Tired of feeling like a fraud, a leader searches for help down different paths. She and her coach talk about how coaching is, and is not, like therapy.

The leader in this episode wrestles with feelings of being a fraud. Tom talks about three resources to help manage that feeling:

“The Executive Impostor”  Episode #176 of “The Look & Sound of Leadership”

Self-Esteem at Work by Nathaniel Branden & Warren Bennis

The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

Additional tools to support your professional development are these free PDFs from our Essential Tools bin:

Johari Window

Readiness in Coaching

You can listen to Tom’s conversations on these two shows:

“I Need at Coach” with Adam Packard 

“Take Five” with Paul Butler

This episode is tagged in four categories in our podcast archive:

For Women

Managing Yourself

Personal Growth & Self-Development

Self-Talk

Four episodes, in addition to “The Executive Impostor” listed above, that will help you dive deeper into the ideas in this episode are:

52 - Coaching v Therapy 

191 - Coaching Under Attack

78 - Unmasking a Stand In

171 - Taming the Wild Child

Be in touch with Tom here.

Grab a free transcript of this episode here.

We share more resources in our monthly Essential News email. Sign up here.

To all of you, from all of us here at The Look & Sound of Leadership, thanks! 

A leader and her coach discuss a three-step model for turning upward feedback into a learning conversation that might allow the boss to hear the message. 

This month’s coaching conversation explores whether feedback should be given upwards in the first place. If so, are there ways to deliver the feedback effectively? 

Download the free “Giving Upward Feedback” PDF.

In the commentary, Tom tells a story about the Marshmallow Test being debunked. Here’s the column he mentions.

This episode is tagged in the library in three categories:

Communication Skills

Feedback

Managing Up

Five related episodes you might listen to are:

74 Dealing with Emotional Responses

14 Delivering Tough Feedback

32 Giving Powerful Feedback

118 Perception is Reality

99 The Disruptive Executive – Part One

Be in touch with Tom here.

Grab a free transcript of the episode here. 

We share more resources in our monthly Essential News email. Sign up here.

From all of us here at The Look & Sound of Leadership, thanks! 

A leader, surrounded by people she knows and trusts, can’t seem to get traction with them. In conversation with her coach, she discovers an unexpected cause.

Tools for teams abound in this episode. 

The four tools Tom suggests as first steps for helping your team openly discuss ideas are:

• Say ‘thank you’ when people offer an idea;
• Be curious; don’t dismiss ideas or people;
• Don’t take differences personally; it’s not about you;
• Develop your comfort with disagreement.

The Gradients of Agreement tool supports the ideas in this episode. Download it for free from our Essential Tools bin along with other communication tools like Sorting & Labeling.

Additional tools for team growth mentioned in this episode are the classic Crucial Conversations and Tom’s conversation on The cATalyzing Podcast.

This episode is in our podcast library in three categories:

Communication Skills

Leading Teams

Management Skills

Specific episodes that will help you develop your team are:

Facilitating Open Dialogue

How Teams Fight

Leadership Behavior in Meetings

Power Tools for Teams: Plus/Delta

Questions as Leadership

Taming Meetings 

Our monthly Essential News email provides links to even more resources. You can sign up here.

To those of you who post reviews, thank you so much for supporting the show.

Let us know how we can support you.

Until next month, from Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, be well! And thanks!

#podcast #TeamDecisionMaking #Teamwork #Leadership #ConsensusBuilding    #EffectiveTeams  #TeamCommunication #TeamLeadership   

A bonus episode!

Tom shares email exchanges he had with two podcast listeners. One exchange is about handling people who interrupt presentations. The other is about defining tasks and responsibilities when they're not defined for you.

During the podcast, Tom mentions two other episodes that support the ideas here: one episode is “Facilitating Open Dialogue.” The other is “Creating Devoted Followers.”

If you’d like more bonus episodes like this one, let Tom know at info@essentialcomm.com.

How you brand yourself sticks with people a long time.Thismonth, a senior executive dreads having to brand himself duringaninterview – until he learns about the PersonalHistoriestechnique.

In addition to giving you this simple yet powerful tool tohelpbuild your personal brand, this episode also references abookcalled "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."

Details about this book is at the end of the podcast. ThereIdiscuss that there are actually TWO books about theFiveDysfunctions. They're quite different. Here’s how.

"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable" has ajuicystory about a team struggling to succeed. In the back of thebook,the author teaches The Five Dysfunctions and explains atarelatively high level how to overcome them. The tools in thisbook– including an assessment your team can fill out – areuseful.

If you’d like to know how to build a high-performing team,thesecond book is even more useful. It’s called, "Overcoming TheFiveDysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, ManagersandFacilitators." This book has detailed, step-by-step instructionstoguide to and your team to high achievement.

This month, The Look & Sound of Leadership gives you a tool for developing your team. A process that takes only minutes to learn, if practiced regularly, this exercise has far-reaching ripples. Welcome to "The Plus/Delta Tool."

Other episodes to help you develop as a leader of teams are:

Your Team's Best Interests - Part One

Your Team's Best Interests - Part Two

Coaching Your People

Engagement and Performance

Performance Reviews

Resolving Conflict

From the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, mindfulness is widely touted as a powerful tool to increase personal effectiveness and well-being. This month’s Executive Coaching Tip explores the “how to” of being mindful with an executive who was already on the path but didn’t know it.

This episode shows that mindfulness is neither complex nor mysterious; it just takes practice. More importantly, this episode puts forward the idea that all professional and personal development requires you to be mindful to some degree.

If this episode inspires you, there are even more Tips to help support your growth. Go to the Executive Coaching Tips archive and select the category “Personal Growth & Self-Development.”

http://essentialcomm.com/tag/personal-growth-self-development/

• A Breakdown of Listening
• Coaching Your People
• Coaching Versus Therapy
• Creating New Behaviors
• High-Stakes Meetings
• How Behaviors Change
• Leadership & Listening
• Self-Knowledge as Leadership
• Who’s Coachable

The goal of this episode is to give you a three-step process to help you succeed in meetings when you feel there’s a lot at stake.

Step one: Clarify the Story. Four other episodes can also help with this step: “Sounding Executive,” “Communicating With Clarity,” “Executive Presenting” and, the mother of all communication tools: “Sorting and Labeling.”

Step two: Do Your Homework. This step is different for everyone. Sometimes it means getting information from another department. Sometimes it means researching data. Sometimes it means talking to people who’ve gone before you. 

Most people seem to know what homework to do; the struggle is finding time. Because we’re busy we think, “Oh, I’ll let the homework slide.” But I promise – doing your homework will make you feel much more confident.

That brings us to the final step: Managing Yourself. In this episode I mention several concepts to help you manage yourself that you can find in other episodes. “Assume Equality” is a critical self-management tool. Another, to help manage feeling like a victim, is called “Status.” Another is called “Choosing Stories Over Truth.”

This month’s episode is all about preparing for a high-stakes meeting with a tough company president. Next month’s episode will be about what happened when I was finally in the room face-to-face with her. 

For many businesses, uncertainty and ambiguity is their new norm. In such anxious times, people long for leaders who will make tough decisions, stand behind those decisions, and protect their people. In some circles, this is called “showing teeth.”

In this episode, I refer to The Center for Talent Innovation and their white paper on Executive Presence.

I also refer to four related episodes:

Assertion versus Aggression 

Gravitas

Speaking for Yourself

Speaking Your Truth

For more ideas about “Showing Teeth,” you might also check out all the episodes in the Assertiveness category of the Executive Coaching Tips archive. The Executive Coaching Tip that explains “unconscious competence” is Creating New Behaviors.

Lack of engagement can assume many disguises but there is one outcome that is predictable: poor performance. What would you say if you found out you could get people engaged – and improve performance – with just two questions? Sounds like a miracle, right? That’s what I thought, too.

A co-founder, at odds with his partner (also his best friend!), reaches out to his coach for help saving the business and the friendship. 

The episode introduces The Conflict Resolution Wheel. Download it for free from our Essential Tools bin along with other communication tools like the Feeling Words Grid.

The Wheel is based on a tool in the Couple Communication course, a program to help you understand and connect with your partner better.

The course’s workbook, Talking and Listening Together, is meant for self-study. It’s available for purchase online. 

Another book Tom references in this episode is the classic Crucial Conversations.

This episode is in our podcast library in three categories:

Communication Skills

Managing Yourself

Relationship Building

Five episodes that will help you continue to develop your conflict resolution skills are:

Conflict

The Conflict Conversation

Creating Safety for Hard Talks

A Difficult Conversation

Resolving Conflict

Every month our Essential News email provides links to even more resources. You can sign up here.

Thank you thank you thank you to those of you who post reviews. You make such a difference to us. Thanks for supporting the show!

Let us know how we can support you.

Until next month, from Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, be well! And thanks!

Disruptive executives take many forms—bullies, catastrophizers, resisters, you name it. But no matter what mask they wear, they create upheaval. Whether the disrupter is your boss, your peer or your direct report, coping successfully requires two things: courage and skills. Here’s how to find both.

Presentations are a golden opportunity to display your executive presence. Here are six behaviors that’ll help you command the room and deepen your brand.

We all think we’re better listeners than we really are. Luckily, we all have the capacity to improve our skills. But not all listening is the same. Here’s a breakdown.

When you’re communicating, you not only need to fly through the intricate patterns of your own information, you need to be sure we can thread that needle along with you.

The research is unequivocal: in the workplace, women play on a tilted field. Everyone contributes to work's off-center world -- even women! This episode explores ways to bring the tipping back in balance.

Narcissistic executives can be infuriating. And, unless you’re one of their favored few, they can be dangerous, too. These five actions will help protect you—and keep you sane.

Helping develop your people is a win for everyone. But developing people is quite different from managing people: developing people requires you to be a coach. Here’s how.

We all assign ourselves a certain status. Of course, that means we assign status to others, too. The question is: do people experience your status as appropriate? Or do you need to dial it up? Or down!

“I’ll know it when I see it” is a natural thought when starting a new project.  Feeling “It’s just not right” is natural when a situation is nagging. But your followers need you to tell them specifically what success looks like. If you don’t tell them, how will they know?

Finding good mentors – and using them wisely – can change your career trajectory. So can being a mentor to others. Here are actions for succeeding in both roles.

A senior leader, having risen through the ranks, ends her coaching engagement by comparing notes with her coach about the skills that have helped her most. 

This episode identified seven essential leadership skills:

• Conquer catastrophic thinking;
• Use fewer words;
• Value relationships as highly as results;
• Don’t take anything personally;
• Commitment to Development;
• Reflection;
• Speak for Yourself.

Resources to develop those last three:

Commitment to Development

• The Executive Executive – an episode with a different list of essential skills
• Four Factors Executives Need to be Successful – another list of essential skills thenschel@essentialcomm.com – my email address if you want help thinking about your own development

The Ability to Reflect

• Mindfulness Resources
• Building Self-Awareness

Speak for Yourself

• The Four Agreements – Agreement #1: “Be Impeccable with Your Word”

Episodes to build assertion:

• Showing Teeth
• The Voice of Authority
• Assertion v Aggression 

This month’s episode lives in our podcast library in these three categories:

Executive Presence
Leadership
Self-Talk

Five episodes to help you with different skills are:

Building Empathy
“Don’t Take Anything Personally”
The Executive Executive
Personal Connections
Short Sounds Confident

Our monthly email has links to more resources. You can sign up here.

All our infographics are available to you for free in the Essential Tools bin.

Let us know how we can support you.

Until next month, be well!

From Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership, thanks!

Executives create honor in the workplace not by declarations and speeches. Rather, honor is built in the display of small, consistent behaviors every day. This month’s Tip examines two of those behaviors and one over-arching factor.

Poor performers often linger far too long. Leaders who avoid these performance issues damage their reputations and weaken their teams. Here are five actions to help you manage poor performers up or out.

Thinking errors are tough to spot in yourself because they seem true.  Usually we've believed them for a long time. Here are ways to free yourself from thinking errors

We'd all like to be given a promotion merely because it's our turn. But earning a promotion is actually a job in itself. Mastering the four factors described here will accelerate the process.

We all want bosses who are sensitive to our needs. But savvy players know we need to manage our bosses at least as much as they manage us.

Each one of us has a personal brand. Every day we reinforce our brands consciously or unconsciously. The tools in this episode will help you craft your brand with intention. 

Your ability to execute senior-level work correlates directly to your ability to delegate effectively. The better you are delegation, the higher you can rise.

Leaders who are authentic display The Look & Sound of Leadership™. We follow them eagerly. But how to achieve authenticity? Here are five tools.

Certain people seem to have unlimited leeway when they make a mistake or miss a deadline while others seem to acquire black marks and penalties for the most minor infractions. This month’s episode explains why.

If you don’t grab your audience at the start, it’s tough to win ‘em over later. The two behaviors described here will help you engage your listeners before you’ve said a word.

At the end of her rope, a leader asks her coach for help managing a direct report who, she says, is the most defensive person she’s ever met. 

This episode was packed with tools. We’ve put them into an easy-to-understand infographic. Download it for free here. 

Kim Scott, the best-selling author of the electric book Radical Candor, wrote a short, friendly guide with tools for handling defensive employees. Find it here.

Harvard Business Review’s Amy Gallo talked with Dave Stachowiak on this episode of the Coaching for Leaders podcast. As with every episode of Dave’s, this is indispensable. 

To work on “deserving” dive into The Four Agreements.  

To dig deeper into tools for taming defensiveness, search our podcast library in these three categories:

• Communication Skills
• Management Skills 
• Relationship Building

Five specific episodes on this topic you could listen to are:

• 7 Steps to Stop Emotional Hijacks
• Be Impeccable with Your Word 
• Handling Defensive Behaviors
• Managing Bad Behavior
• Managing Disruptive Executives

Sign up to get our monthly email with links to resources that support each episode.

Calling all COACHES! Come join our Executive Coaching special interest group (SIG) sponsored by the Los Angeles Chapter of ICF. Check out our SIG and all the others here.    

Or shoot me an email with your questions. I’m at tom@essentialcomm.com.

All our free infographics are in the Essential Tools bin.

Your reviews supporting the show help us continue as an ad-free podcast. 

Let us know how we can support you.

Until next month, be well!

Thanks from Tom and everyone at The Look & Sound of Leadership.

We all sense the subtle messages we send each other. When those messages have even a whiff of disapproval, your followers may begin to cool.

Accepting how others see you can be a struggle. Until you can, you may not seem ready for the next step in your career.

An ongoing series of Executive Coaching Tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to be perceived.

We all have moments when we don’t speak up because we worry what other people might think. Here’s a way to help you find—and keep!—your voice. 11/07/13

Choosing to collaborate often feels like inviting an invader to sit down and eat your food. It can be done, but it doesn’t feel natural. And why would you? Where’s the benefit?

Gravitas is credibility that goes beyond titles or credentials. Without it, you can’t achieve The Look & Sound of Leadership™. This Tip will help you get it and keep it.

Without good feedback about yourself, you can’t achieve The Look & Sound of Leadership. But how can you get good feedback about yourself?

Being “high maintenance” can derail a career. Here are four mistakes people make that get them labeled “high maintenance.” And four actions to help you avoid the high maintenance label.

Our own work style seems completely natural—to us! But what about all those people whose styles are different? What do you do with them?

We create impressions, in part, through our behaviors. And changing behaviors can feel overwhelming. This four-stage process makes behavioral change manageable.

During her first C-suite years, a leader burned a lot of bridges. Her boss, who’d traveled a similar path, gets her a coach and sets only one goal: repair relations through emotional intelligence.

Lots and lots of tools and resources this month:

Free downloads:

The Feeling Words Grid

EQ Model

Books and papers to sharpen your skills

“Executive Presence: The Missing Link between Merit and Success” 

“The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success”

“Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well”

“Executive Presence” from Center for Talent Innovation

This episode is tagged in three categories in the Podcast Library:

Executive Presence

Managing Yourself

Personal Growth & Self-Development

Five episodes to help you command a room:

109 Building Emotional Intelligence 

146 Building Empathy

155 The Human Element

69 Leadership & Self-Deception

17 Speaking for Yourself 

Please help yourself to any (or all!) of our free infographics in the Essential Tools bin.

Our deepest gratitude to those who post reviews. Thank you!!! 

Let us know how we can support you.

Until next month, be well!

Tom and The Look & Sound of Leadership team. 

Companies invest in developing Emotional Intelligence (EQ) because its presence improves performance. EQ has four steps. Here is number one. 04/04/13

Every leader casts a long shadow. Casual comments can have huge ripples. Such is the burden of leadership. How well are you shouldering the burden?

Everyone you manage is at a different stage of their professional and personal development. Are you managing them all the same way?