Donna Lichaw: commitment

Transcript context

…You actually were a product manager in a previous life. You're also a designer in a previous life. These days you're an executive coach. Just briefly, I'm curious what pulled you from product management design and the things you did before this life into executive coaching. And maybe another way to ask this question is what's your origin story? And this is a little foreshadowing to the stuff we're going to be talking about later. Actually, it's funny, like all origin stories, there were actually multiple episodes, multiple moments that led me to an epiphany, but the biggest aha moment was when I was working several years ago, almost a decade ago at this point, with an executive team in Silicon Valley. And we were at a leadership retreat, and we were supposed to... At the time, I was a program on effective product leadership, how to be a great product leader, product executive. And the biggest thing that companies wanted at the time and teams wanted was their teams to be better storytellers. And it's still something we hear today, which is, "To be a great product leader or leader in general in any industry is you got to be a great storyteller." And so at the time, I was teaching and facilitating storytelling workshops and exploring that with teams. And it was a few people on this team specifically who I so appreciate their honesty and candor here, which is what this giant tech company is known for, very blunt people working there. And they pulled me aside halfway through the offsite, and they were just like, "Honestly, storytelling is not going to fix our problems. This is silly." And what they were able to tell me is that their leaders wanted them to be more effective by having greater influence. And these are terms that we throw around all the time. Be more influential and be a better leader, whatever that means. And what was happening on the ground with these executives was that they were all fighting. I'd hear, "Oh, the head of engineering is such a jerk," or, "This person won't listen to me," or, "My team is demotivated. And I get it, but they need to step up and work more." And there was just a lot of conflict going on here and there that storytelling wouldn't fix. When that happens, and I talk about this in the book a bunch, no one wants to hear your stories. You have to actually be able to connect with people and to work with people and feel good as a leader in order to really step up and lead. I didn't have an answer for this team at the time, and I left this offsite just honestly feeling terrible and not knowing what to do about it except telling them, "I think you got to go work with a coach because this is beyond my pay grade. " But when I left that day, I just couldn't stop thinking about this team because I had a hunch that stories were still a part of something but not what they needed. Telling stories was not the answer, and so I ended up spending what now is the next decade figuring out, all right, how do you become an effective leader? And of course because I can't do anything lightly, once I went down that path, I ended up switching up my entire business. And now that's all I do is help people be better, more effective, confident leaders who really make the impact that they want to make. Along those same lines, what's interesting is you actually found that this idea of storytelling was actually much more effective in your coaching practice. Instead of helping them figure out the story of the product, it's the story of the person. And so transitioning into the meat of your approach to coaching, I think you call it story-driven leadership. Essentially, your finding is that story and the person's story is extremely important and powerful in helping them level up as a leader and also seeing them as the hero of their story. I guess just with that foundation, can you just talk about why that is so powerful, the idea of figuring out your own story and why you need to be the hero of your own story and just what all this means?…

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