Dear courageous leaders,
Joan had a plan. And she was about to spend a year of her team's trust to carry it out.
She came to a coaching session a few weeks ago ready. Sharp, prepared, principled. Exactly the leader you want building strong systems and holding a high bar. She was going to walk into her next team meeting and move the work to a more rigorous level of analysis. She was right that the team needed to get there. The destination was correct. The instinct was sound.
And it was going to land like a brick.
I have been thinking about Joan because the mistake she was about to make is one I have made myself, more times than I can count. It is not the dramatic kind. It does not surface on a public stage. It is quieter than that. It lives below the waterline of leadership, in how we say things, enter situations, and engage in making decisions.
It is the moment a leader says something true, something accurate, something they have every right to say, and watches the room go cool. You were honest. You were even correct. And somehow trust still left the room.
If you have felt that and never had words for it, this edition is for you.
The Lens
Before Joan walked into that meeting, I asked her one question. I asked her to walk me through her last few team meetings. Not what was missing. What her team had actually been bringing.
She paused. And then she said it. They had been leading with data. In the organizations they chose to highlight, in the way they adjusted their timelines, they had already started making the exact kind of evidence-based decisions she was planning to instruct them to make. They were not behind. They were on their way.
Joan had walked in holding a deficit without realizing it. She is wired to see the gap and build the improvement list, and to start there. It is a real strength. (It is part of why her work is trusted.) But she rarely gave herself credit for progress, so it had not occurred to her that her team might need it. Her team was wired differently. They were people who needed to feel that their effort had landed somewhere before they could hear what came next.
If Joan had delivered her planned message, her team would not have experienced it as leadership. They would have experienced it as judgment. Not because the message was wrong. Because it was right in a language that did not make full sense to them.
This is the gap I want to name. You can be technically honest and relationally dishonest at the same time. You can say the accurate thing, the defensible thing, the thing you have every right to say, and still break something in the room.
Here is why this happens to good leaders. We are each wired to communicate in a particular way. Some of us lead with structure and the plan. Some lead with the power of relationship and connection to mission. Some lead with momentum and what is possible. Some lead with the evidence and the analysis. On a steady day, we adjust. We read the room and we translate. Under pressure, we stop translating. We default to our own wiring and speak from it, and we mistake speaking our own language for being understood.
Here is what Joan did instead. She walked into the meeting and started by naming what she saw, the real discipline her team had built. She let that land. And then she stopped. She waited a full week. When she came back, she did not bring a redirect. She brought an invitation. Here is what we have built. Here is where we are ready to go next.
Same data. Same destination. Two completely different experiences. One would have looked like leadership from the outside. The other was experienced as leadership by the team.
Clear Eyes. Full Hearts Practices
The practice
This week, try a check you can run in about two minutes, before any conversation that is already weighing on you. Call it the Landing Check.
Bring one conversation to mind now. A meeting, a piece of feedback, or a decision in the next two weeks that you can already feel the weight of. Hold it. Then ask three questions.
First. What is my wiring pulling me to do here? Not what I think I should do. What is my default. Am I already drafting the message in my head, already softening it, already postponing it, already over-preparing it.
Second. What does the person on the other side need in order to receive what I am bringing? Where is the gap between how I am pulled to deliver the message and how they need me to engage to fully process it.
Third. What is one small thing I could do to close that gap. Not the whole strategy. One move. Naming what they have already done before I name what is next. Asking before telling. Slowing down before I send. Having the conversation at all.
Journal prompts
If you have more space, sit with these.
Think of a time your message was right and it still did not land. What did it cost, in trust or in time? What was the person in front of you needing that you did not give?
Where in your leadership do you most often default to your own wiring, and with whom?
What would change if you treated being understood, not only being accurate, as part of the job?
Leadership translation
For your team, the work is to make this a shared discipline rather than a private one. Relational honesty is not something each leader solves alone. A team can build it together.
Before a hard message goes out, from anyone, a team can learn to ask one question out loud. Who needs to receive this, and what do they need in order to hear it? That single habit, practiced in the open, slowly teaches a team that honesty is not only saying the true thing. It is saying it so it can be used.
Invitation
Joan was not wrong. She was early. The work was never to change her message. It was to deliver it in a way her team could actually receive. That is not a softer kind of honesty. It is a more complete one.
If you would like to go further with this, I would like to offer you two doors.
The first is a live workshop. On Thursday, June 18, from 12:30 to 1:30 Central, I am hosting a 60-minute introduction to your influence code, the wiring that shapes how you are motivated and what that means for how you tend to communicate. It is built to be genuinely useful and genuinely fun.
Saving a seat is simple. Reply to this email, or write to me at paula.shannon@wholeleaderlab.org, and I will send you the Zoom link.
The second is quieter. If something here identified a pattern you are ready to look at more closely, I would like to offer you a Clarity and Alignment consultation. One focused conversation, with no expectation beyond it. You can book a time here:
Clear eyes. Full hearts.
Paula
PS - If you would like to learn more about Ignite Personalized Leadership Coaching and how this work unfolds more deeply, click the button below. You do not have to carry it alone.
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