Warts and nothing but

Am I right that strategists spend a lot of time getting their work “ready to share?” I remember feeling a lot of pressure to do that myself when I was an individual contributor on projects. And I remember strategists I managed frequently telling me they needed to “get the work in a good place” before reviewing with me. Sometimes they even rescheduled meetings because of it.

Scrambling to get work to a certain point before sharing out with teammates is understandable. They are almost never strategists themselves, and getting the work out of your head and into the deck wards off questions and suggestions you’ve already thought of. It simply takes less time overall to share more finished product, even if it means going to the well before share-out meetings.

The desire to share more developed work with a manager is even easier to justify, right? They’re ultimately responsible for deciding if you get the next plum assignment, not to mention that raise or promotion. It’s easy to think they’re secretly judging us, every time we show work in progress. Most aren’t, by the way. Most just want to help you produce good work.

As a manager, it took a long time for my team to see that my job wasn’t to stand between them and their career ascension, but that I was actually their partner in helping them achieve it. This trust isn’t always easy to come by. A lot of strategists I know don’t feel comfortable sharing unpolished work with managers. Showing weaknesses feels vulnerable. With the amount of turnover in our industry it’s rare to find strategists and managers who have worked together long enough to build up strong trust. Sharing out the pretty parts feels like a way to build trust - trust that our manager knows that we’ve got it under control, and can count on us. When in reality we are really struggling - with a central idea, with a narrative, with self-confidence. It can all spiral pretty quickly.

Becoming a strategy coach was a revelation. The trust is much easier to build, precisely because I’m not responsible for someone’s next assignment or raise or promotion. I’m a resource to them - someone with the ability to help them improve, and no authority to hold them back. So it’s easy for them to show me where they’re struggling. In fact most quickly become eager to. Work in progress is always warts and all, but it’s usually not long for my collaboration with strategists to focus solely on the warts. That’s where growth happens, and frankly it’s fun to grow.

I often compare strategy coaching as a mix of personal training and therapy. Both are about growth, but when careers are involved the dynamic gets complicated. Even if our personal trainer is judging us for having an embarrassingly weak core, there aren’t any repercussions to that. They’ll just make us do more of the exercises we’re really really bad at. The part that coaching borrows from therapy is the safe environment. Where the warts aren’t just part of the work, they ARE the work.

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