Answer the Call to Conscious Leadership – Vulnerability Challenge

At our January yearly Answer the Call to Conscious Leadership planning event, Lawrence and I had essentially a live brainstorming session about how we can add value to the C3 community and promote and advance its mission of co-creating a more conscious corporate landscape.

As leadership coaches, we know that our clients have broken through many challenges, both external and self-imposed, to being highly effective conscious leaders, but our clients don’t always share their secret sauce (us). Coaching has yet to be normalized. There still exists, especially in certain cultures, a stigma on admitting you need and reaching out for help. Even where there is no stigma, leaders may fear losing credibility by admitting that a coach is partly responsible for any improved effectiveness in their leadership. Another thing that Carl brought up is just the tendency to hoard special relationships, like those with coaches. Of course, this is all ego-based.

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Admitting you need help, asking for help, and attributing help for improvement is the epitome of vulnerability. When leaders are able to be this vulnerable, psychological safety is created, and leaders are more apt to be privy to threats to progress and production so that they can be proactive about addressing them. In the absence of vulnerability, toxicity thrives in the form of scapegoating, intentional silos, drama, deflection, and increased stress, which leads to increased absenteeism, presenteeism, burnout, and turnover. This is very wasteful, and it may not show up as a loss on financial balance sheets, but it drains from the top line and bottom line, nonetheless.

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Led by Carl Shawn Watson , Mr. Vulnerability, C3’s resident vulnerability expert, our guest, Jennifer Bohaty , and I shared our own experiences of coaches and mentors, from our first through our most recent. We all admitted that had it not been for an early career intervention from a mentor our coach, we would not be where we were today.

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We discussed:?

?All the different ways we have been helped by others.

?All the different ways that help can look, from a sports coach helping you realize your athletic potential, to group programs, to voluntary mentors and sponsors, through having an executive 1:1 coach.?

?How important having a coach and example is the key that opens the lock to your potential, so we need more people to pursue and accept coaching.

?What’s necessary for a coach and leader to be effective and influential?

?How leaders need to be coached to be effective coaches.

?Generational differences in leadership expectations.

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Join C3 to watch the replay and interact with our esteemed members. Ask yourself the questions we asked ourselves. Embrace the vulnerability challenge and share with us how a coach elevated your leadership game. Be bold. Have courage.?If you want to take the challenge further, invite them to C3. We’re all here so that our secret success sauce can be shared with each other, so that we can exponentially expand our growth as leaders and accelerate corporate consciousness.

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Imagine how your negative leadership experiences could have been transformed by a coach. Tag a coach that has made a difference in your leadership and life.