How to Grow as a Leader

Thanks for joining me for another edition of my weekly LinkedIn Newsletter! This time, I am featuring advice from executive coach and host of the Coaching Real Leaders podcast, Muriel Wilkins! And also, as always on Thursdays, you can join my weekly interview series with Newsweek, Better, today at 12 pm EDT/9 am PT/5 pm GMT. This week I have the pleasure of speaking with the author of Grace Notes, John Baldoni. For a calendar reminder about that interview, click here.

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The responsibilities of a leader are in a constant state of redevelopment. Muriel Wilkins works with executive coaches on how to find their voice, how to Own the Room, and learn from their mistakes with a positive perspective. This is a selection of highlights from our talk, and to listen to our entire conversation, it is available here.

Finding your leadership voice:

“Be able to demonstrate your value in an authentic way. That's an ability to really be able to then articulate your voice: What is it that you bring to the table? What's your point of view? What's the vision that you have on a larger scale for your organization? The other piece of it is your ability to give voice to others and the ability to connect, be relatable, and understand what others are also going through. Truly having a signature voice is being able to do both of those things in parallel and do it in your own authentic way.”

Being assertive and not aggressive:

“You can be assertive without being aggressive. The difference between the two, nine times out of ten, comes down to your delivery. This is based on two muscles that you have to build. You need to have credibility, and you need to have connectivity and relatability. When there are competing agendas, where most people go wrong, is that they are completely focused on their credibility and their voice: ‘Let me get my point across, let me get my agenda across.’ And it's push, push, push, push, push. In doing that, they have completely left everybody else out of the room. When you leave everybody else out of the room, you are not owning the room. If you have competing agendas, the place to start is to understand what their context is, what their reality is, and what point of view they're coming from. If you can demonstrate that you understand it and then frame your message in the context of their understanding, you have a much better chance of getting closer to alignment.”?

Change your perspective on failure:

“I feel like we're dealing with a global epidemic of conditioning - that failure equals bad. So every time we experience failure, it automatically sends us reminders that we're not worthy. A reminder that we're not good enough, that we need to do better, and that might then inspire a different type of response. So how do you recover from that? In the short term, the way you recover from failure, quite frankly, is to try again - you try again learning from the episode that happened in the past. It's the lessons learned in failure that are our biggest muscles to build. I'm not saying go out with the intent of failing all the time, but failing is inevitable. You are going to run into challenges. Learn from them, and then repeat. That's how we learn. That's how we grow.”

Thank you so much for reading this week’s newsletter - Meet me at noon for my interview with John Baldoni! The following week I’ll be talking with the founders of Likeable Media, Carrie and Dave Kerpen, about successfully selling your business! For a calendar reminder, click here.

Hope to see you shortly for my talk with John Baldoni! If you can’t make today’s interview, we always make a replay available on my YouTube page. If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie