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    How Do You Want to Show Up?: Find Your Inner Truths—and Lead with Them
    How Do You Want to Show Up?: Find Your Inner Truths—and Lead with Them
    How Do You Want to Show Up?: Find Your Inner Truths—and Lead with Them
    Ebook77 pages2 hours

    How Do You Want to Show Up?: Find Your Inner Truths—and Lead with Them

    By Melissa Williams-Gurian

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    About this ebook

    What do you really believe? What do you truly want? What are you here to do?

    Many of us start our careers with satisfying answers to these questions but stray off course. We stop finding time to revisit our goals. We stop asking the big questions. But no matter how talented we are, we can only work to our full abilities if we take the time to know ourselves.

    With more than twenty years of experience as an executive coach, Melissa Williams-Gurian has found that truly effective leaders share a key strength: the ability to realize their inner truths and use that knowledge to communicate more effectively. Through stories and lessons gathered from her decades of consulting work, Williams-Gurian reveals the strategies she uses to help leaders develop that strength and use it to achieve high performance in the workplace for themselves and their teams.

    Whether you’re a longtime leader, a rising star looking to develop your talents, or an employee struggling to communicate with your executives, How Do You Want to Show Up? will help you use your internal values and beliefs as a guide in the workplace—and in life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMelissa Williams-Gurian
    Release dateOct 20, 2017
    ISBN9780998905129
    How Do You Want to Show Up?: Find Your Inner Truths—and Lead with Them
    Author

    Melissa Williams-Gurian

    For more than twenty years, Melissa Williams-Gurian has worked as an executive coach and leadership development consultant. Her clients include Fortune 1000 companies and high-level executives and their teams from a wide range of fields, including technology, manufacturing, retail, public education, nonprofit, financial services, and health care. She specializes in helping leaders build better relationships, communicate effectively, take decisive action, and recognize and change systemic issues in the workplace. Williams-Gurian holds a BS from Cornell University and an MA in applied behavioral science from Bastyr University. She lives in Seattle with her husband and three children.

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      Book preview

      How Do You Want to Show Up? - Melissa Williams-Gurian

      Introduction

      Secrets of a Leadership Coach

      When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, joy.

      —Rumi

      I am not yet able . . . to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things.

      —Socrates

      I was born into a

      family business. My father owned a chain of Hallmark stores in Maryland, in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Beginning at a young age, I would sometimes tag along to his stores, where I’d witness his leadership skills firsthand. I observed the respect with which he treated his employees and the creative ways he handled daily challenges. At the dinner table, he and my mother would talk about his work, and he would solicit her thoughts about larger decisions.

      Later, starting around age twelve, I helped out in his stores after school. This, my first unofficial job, was my chance to learn about the working world. What I experienced there eventually led me to the work I am so passionate about now: coaching CEOs, senior management, and their teams.

      Looking back, what was surprising about working in his stores was that my favorite ones were the busiest and seemed to have the best managers. I found myself studying what made these managers so good at their jobs. It didn’t seem to be about the particular personality of each manager, because each was very different from another. One manager I liked a lot—I’ll call her Susan—was outgoing, even loud, and at first she made me nervous. But I quickly warmed to her forthright manner, whether it was with a customer who had a complaint or a cashier who made frequent errors and arrived late to work. Another good manager, Terence, was quiet and kept the music in the store low, but he dressed crisply, stood proudly, knew something about every single store product, and noticed and acknowledged employees’ work with praise or a kind smile.

      Later, in adolescence, I worked at other retail stores and offices and saw other, more disastrous kinds of management.

      All of it fascinated me—and still does. I love to think about the human factor in business and solve the question of how that can be harnessed to create wonderful organizations where employees work in thriving teams and produce high-caliber work.

      This book is a result of real experiences I’ve had coaching top executives and helping to build high-performing teams for Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, nonprofits, health care organizations, and other businesses. Leaders can grow lonely as they climb higher in an organization, and I want to share and normalize the many traits that leaders have in common. I also want to help leaders develop one of the traits I believe is central to long-term success in the workplace.

      I observed it in my dad’s stores, and I see it even more clearly now after twenty years of coaching leaders: one of the most important traits of truly effective leaders is self-knowledge. If you know yourself, your values, and how you want to show up in the world, you will inspire others, whether you are a noisy extrovert or radiate a quieter authority.

      Successful leaders who are willing to do the work of knowing themselves are able to support others and navigate work relationships and organizational systems effectively. Leaders with self-knowledge are able to have conversations that matter.

      There are so many important conversations that never take place in organizations, whether they are between a boss and a direct report or between two peers, and it is for the lack of these conversations that many businesses falter. Looking back at my dad’s store managers, what did Susan and Terence, two such different people, have in common? They were both effective communicators, because they knew themselves well. Susan’s style was somewhat brash, but she was wonderfully effective at communicating with clarity, directness, and compassion when problems arose. Soft-spoken Terence was terrific at reaching out to other employees almost daily to maintain connections and skillfully acknowledge good work. Susan’s strength was that she could have the kinds of conversations most people avoid, at work or at home, because they can feel uncomfortable. Terence’s strength was based in his quiet confidence and a generosity of spirit that allowed him to see and praise the efforts of employees. In both cases, they were having conversations that mattered.

      I doubt that either of these managers had had any coaching. We all know people who seem to have been born with particularly good social and emotional skills. Sometimes they really are born that way, and sometimes they are raised in a way that has developed those skills. Yet even those natural experts at times face the challenge of how to communicate effectively. Human relationships are inherently difficult, and we make these relationships even harder given our internal barriers to communicating with others, such as fear, conflict avoidance, perfectionist tendencies, and a desire to be liked.

      The good news is that, even for those of us who weren’t born with self-insight or a brilliant communication style, these skills are teachable. I know, because daily I help some of the smartest leaders in the world get to know themselves and communicate more effectively in the workplace.

      ______

      How Do You Want to Show Up? is the result of my more than twenty years of coaching executives and working as a therapist in private practice.

      What is it you really believe?

      What is it you really want?

      What is it you are here to do?

      Many of us start our careers with satisfying answers to these questions but stray off course. Or we never ask the questions in the first place. As we rise in our careers, we become so busy we forget to assess our performance to ensure we are bringing our true, full selves to the work we do.

      No matter how talented we are, when we don’t take the time to know ourselves and have those conversations, we don’t work to our full capacity.

      Companies hire me for many reasons, but the primary one is that they’d like to invest further in one of their employees who is doing exceptional work. I am brought in to help rising stars further develop their talents, perhaps to prepare them for a position with more responsibility.

      Alternatively, I’m hired because an employee or team is in crisis. Perhaps someone has received a bad review or is on the brink of losing their job. The company hires me to coach the employee to change.

      Sometimes I may work with my clients for a year or more, but often I am asked to accomplish substantial change in a shorter time frame, and I have seen clients make enormous changes in even a few short weeks. How?

      Leaders are often surprised when I ask them to name their feelings, a subject not often crossed in offices and meeting rooms. (And when I say they’re surprised, I mean that I regularly hear versions of You’ve got to be kidding me and No, thanks.) But feelings get to the heart of the matter, and it is when we acknowledge them that we are most alive. Without a connection to our inner truths, our connection to others will falter. At best, we move forward in our work but find ourselves less inspired and more frustrated. At worst, our lack of self-knowledge contributes to the kind of work culture that can drag a business down.

      On the other hand, when leaders know themselves and use that knowledge to communicate more effectively, it brings measurable business results.

      A few common results I see in my work include:

      Productivity soars in teams that are able to stop working in silo and have open, frank conversations.

      Employees who sense an openness to sharing their full selves feel empowered to share ideas, leading to innovations.

      People produce more and work harder when they are invested in their work, a feeling that comes about when they feel truly seen and acknowledged.

      Many businesses know this, and the successful companies I work with are eager for tools to teach self-awareness and emotional intelligence to their top employees.

      In How Do You Want to Show Up? I share stories from my coaching experiences with high-level executives. I hope to normalize many of the common challenges in the workplace that readers may be experiencing. They may find themselves in meetings dominated by the loudest person or bogged down by passive-aggressive behavior. Perhaps they are introverts who feel stuck, or extroverts who look like they have it all together but are, in fact, overextended. Many leaders are looking for new ways to resolve the conflicts that arise in every business. What my stories have in common is that these leaders, with coaching, were able to achieve their goals by becoming more self-aware and using that knowledge to have conversations that matter.

      Sidebars throughout the book offer readers the tools and strategies I regularly use to help clients unlock self-awareness and move forward in their conversations—and their careers—with worksheets, graphics, and stories from the field.

      This book includes materials I’ve developed or adapted over the past twenty years to guide my clients and organizations through the coaching process. Sidebars and graphic tools help readers work through their challenges, improve self-knowledge, and communicate more clearly.

      Readers may find specific chapters addressing their own leadership challenges but can find materials in any chapter that are applicable to most leaders.

      How to Use This Book

      Read the stories about some of the leaders I’ve met and how we worked together to help them boost their self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills, and you will find support for the common challenges leaders face. These are fictional characters and situations drawn from my real-life experiences of high-level coaching and include the following:

      The brilliant executive whose chilly demeanor and critical responses were demoralizing her team until we helped her find her warmer side

      The team of triangles, where no employee was able to give another direct feedback until the leader learned the secret to breaking a triangle

      The high-achieving introvert who hadn’t quite moved up on the job and worked to learn strategies for connecting with others on terms where he felt comfortable

      Throughout, look for the tools I use to help leaders in the workplace achieve high performance for themselves and their teams.

      Chapter 1: Alex

      Tackling the Elephant in the Room

      I just want to get this over with.

      My client, Alex, chief data

      scientist at a major tech company, dropped into a chair in the conference room. He moved stiffly after a

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