Be Discerning

Senior leaders are told constantly to “be coachable.”

I think it’s the wrong frame.

“Coachable” suggests being open to whatever someone wants to teach you. Accepting feedback. Adjusting. Improving.

That sounds healthy. In practice, at the senior level, it often produces a specific kind of damage: leaders who absorb every piece of feedback indiscriminately and gradually lose the shape of their own judgment.

Here’s the better frame I work from with senior clients: be discerning.
Discernment means listening hard, and then deciding what to do with what you heard. Some feedback is useful and you should act on it. Some feedback is the giver’s own pattern, not yours, and you should set it aside without defensiveness.

Some feedback is well-intentioned but based on incomplete information, and you should weigh it accordingly.

The job at the senior level is not to be infinitely adjustable. It’s to be clear-eyed about which inputs deserve to change your behavior and which don’t.

The leaders I’ve watched flame out fastest are usually one of two extremes. The unreachable ones, who treat all feedback as noise. And the over-coachable ones, who treat all feedback as signal and end up so adjusted to other people’s pictures of them that they’ve lost their own.

Most senior leaders, in my experience, are closer to the second problem than the first. They’ve been told to be coachable for so long that they’ve stopped trusting their own read of a situation.

The work, if you’re in that camp, is not to become harder to influence. It’s to rebuild the muscle of saying calmly, internally “interesting feedback, I’m choosing not to act on it.” And meaning it.

Which piece of feedback have you been carrying around for too long that you actually should have set down?