Kelly talks to Muriel Wilkins, host of the award-winning Harvard Business Review podcast, Coaching Real Leaders. Her latest book is called “Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential.”  

A recurring theme in this book is ceding the need to be right. 

“Probably one of the things that if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have had a different perspective on it, where I would have been like, yeah, everybody sort of thinks they’re right and they’re not. Shame on you. And my newer perspective is let’s cut ourselves some slack and give each other some grace because it’s no wonder we all sort of fight to be right. You know, it’s a learned belief and behavior. That’s how we were raised, you know, at least it was how I was raised. Certainly by the time you get to school, you’re rewarded for being right. So why not walk around acting like you’re right? You know, who doesn’t want to be right when that’s how the world, at least back then when you were younger, deems you as worthy and valuable.” 

You note that it’s important that people don’t conflate coaching with therapy. 

“I kind of get on my soapbox a little bit about this, even though I’m in the profession of coaching, I stand 10 toes strong for the therapist because if the belief that you are holding onto or that is getting in your way is deeply rooted in trauma, or it’s one that you can’t through some of the simple exercises that I share, you know what my friend, a coach is not the one to help you. Go to a licensed mental health professional. And so, I often have clients where, not often, but I’ve had situations with clients where we sort of figure out that it’s probably best for them to do therapy in lieu of coaching and or alongside of it, right? I think therapy is very much a healing profession. I don’t see coaching as a healing profession. I see coaching as a planning profession.” 

One of the profiles in the book is a recently promoted leader who isn’t seen as effective by his bosses because he still thinks he needs to be involved in the minutiae of everything. 

“It’s not that the belief that you need to be involved is bad. It just doesn’t serve him well now. At one point in his career, it definitely served him, right? I remember when I was an individual contributor, my first job out of college I worked at an insurance company. And my responsibility was literally, I’m going to date myself here, but my responsibility was making sure that those little bill stuffers with the little messages on them had the right little message and that it got in that bill every month. So that when those policyholders got their bill, they’d get something that said, buy auto insurance as well as home insurance. This was pre-text messages, right? Yeah, I needed to be involved, but there wasn’t much to be involved in. So yes, I needed to be involved in all the things that were under my umbrella, but as you scale and you’re not only managing others, but you’re managing others who manage others and the world has become more complex, there’s no way you can keep that as the operating system or the operating script that then drives how you behave as a leader if in effect what you want to do is operate at a higher level and at a more strategic level.”