Kami learned to quiet her insecurities and become more flexible on execution.
Customer Journey Series: Kami
This article is part of a customer journey series following “Kami,” a sales leader in pharma managing competitive changes and new leadership.
Her journey explores building leadership confidence, managing up, navigating organizational change, and positioning herself for the next level.
Each post explores a real coaching conversation or leadership challenge from that journey.
This is the second post in the series.
Over the first few months working together, Kami focused on building confidence and overcoming imposter syndrome.
She admitted that in conversations, sometimes the feeling rises within her that she’s not good enough. Sometimes following that is the thought that she’ll never be good enough.
“And I see my problems. I can’t sit down. I’m always doing something. I have multiple roles—sales leader, mom, wife, school parent—and I want to be the best at everything. But even if I try my hardest every day, I know that sometimes something has to give. I have to learn to give myself some grace.”
I told her that when she feels overwhelmed, try to slow down, just enough to take three deep breaths. It’s like a reset button for the body and allows thoughts to setle. Just focus on breathing while it goes in and out three times, and see if there is more clarity afterwards.
She came back the next week and reported that she had focused on mini-breaks, just three breaths. “It really helps me refocus, so thank you,” she said.
It also made her aware of her need for self-care. She had been better to herself and also encouraged her team to take breaks too. “It earns trust when I tell my team to take a lunch and take breaks. We all have to have grace for ourselves.”
Overcoming Her Self-Doubts
Kami noticed that her self-doubts crept in and sabotaged her in different moments throughout her work day. Sometimes it was dealing with her boss, sometimes with her team, and sometimes in meetings.
Dealing with Age/Experience Gaps
With Kami, self-doubt often crept in when she was working with her boss. He was at the end of his career and sometimes she viewed the difference in experience as a gap she needed to overcome.
“I have to maximize my strengths to overcome the experience and age gap. I need to compensate with emotional intelligence, where I think I have an edge.”
I agreed. “You have great self-awareness and very high empathy. How can you leverage those more in your work?”
She thought for a minute and said, “I think it all comes down to my communication skills.” She recognized that she needed to be a little more flexible as she talked to her team. Sometimes she needed to be firm or assertive, and sometimes she needed to be more empathetic and forgiving.
How to Stop Micromanaging
She noted that when her team ran into problems, she sometimes fell into a habit of doing it or telling them what to do. She didn’t want to take on their work and she didn’t want to micromanage. She realized that being patient with them was needed. She had to look for clues about what each person needed to overcome their problems and learn to do their best.
To build trust with her team, I suggested using feedforward instead of feedback. “If your team has trouble, instead of talking about what went wrong, focus on the future and work together to develop options for how they can do it better.”
Being Too Assertive or Too Quiet in Meetings
She noted that she wanted to be more flexible about when she asserted herself in meetings and when she held back. “Sometimes I speak up and drive a bit hard, and then I regret it and hold back for weeks.”
She decided to spend more time preparing for meetings and being more strategic about when to speak up. Before each meeting, she would spend five minutes planning what she wanted to say, how to say it so that the other person could hear it. Even for her 1:1s, she started planning more.
So pretty soon, Kami had a list of things she wanted to work on.
- Give myself a break and stop trying so hard to be the best at everything. Take three breaths to slow down, calm my ego down, and focus on others.
- When dealing with problems, take a feedforward approach and focus on options for how to do better next time.
- Spend more time preparing for meetings and knowing what I want to say and how I want to say it. Be strategic about my messaging.
“Overall,” she said, “I want to take down walls in my communication so others don’t become defensive. I think these techniques will help me make more progress working with others, being more strategic for when to speak up and when to hold back.”
Two weeks later she came back and reported that she was getting more of what she wanted from conversations.
“Even though results aren’t always exactly what I want, I’m improving people and processes. I am more conscious and clearer about what I want to change, and it is really helpful to remind myself to take ego out of it and drive results. If I focus on the other person and get agreement on core problem, then I’m in a better position to advocate, and I get better outcomes.”
Kami made further progress a few weeks later. She came to a session noticing something important.
“I had a conversation with my counterpart, and she was asking some questions,” Kami reported.
“Sometimes I think questions are negative, but instead of getting defensive, this time I took a few breaths and slowed down. I was thoughtful and asked myself, is this something I want to advocate for? And it was! We agreed.”
As she reflected on this insight in coaching, she said, “I need to be more flexible on execution.”
She wanted to respect her team. She realized that they might have different ways of working than she had. Ultimately, the goal was to have impact. So, if they were doing something that worked for them, she had to be ok with it. Not all the ideas had to come from her.
She thanked me and said it was really helpful to reflect back on it, and think: What went well and what can I improve? Taking an hour every other week was paying off.
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