At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether your boss sucks at providing feedback or whether you’ve found a great coach. It sure would help you make progress, but neither can do the work for you. How you take ownership of your growth will decide your career, and, really, how you spend your life.

The Differences

I’ve unfortunately seen my fair share of people whose companies got them great coaches (*ahem*), invested in training programs, and sent them to conferences, to no avail. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. I can start every session fully prepared, suggesting possible areas for improvement, sharing tools for working on skills you want to get better at, and providing you with thoughtful, frank, and constructive feedback. All that wouldn’t move the needle one iota if you don’t then act on those things.

That’s so frustrating that I’ve started deliberately trying to smoke these idlers out when their companies approach me. I’m not into wasting my time and energy with these people, even if it pays. If your idea of coaching is that you sit there and listen to some things and then maybe make a change at some point later in the quarter, you’re not even working on yourself fast enough to remain static: you’re getting worse.

Contrast that with the other extreme, which I’m lucky enough to encounter a few times a year. Those are the eager and motivated senior leaders who immediately embrace any opportunity to work on themselves. You know how some species on earth have been essentially unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, while humans are fairly recent? That’s the same here. You can go for evolutionary stasis, or you can keep evolving.

Upgrading Yourself

Three hundred words into the article, we come to the point where I usually suggest what you should do personally. In this case, it couldn’t get much simpler. Create a mechanism of accountability to ensure that you’re relentlessly moving forward, even if some days it’s only by a little bit.

Declare these self-iterations where you decide to improve something personally, like paying more attention to a specific pattern of behavior. Decide on action items for making progress. Track those like you track other work-related projects that you’re responsible for.

It’s so unsexy, yet it’s going to make a huge difference throughout your career. Don’t complain that others aren’t helping you grow. Fertilize yourself.