If not me, who? That quote from two millennia ago still holds true for anyone who wants to keep growing regardless of the organization around them not being perfect or their boss being a lousy coach. Especially as you get more senior leadership roles, the onus is on you. Here’s how you can start taking care of yourself. If not now, when?

Self-Reliance In Our Careers

I recently found out that self-reliance as a key to success has been on my mind way longer than even I had realized. Thirteen years ago, I published a series of articles aimed at suffering individual contributors. It was all about improving, focusing on craftsmanship, and picking up new habits, even if your environment wasn’t cooperative.

The connecting thread between those articles and this one is that people with agency, autonomy, and extreme ownership of their careers are those who will grow and thrive in any environment. Yes, you’ll no doubt improve faster if you can use the services of someone like myself. Yet that doesn’t mean you cannot improve, and fast, on your own. It just requires more discipline and deliberate planning. You’ll have to take care of discipline on your own, but let’s talk about the planning.

Coachless Coaching

This whole approach revolves around the concept of coaching as that is what aspiring people do when they want to improve at something. As a VP Engineering or CTO, you’re not likely to get any substantial coaching from your boss (I’m not saying that’s how it should be, just stating what’s empirically the most common situation). Therefore, you’ll have to find ways to grow and improve with yourself being the propellant.

Let’s start by asserting that there’s always room for improvement. You can always find something that would make a tangible difference to your work or career if you improved at it. Couple that improvement goal with a deadline. That’s it, you’re done. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a goal, or want to drill down into this impact coaching framework, check out my free short ebook on the topic.

Then, break this goal into milestones and possible approaches so you’ll have leading indicators for progress. What matters in the long-term are the outcomes and how you improve them. However, when things take too long to show these results, you should have metrics that help ensure you’re on the right track.

So if, for example, you’d like to move upstream in your career as a tech executive and become a genuine part of the executive team, you can start with a leading indicator such as counting how many of the leadership meetings you’re part of. Then you can track the number of times you ask questions, speak up, suggest ideas, and eventually proactively set topics on the agenda.

As you can probably see, nothing here requires budgets or having your boss’s approval. You’re working on yourself and improving, and, in my experience, most CEOs are actually pleased when their executives become more proactive. You don’t need to ask for permission in advance for most things, and can just get going.

Feedback Loops

Seeing rapid improvement in coaching, much like in software development, requires tight iterations and plenty of feedback. These feedback loops allow us to incorporate our learning into the work fast, resulting in regular improvements (that’s Agile in a sentence for you). What feedback do you have?

First, there’s the self-feedback you can get. That’s the purpose of the leading indicators we’ve covered above, to ensure that you have something to track your progress with. However, having other people involved can be immensely helpful. We sometimes miss the obvious when we’re looking at ourselves, or we might not realize that some things come across in a certain way that’s detrimental to our success.

As I discussed in this podcast episode (and audio here) about bootstrapping your leadership, as a senior leader you’re unlikely to get meaningful feedback until things get visibly bad. Thus, you have to learn how to solicit feedback to generate the feedback needed to improve before things go past the point of no return:

Ask your boss: Again, most CEOs don’t do active coaching very well. Yet, my experience shows that when you explicitly ask how you’re doing, they’ll gladly share the feedback. You might hear that you’re doing great and they’re pleased—which is good, of course, yet doesn’t really help you decide what you ought to be working on. However, they just might reveal something that didn’t register as “serious enough” to be discussed, but since you asked, they’ll share.

Survey your employees: You’re giving your people regular feedback as part of your coaching of them, right? (If not, check my ebook linked earlier). Who’s to say they cannot provide you with feedback as well? As part of your one-on-ones, regularly ask them whether there’s anything they’d like to tell you, and not just have them listen to your feedback. Explain how speaking up about issues isn’t merely acceptable, but would genuinely help you (of course, when they do speak up, you have to learn to accept that feedback instead of rejecting it on the spot).

Include your peers: Perhaps the hardest part, but sometimes the most impactful. Working effectively with your peers can unlock incredible improvements to your impact on the company and your leverage. However, it’s precisely the relationships with these colleagues that are often hardest. If you can be vulnerable enough with them, you’ll get lots of valuable information. Ask for feedback in general, or share what goals you’ve set for yourself and explicitly ask them to let you know about the progress you’re making from their point of view.

Sounds like work, or intimidating? Well, no pain no gain. The alternative is to keep sitting on your hands, feeling fine and wasting your life.