🚴‍♀️ 🦅 🧗‍♀️
I participated in a coaching session with Ray Foote this year as part of a leadership cohort program facilitated by the good folks at Reboot.
I came to the session with an idea of what I wanted to discuss. My team was growing and the mandate was to grow even more. I felt like I needed to dramatically improve my ability to forecast our needs along with that growth. I imagined I could do this with a perfectly formulated spreadsheet, where I input a few numbers and got a perfect projection of the people power we’d need to support the work. If only I knew what those inputs should be!
I framed this as being “more proactive” vs “reactive,” which is the term I used to describe how I’d approached hiring and contracting our work before. Ray immediately talked me down. He asked me to relate my experience back to something in my life.
I thought of a radio segment that had come on the previous weekend about motivation. In it, the host described how a cyclist would zero in on the bike shorts of the competitor directly in front of her and only think about getting further ahead one competitor at a time until she was leading the race. I had been thinking about this approach while running that week, but hadn’t applied it to work yet. Ray pushed me—how could this strategy apply to the problem I had brought to our session?
I thought for a moment about the spreadsheet I was so sure would solve all my problems before they had a chance to occur. Even if I could create something like this, it was prone to becoming irrelevant as soon as something unexpected happened—changes to our team, an influx of clients, a pandemic (had 2020 taught me nothing??).
The appeal of the cyclist strategy was that I could narrow my focus and use what was right in front of me, what was known, to base my decisions on.
Ray asked if there was another metaphor that might compliment this approach. What sort of obstacles might a cyclist want to anticipate? How could she see that hill coming up ahead in the course, for instance? Get a bird’s-eye view maybe?
We talked more about how a bird (we settled on a raptor) could give the cyclist an edge. The raptor could soar along up above and anticipate changes in the course, weather, or other potential hurdles the cyclist might want to ready herself for. In work terms, these could be represented by shifts in company priorities or new objectives.
Our working combination of metaphors was representative of how a good leader should be able to problem-solve in the moment while keeping in touch with the bigger picture of the organization her team was within. Ray encouraged me to go one step further.
Having scoped out my interests and hobbies, Ray asked about rock climbing. What lessons could I bring from that pursuit?
I described my experience as a (very) amateur rock climber. What’s always appealed to me about climbing is that it’s essentially a puzzle to unlock through a sequence of moves. Ray noted that this was similar to how I’d been approaching leadership—reshuffling after I scrambled from hold to hold so I was properly calibrated to continue upward. He reframed what I had been referring to as a “reactive” approach as a strength where I let previous moves inform the next rather than fall when my original plan hadn’t worked out.
He asked what happened once I completed a difficult climbing route. I’ve always liked to try the same climb again, applying what I had learned from previous attempts. How apt is that?
Ray invited me to live these three metaphors as I went about my lead work and use them as prompts for reflection. I’ve thought of them often as I’ve traversed team performance, hiring goals, and new projects—feeling better as I’ve adapted to changes in plans and priorities. Sometimes I still wonder what leading a team this past year would look like on a spreadsheet, but embracing the strengths of a cyclist/raptor/climber has made it feel possible to continue forward without it.