Leadership - Ep. #13: Short Bites with Lisa Gill

Name: Leadership - Ep. #13: Short Bites with Lisa Gill
Uploaded: 2020-06-02T23:19:53+00:00
Duration: 2 min 34 s
Channel: Virginie Glaenzer
Description: In this monologue, Lisa Gill (a trainer and coach) reflects on the pervasive blind spots that leaders possess, regardless of how conscious they consider…

2 Jun 2020 · 3 min

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2:34

In this monologue, Lisa Gill (a trainer and coach) reflects on the pervasive blind spots that leaders possess, regardless of how conscious they consider themselves to be. She argues that external feedback—coaching, mentorship, and peer mirrors—is essential for uncovering these blind spots. Gill connects this process to the concept of "growth pain" from Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, suggesting that genuine transformation into a more conscious leader is inherently uncomfortable, much like physical training that creates muscle soreness. She advocates for creating learning communities or "dojos" where leaders can practice together, receive honest challenge, and develop new leadership muscles that differ from the industrial‑era paradigm. This work, she says, is necessary to shift from a mechanistic, process‑driven style to leading from the heart, a transition that is both scary and painful but requires compassion and collective practice.

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A sort of hunch that I have, and I'm biased of course because I'm a trainer and a coach, but the hunch that I have is that we all have these blind spots in terms of leadership. You know, however conscious we think we are, I think that we need others to help us see those blind spots and my sense is that we need to go on, you know, and how it's triggered, as you say, Rune, there's lots of different ways. And often it's through adversity that we kind of begin these journeys. But I think of it like, you know, these spaces like a dojo or some kind of space where we can learn together and get lots of feedback and lots of coaching and support. And people holding a mirror up to us. And it's often like Frederic Laloux, who wrote Reinventing Organizations, he talks about growth pain, and that to go on this journey to becoming a more conscious leader involves growth pain. And I think all things in life that we learn, when they're real lessons that really change who we are, they're often painful.. And I think that's, you know, like when you train in the gym, when your muscles ache, you know that you're developing something, right? So my sense is that we, we need to find these different learning communities where we can practice together and learn together and support each other. And that's not just, you know, patting each other on the back, but really challenging each other. And without that, you know, I really think if we want to shift leadership in our organizations, it's not enough to change our structures and processes. We really need to do this hard work of really interrogating ourselves and developing new muscles, which are totally different muscles to the industrial kind of paradigm that we've been talking about. Those things, in a way, are going to get in the way for you to lead from the heart. And that's going to be scary and painful, and that's okay. I think we need to be compassionate about that. It's not our fault. This is the sort of thing we've been conditioned into. But if we can practice together a new way of being, a new way of leading, that I think is, in my view, at least from what I've experienced so far, the only way really that we can shift.