Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Director Who Kept Sitting In
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Director Who Kept Sitting In. Here we go. Think about the best employee you've ever managed. Not the most talented one, the one who got better every single quarter, long after they already looked finished. That's the person Carol Dweck spent her career trying to understand. She's a psychologist who spent decades studying why some people treat a skill as something you have and others treat it as something you're still building. She summed up the difference in five words. She wrote, Becoming is better than being. Picture a regional sales director named Sonia. Three years ago, she hit every number and got promoted to run the whole division. Her new team expected her to coast on what got her there. Instead, She kept doing something strange for someone at her level. She sat in on cold calls made by brand new reps, the ones six months into the job, just to hear how they opened a conversation. Her own staff asked her why. She told them the day she stopped learning how beginners think, she would stop being any good at her job. That is the quote in practice. Being treats your current level as a finished fact, something you already are and now just get to enjoy. Becoming treats it as a snapshot of work still in progress, no matter how good the snapshot looks. Sonia wasn't being humble for show. She understood that the title on her door described where she had arrived, not who she now permanently was. Now here's where most people misread this idea. They hear growth mindset and think it just means praising effort instead of talent. Tell people they worked hard, not that they're smart, and you're done. That version is too thin to hold up. The real difference isn't the compliment you give. It's what happens the moment something goes wrong. A being leader hears hard feedback as a verdict on who they are. A becoming leader hears the same feedback as information about what to try next. Same words, completely different leader, depending on which one they've decided they are. This is worth sitting with a bit because most of us slide toward being exactly when we can least afford to. The quarter goes well, and it's tempting to treat that result as proof of a fixed identity. The leader who always wins, who's naturally good at this, who doesn't need to ask hard questions anymore. That feeling is comfortable. It's also right where growth quietly stops, even as everyone around you still assumes you're climbing. Now think about where AI tools fit into this. Every answer one of them hands you arrives sounding complete, like a finished conclusion rather than a first draft. Nothing about the delivery signals doubt, and nothing invites you to push back on it. That confident, closed-off tone is its own kind of being, an answer presenting itself has already arrived, with nothing left open to question. A leader still becoming doesn't take that tone at face value. They treat a clean sounding answer as a starting point worth testing, not a verdict worth repeating in a meeting. The tool can produce the sentence, deciding whether to trust it or to go find out what it missed. Is still a human habit. It's the same habit that Dweck was describing long before any tool could write a sentence at all. So here's something to try this week. Pick one area where you already think of yourself as good, maybe even finished. A skill, a relationship, a part of the job you stopped studying because you got comfortable there. Ask one question you haven't asked in a while. What would it look like to get better at this specific thing, not just maintain it? Then go find someone two levels below you. And ask how they would approach it. You might learn something useful. You'll definitely remember what it felt like to still be becoming. Carry this forward past today. The leaders worth following are not the ones who've arrived at some finished version of themselves. They're the ones still quietly working on the next version long after everyone else has stopped checking. Sonia still sits in on those calls every few weeks. Last month, a rep who had been there 11 months tried an opener Sonia had never heard before. She wrote it down. Then she used it herself on a call with a client she'd been chasing for two years. It worked.