Building Better Leaders with Michelle Brown of Choose Growth

In this compelling episode of The Leadership Initiative, host Dr. Timothy A. Judge engages with Michelle Brown, Executive Coach at Choose Growth LLC, to explore the intricacies of developing leaders across high-growth companies. From emerging talent to senior executives, Michelle shares a wealth of strategies tailored to different leadership levels, including how to instill self-awareness, manage resistance to change, and foster an organizational culture where feedback is embraced. Check out an excerpt from the episode below:

Listen to the full podcast episode here 

Host, Dr. Timothy Judge:

...How do you develop ...senior leaders in high growth companies? And how does your approach differ when developing emerging leaders who are still developing their leadership identity and in high growth...scenarios?

Guest, Michelle Brown:

...My observation is that a lot of times emerging leaders haven't had an opportunity to know what great looks like. So, I think when you're coaching an emerging leader, you spend a disproportionate amount of your time making sure that they have the exposure and the experiences so that they can see what it means to be amazing at whatever the skill is that you're gonna work with them on...

The other thing I think that is important for an emerging leader is to help them put in place good practices that will help them continue to grow. So, examples might be learning how to ask for feedback from their peers, from managers, and how to make adjustments based on that feedback...

Senior leaders, I think are different. Likely by the time that they've gotten to that point and by the virtue that they're a senior leader, hopefully they've done well, right? So, they've probably seen what great looks like. You don't need to spend as much time on helping to get that experience for them.

What's different for a senior leader is often times they have started to develop habits that help them, and habits or behaviors that don't help them. And so, I think the challenge when you're working with more senior leaders is to help them discover what are the things that they have been doing...that are not useful towards their goal...That's what a growth mindset is about, is helping others to understand that they can change, they can do things differently...