Vachon Imagined

I was in an Army Senior Leadership Development Course, and we were asked to complete an Army 360 assessment. For those unfamiliar, that meant I had to reach out to twelve people and ask them to evaluate my leadership: four superiors, four colleagues, and four subordinates.

I wasn’t really worried about any of them.

Well, mostly.

I did send those assessments out with one eye kind of squinting, wondering, Oh God. What’s this going to feel like? What are they going to say?

Which, of course, told me something immediately.

I had something to fear.

I had something I wasn’t entirely proud of.

To my great enjoyment, most of the feedback came back making me feel like I was on top of the world. Excellent leader. Strong leader. All the things a person likes to hear about herself.

And then there was one.

I knew exactly who had written it by the way it was phrased.

He said I needed to be more aware of how I spoke to men.

Are you shitting me?

That was my initial thought.

The men I always felt like I had to work three times as hard as to receive one-quarter of the credit?

Those men?

The very thing I had been fighting my entire career—men—was now telling me that I needed to work on how I spoke to them?

I was furious.

And I did what any other reasonable woman would do: I picked up the phone and started telling my best friend how offended I was.

And anyone else who would listen.

Now, here’s where things get interesting.

As a leader, I did one crucial thing in that moment.

I broke that man’s trust.

He worked for me.

He had trusted me with honest feedback about my leadership, and instead of receiving it as the gift it was, I gossiped about him.

Why?

Because I was offended.

And because I had plenty of other people willing to tell me exactly why I should be.

Ah, that felt good.

Until it didn’t.

Because somewhere deep inside this cold and broken heart of mine, I knew he was right.

Yes.

Those men.

And therein was my problem.

I did have a tendency to talk to men—and, if I’m being completely honest, to people—with heat.

You know that heat.

The kind that feels like you’re being blown over when a feather would have worked just as nicely, and probably more effectively.

That one.

So, after much humility—enough humility to choke a horse on steroids—I listened to him.

And I took it as a win.

Because I realized something.

He wasn’t my enemy.

My defensiveness was.

I had taken someone who was brave enough to tell me something I needed to hear and turned him into an adversary because I didn’t like what I heard.

That’s what defensiveness does.

It takes information and turns it into an attack.

It takes a person and turns them into a threat.

It takes something that could help us grow and gives us someone to fight instead.

People who are sure of themselves pick up heat only when it is necessary.

People who live in that heat are blinded by it.

They have other words for it:

I am not safe.

I have to fight you.

I have to defend myself.

It’s exhausting.

And it is not the sign of a confident leader.

But there is something else that has always aggravated me almost as much as insecurity itself:

hypocrisy.

I have noticed that the people who are most aggravated by what you are doing are sometimes the very people who are doing it themselves.

They just don’t see it.

So instead of looking inward, they make you the object of their project.

They study you.

They correct you.

They tell you what you need to change.

They make you the lesson they are trying desperately not to learn about themselves.

Do as I say, not as I do.

That isn’t leadership.

That’s projection wearing a leadership uniform.

And I know this because I have done my own version of it.

That’s the part that makes this uncomfortable.

It is very easy to see hypocrisy in someone else. It is much harder to recognize the places where you are doing the exact same thing.

Which brings me back to that 360 assessment.

The most valuable feedback I received wasn’t the feedback that made me feel like I was an excellent leader.

It was the feedback that pissed me off.

Because that was the feedback that showed me where I still had work to do.

A confident leader doesn’t need to make the person delivering uncomfortable information wrong.

She doesn’t need to gossip about it.

She doesn’t need to build a case for why the criticism shouldn’t count.

She can listen.

Even when it hurts.

Even when it comes from someone she doesn’t like.

Even when it comes from someone who works for her.

Especially then.

Because leadership isn’t proven by how well people praise you.

It is revealed by what you do when someone tells you the truth.

And sometimes the person you are most tempted to fight isn’t your enemy at all.

Sometimes, they’re the person showing you the part of yourself you were afraid to see.