Melanie Parish, MCC

Being a leader is challenging work. When I first started working with clients, one of the biggest surprises for me was that almost every leader (with only rare exceptions) suffers from some kind of imposter syndrome. It is ubiquitous. The more success the leader is having, the more imposter syndrome they seem to feel. I believe this happens because they are stretching into new territory–taking up a little more space than they took up before–and it leaves them feeling exposed. Imposter syndrome isn’t a pleasant feeling. When it happens, we want to try and make it go away. Even though it is ubiquitous, imposter syndrome is still scary and uncomfortable.... Read More

Having an experimental mindset helps leaders and teams open a variety of possibilities and a free flow of ideas. Seeing the things you try as experiments orients you to collect data and evaluate whether the experiments or things you try are working or not. Sometimes a team will luck into things that work but many times they don’t. When things don’t go as hoped, we fail. An old friend of mine says, “Education is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” And education can feel like a consolation prize in the race to innovate. It isn’t about whether it feels bad to fail (it does), but how to emerge resilient and ready to experiment again. To fail better, experiments need to be safe-to-fail, small enough to iterate often, and there needs to be a plan in place for data collection and decisions about the next steps.... Read More