Note To Self

One of my coaching clients, we'll call him Jeff, prided himself on his direct communication style, but recently, it had been getting him in trouble with his colleagues. After a stressful quarter marked by several tense sparring matches with people on his team, Jeff's boss told him he needed to change his approach.

Jeff agreed something needed to change. "People just need to get a thicker skin," he told me.

"While that would be nice, it's not something you can control. What's in your power that could improve your working relationships with these folks?" I asked.

This proved to be a more difficult question than I'd expected. After a bit of discussion, I offered a suggestion. "Maybe you could say something in your next one-on-one conversation to re-establish friendly relations with each person. You know, acknowledge the recent tension and share that you'd like things to be better."

Jeff nodded. "Sure, I can do that."

He sent me a recording of a meeting with the team later that week with a short note: "Did it yesterday with the whole team. Went great and much more efficient than talking one-on-one."

But as I watched the reactions of the others on the team, it was clear to me that the only one who thought it went great was Jeff. What followed was a master class in how not to win friends and influence people.

His opener was one of those classic non-apology apologies. "I'm sorry you got the impression that I was being rude. I'm not. I might've been a little stressed, and it didn't help hearing that people have been complaining about me. But I'm ready to put that behind us and you should be too."

By the time he finished, no one was looking at the camera. They looked up, down, off to the side—anywhere but at Jeff. And when he was done speaking, an awkward silence followed for a few seconds. Jeff smiled, as if waiting for applause, and then moved on to the next topic on the agenda.

In the coaching profession, we're trained to offer advice only sparingly, and this recording powerfully reminded me why. I had a very different delivery and outcome in mind when I shared my suggestion with Jeff, and I spent the better part of a day pondering how it had gone so wrong.

Jeff thought he was being sincere and even a little vulnerable. How come it failed to come across that way?

After sitting with this for a while, I realized I'd attempted to share more than a piece of advice with Jeff—I'd tried to impart a point of view. And that point of view is that empathy, humility, and curiosity are necessary ingredients for better dialogue, especially when there's been misunderstanding or contention.

But how did my advice demonstrate those values in relation to Jeff? The more I thought about this, the more uncomfortable I became. The advice I gave Jeff, while well-meaning on the surface, also betrays an unbecoming truth: while advocating for empathy, humility, and curiosity, I offered none of these to Jeff. He had the wrong answer, I thought, and needed me to provide the right one.

This dynamic is what organizational theorists Chris Argyris and Donald Schön called the gap between espoused values and theory-in-use—the difference between the values we say guide our behavior and the values that actually do. I say I value empathy and humility. My actions demonstrated that I was judgmental and arrogant. Jeff and I had more in common at that moment than I'd like to admit.

The painful lesson we both seem to be learning is that people won't give you credit for what you say you value; they give you credit for how they experience what you do.

That one stings a bit. Well, I suppose no one ever said developing greater self-awareness was supposed to be fun.

So where does that leave us? Two things have helped me most when the mirror has blind spots (and it usually does). The first is reflection—taking time after difficult interactions to ask not just what happened, but how you showed up and how you felt. The second is feedback, the kind that comes from people who will tell you the truth. A 360 assessment, a trusted colleague, a coach. The goal in both cases isn't to confirm what you already believe about yourself. It's to get curious about the gap.

Real repair, whether it's a working relationship or your own self-image, doesn't sound like an explanation. It sounds like learning. It shows up as genuine curiosity about someone else's experience, a willingness to say "I didn't see it that way before, and now I do." Not necessarily agreement. Just evidence that you were actually listening.

The mirror can be uncomfortable. Still worth taking a longer look.