Donna Lichaw, product expert, consultant, and author of ‘The Leader’s Journey’ joins us on the podcast this week. She shares the lessons to reinvent your leadership journey, by activating your superpowers, transforming your team, and poising your business for success in product.
Featured Links: Follow Donna on LinkedIn and Twitter | Donna’s website | Donna’s book ‘The Leader’s Journey’
Episode transcript
Randy Silver (00:00):
Hey Lily. You know, this might be my favourite episode that we’ve ever done.
Lily Smith (00:05):
Why is that, Randy?
Randy Silver (00:07):
Well, we first had Donna Lichaw on a few years back, and this was shortly after I left a job and I was just getting started as a coach and a consultant. And as I learned more about Donna, I realised that I needed her, or maybe somebody like her, as a coach. And actually it all worked out and I’ve been working with her ever since.
Lily Smith (00:26):
Ah, so you love this chat because Donna’s got a new book, The Leader’s Journey, and you just like talking to her so much.
Randy Silver (00:33):
No, actually it’s because of what she did with you in today’s episode.
Lily Smith (00:40):
What? What she did with me?
Randy Silver (00:42):
Yeah. Well, Donna’s been asking me hard questions for years, but she turned the tables and did a mini coaching session with you in the middle of today’s chat. It was great to see someone else be on the other side of that.
Lily Smith (00:55):
Yeah, she totally put me on the spot and she’s very good at this stuff. But I like today’s chat because the lessons in her new book are so good. So no more waffling. Let’s hit the music.
(01:10)
The product experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe. Visit mindtheproduct.com to catch up on past episodes and discover more.
Randy Silver (01:22):
Browse for free, or become a Mind the Product member to unlock premium content, discounts to our conferences around the world and training opportunities. Mind the Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you.
(01:40)
Donna, welcome back to the podcast. It’s been, I don’t even know how long, it’s been years since we’ve had you on.
Donna Lichaw (01:47):
Hi, Randy, Lily. I’m so excited to be back. I don’t know how long it’s been, but it’s like it was yesterday.
Randy Silver (01:53):
Yeah, it’s been… Well, it’s been way too long. But it’s a good reason that we’re having you back. It’s time to talk about your second book. So last time we had you on, we were talking about storytelling and the importance of that. And now you’re talking about storytelling and more, in not just the user’s journey, but the leader’s journey. Is that right?
Donna Lichaw (02:14):
It’s almost right. For a while I really wanted to call this book Against Storytelling, because it’s very much a reaction to storytelling be being so in vogue in the business world. And I firmly believe, which is part of the journey I went on that I talk about in the book, that nobody cares about your stories as a leader. They care about how they experience working with you and how you move them forward and the impact that you all make together, and that’s what matters. So it’s kind of about storytelling, but not really. No one wants to hear your stories.
Randy Silver (02:54):
That’s interesting. Yeah, one of the things I read in the book was there’s a lot about stories and storytelling, but it’s the difference between telling a story and bringing them to life. And I wanted to ask you, what did you mean by that distinction?
Donna Lichaw (03:07):
Yeah, I know, it’s like the curse of my life. Things make sense in my head and then I have to spend my entire life answering the, “Please explain. Please elaborate.” It’s like my life is red ink on a report from elementary school or grade school… No, what do you call it, primary school as you say. Please explain.
(03:32)
But yeah, the book is essentially how to feel like you’re the hero of your own story as a leader. So there’s a story that we all live and it’s called life, and it’s how our brain navigates everything. There are stories we tell ourselves about how we show up as leaders, how we make an impact, how we don’t make an impact, and it’s really about the way that we do or don’t feel like heroes as we’re navigating through all the things we do as leaders and how to make it the best story possible. But yeah, it’s not really about telling stories.
Randy Silver (04:16):
True. Okay. And you made one other-
Donna Lichaw (04:20):
I know. Did that help?
Randy Silver (04:23):
It did. But there’s one other distinction that you made around the difference between some being a hero and saying that leaders need to be superheroes. So what actually is the difference between being a hero and a superhero?
Donna Lichaw (04:37):
Okay. And the funny thing is, I’m going to tell a story to explain what I mean, and so here I go contradicting myself. But I think the best way to explain this is to tell you about a time and what kickstarted me on my journey towards developing amazing leaders many years ago when I was working with an executive team in Silicon Valley. And at the time they brought me in because my previous book and all of my previous work as a consultant was about getting businesses to really understand the stories that customers can experience when they buy, think about and engage with digital products and services.
(05:24)
And what I’d found over the years is that when leaders are most clear on these stories, they can use that same mechanism and language and way of working to create not just heroes of their customers, but create heroes of everyone they work with internally in their organisations.
(05:45)
And so I was working with this team and we were working more on traditional storytelling. Here’s how you get everyone excited about what you’re building and how you show up and you give pitches and demos and presentations. And it was one of those executives who pulled me aside, and then it was a few of them, and they just very bluntly said, “Yeah, I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone cares about any of this. I know it’s a good skill to have, but how do I do any of this if I don’t feel like a hero?” And my knee-jerk reaction was, well, it doesn’t matter. You need to be taking care of everyone else. But over time, I just couldn’t stop thinking of that question, how do I be a hero?
(06:32)
And what I eventually found over many years of research, practise, thousands of hours of research, and eventually an entire business pivot later as I ended up pivoting into leadership development from product development and product strategy, was that if you’re going to make the biggest impact you can as a leader and really move yourself, your team, and your business forward, there was something to that answer of… you do have to feel like a hero, but it’s more than that. You have to feel like a superhero because leadership is hard. It is a pressure cooker. Everyone’s looking up to you. You’re spread in a million directions and often it feels impossible. And the things that you want to accomplish, whether you’re the CEO of your business, the founder, you run the show or you were promoted because you’re brilliant, or whatever reason you’re promoted, often the things that we want to accomplish when we are trying to lead ourselves and others forward feel really, really impossible.
(07:43)
And superheroes are a great metaphor for what it means to accomplish incredible things and impossible things. And so the more I tried to answer this question that I could not let go of, that this person and this team asked me many years ago, the more I found the answer and one of my favourite things, which is superhero stories. So now it’s great. Now I develop superheroes. It’s great. And good thing one of my superpowers is not letting go of things, so that’s how I got here.
Lily Smith (08:20):
So one of the things that you say in the description of the book that you’ve written is kind of, leadership isn’t about letting life happen to you. And I guess that’s a little bit about what you’ve been talking about, but how do you see then that sort of difference between leadership, the taking charge versus being the part of the team? How much is that driven then by the leader versus maybe more of a servant style leadership as well?
Donna Lichaw (08:58):
So the paradox of leadership for a lot of people, whether you’ve been promoted into senior leadership by just doing a great job somewhere you work, or whether you’ve created the company, founded the company and you built something profitable or you found investors and you built something promising, the paradox is that leaders often feel like success happens to them rather than them controlling success. And I say control with a grain of salt because I don’t believe in sort of manifesting mumbo jumbo, we can control our lives and everything about us. Now there’s plenty that’s up to chance and serendipity, but there is something about taking control of the narrative that the most successful leaders do. And let me explain because I don’t mean telling stories. I mean knowing what the story really is.
(10:15)
So for example, a few years ago I was working with someone who was promoted to senior leadership very rapidly within a couple of quick promotions, she had so much promise. And by the time she got to where she wanted to be, she was sort of freaking out because there’s a lot of stuff that comes up, imposter syndrome and oh, I think I was promoted by mistake. But when that happens, you’re letting life control you or the journey that you’re on control you. Okay, now I’m promoted, I don’t know if I really want this job. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this job. What can I possibly do in this role?
(10:59)
And when that happens, you come at your position and at your leadership and at your job from a position of often fear, you come at it with this lack of agency and you’re just waiting for things to happen to you. Maybe I’ll get another promotion, maybe this will happen, maybe that will happen. But when you can really go back and figure out how you have shown up in your life, and this is where the superhero metaphor comes in. Superheroes have three things. They have an identity, they have superpowers, and they have a mission. And there’s a cocktail of all that in all superheroes have different variations of all of the above. But when you can show up and instead of being along for the ride of your life, you can really look back and say, okay, who am I? What makes me amazing? Where am I going? What are my superpowers? Even getting deep into what is my kryptonite? That’s when you can fully understand who you are and use that to then pave your path forward with more intention and focus.
(12:32)
And I say this, I use the example of someone being promoted by accident, but I work with a lot of founders and a lot of CEOs, and they would tell you the same thing. Oh yeah, sure I raised $150 million last month, but it was a fluke. Yeah, I think someone screwed up and I don’t know what they were thinking and now here I am and I have to fix this mess. So it’s kind of amazing how it shows up in so many different ways, it crosses roles, contexts, nationalities, genders, anything you can throw at the equation. But it’s all the same when you can really find out, okay, what is amazing about how I got here and how I can move myself, my organisation, my business forward, that’s when you get going.
Randy Silver (13:24):
So you’ve got four sections to the book about how you work with people through this or the journey that people take. And just to give the overview, the sections are identity, superpowers, mission and impact. So let’s start with the first one. So how do I discover what my identity actually is and what’s the difference between identity and identity with superpowers?
Donna Lichaw (13:50):
So the fun thing is I have spent my entire career working in tech and in product development where we have, in theory, a strong tradition of what we call paving the cow path, which is, let’s say you build something, a proof of concept, a prototype, you put it out into the wild and you’re finding out what’s working. You don’t go just change all of that, you find out what’s working, and then you do more of that. You bake more of that into the product. An example, I’m thinking Slack, Slack started, I forget what they actually started as. Was it in app messaging?
Lily Smith (14:39):
I think gaming, something to do with gaming.
Donna Lichaw (14:42):
Something with gaming.
Randy Silver (14:44):
It was their dev tool while they were making the game.
Donna Lichaw (14:47):
There you go. So their dev tool while they were making the game. And then it turns out, this is actually really useful. And then when you see opportunities like that and you pave those paths, then you can build incredible products. And so leadership is much the same. I mean, being a great human is much the same. So identity is who you are based on where you’ve been and how you got to where you are.
(15:12)
So it is a bit of a timey-whimey trip through time and space that I take my clients through and also take readers through in the book, which is find out who you are by finding out where you’ve been. And so you go back and you mind your past and you find out, all right, when have I been my absolute best? And what was I doing at those times and what’s the impact that I made? And when you can reverse engineer all of that, you’re often surprised at who you are.
(15:45)
And that’s where the superhero metaphor is also quite wonderful because in every superhero origin story, someone suddenly finds out that they’re not who they thought they were and they have to grapple with it. And they realise, wow, I’m super, wow, I have sticky webs on my hands and I can shoot them. Wow, I can fly and I can do things that all my friends and peers cannot do. Yeah, leadership is much the same. We all have amazing things that we’ve done in our life, we just often don’t see it because we’re not looking for it.
Lily Smith (16:24):
And I think that that’s one of the things that I find or have found slightly tricky in my own sort of journey is kind of uncovering what my superpower is or what my strengths are. I think I’m much clearer on that now, but I’m older. So how do you help people uncover what their superpowers are if they’re not sure how they differ from other leaders in the business or just other kind of peers who are at a similar sort of level and type of experience of them. Yeah, how do you get to understand what your superpowers are and how you can use them, I guess, as well?
Donna Lichaw (17:10):
It’s a funny thing, for a lot of people it does come with age, when you’re a lot older. I find often once you hit your fifties, you’re kind of realise, hang on, I know what I’m good at and I’m done with this. And you stop, you’re just done with all the silliness. And often people have sort of a reawakening at that age and they’re able to be amazing. But for the rest of us, especially the founders, CEOs and executives who I work with, especially in the tech industry, a lot of us are really young. And I say us, a lot of my clients are even much younger than me.
(17:54)
And what happens is when you’re so young and so promising, you can’t see and you also can’t wait till your fifties to figure out, oh, this is why I am pretty great, and then get confident. And so the fast track way is again, to travel through your past and just, it’s almost like that, what story was it? The Christmas Carol where you take a ride through your past and you look around and you see what happened. Was that the Christmas… Right? Christmas past.
Randy Silver (18:32):
It’s a Wonderful Life, Christmas Carol.
Donna Lichaw (18:34):
It’s a Wonderful Life. All those stories. Yeah.
(18:36)
And I know there’s a superhero one for this too. I don’t think it’s in the book, but Dr. Strange probably does it or whoever. But yeah, it’s just to look back. And so I could even ask you right now, Lily, what’s something… Maybe I’ll put it this way, what was something that you worked on as a kid or something you did, a project, maybe in school or outside of school, something where you were just your absolute best, much younger, so excited.
Lily Smith (19:08):
Oh my God, I can tell you the answer to this. I knew as soon as you asked me what it was going to be. So do we have time for this? I’ll just tell you really quickly. So when I was in sixth form, which is year 12, 13, I really wanted to be the social rep because you got to organise all the parties. And I was up against two other girls who were the popular girls. So I was like shit, I’ve got to pull all the stops out in order to win this.
(19:38)
So I organised a party, like an under eighteens night at a club, nightclub, and did the posters for it and everything. And then when they had the sort of pitch thing, the two other girls did their pitch of why they should be chosen. And then I was like, “Guys, I’ve already organised the party. If you vote for me, it’s happening on this date and this is the venue and everything.” And everyone was just like, “Okay, we’ll go with Lily.” So I won. It was brilliant. So yeah, I was very proud of myself at that point. I think it’s getting shit done. Maybe that’s my superpower.
Donna Lichaw (20:21):
Getting shit done. Okay. So you did this, what’s the impact that you had? Then what happened?
Lily Smith (20:31):
Then we had an amazing party, I guess, and everyone was very happy.
Donna Lichaw (20:37):
You get shit done, you had an amazing party, everyone was happy. Why does it matter that everyone was happy?
Lily Smith (20:49):
Oh, I mean… Yeah, that’s a really hard one to answer. I don’t know. Oh, I’d have to really dig deep in order to figure out why I cared so much.
Donna Lichaw (21:03):
That’s okay. It could be, so the end of the story is that everyone was happy. Sometimes there’s a there there that matters and sometimes that’s the end. Everyone was happy. So you get shit done, everyone was happy. What did or could have gotten in your way on this journey?
Lily Smith (21:19):
Oh, well, things going wrong, the venue falling through, no one turning up.
Donna Lichaw (21:30):
That’s always the horror story with parties, right? The potential nightmare. No one showing up. Yep. What about internal things that could have gotten in your way? What of your own internal quirks or characteristics could have gotten in the way of your success here?
Lily Smith (21:49):
I mean, I think at that age, I was so sort of blind to all of that stuff that I don’t know if I would’ve been aware of anything like that. But now I know that sometimes I can be a little bit too gunghoe and not bring everyone else along on the journey. And so yeah, I’m a bit more careful these days with my go get them attitude.
Donna Lichaw (22:20):
There you go. So chances are, if we had a tonne of time and we dug into a few more stories from throughout your life, we would see patterns emerge. And what’s great about this way of working and just this way of thinking is to… Because this is the Product Experience podcast, and everyone listening to this is a product person, I’ll use shorthand and industry lingo, but this a, it’s a discovery project. And when you do it right, it’s a continuous discovery project that you never stop doing. And if we were interviewing users or customers, for example, I would need to interview three to five. I’d hear the same things after three. And then of a certain segment, by five, you feel really good about things, and then you interview eight of that segment just to make sure that you didn’t really miss anything.
(23:18)
Going through the stories of your past to figure out who you are as a leader, who you are as a person, essentially, is the same exact thing. So if we went through a few more stories, we would start to see the patterns, your superpowers would become abundantly clear. The impact that you have on the world and what motivates you would become abundantly clear. If it’s just to make people happy, that’s great. If there’s more, we would uncover it. And kryptonite are the things that you would look out for. Although we’d also find that your superpowers lie in your kryptonite because if you struggle to bring people along on your journey because you move so quickly, that means that moving quickly is also a strength of yours. So got to figure out how to leverage it.
(24:05)
And once you’re clear on what the ultimate story is, again, this is, it’s not one that you necessarily ever tell anyone because they probably don’t want to hear you talking about yourself all the time. But it’s one that you start experimenting with. And this is where, again, it’s like a product problem or a product challenge or a product creation thing that we’re playing with, which is you start experimenting, okay, is this really who I am? I get shit done.
(24:35)
Sometimes when I talk to people, what they realise their story is, it actually surprises them. And I talk about this in the book, I know for myself, I spent years of my life thinking I was a quitter and I can never stick with anything. And I learned through a lot of what I talk about in the book that my story is exactly the opposite. And in fact, today I was in a meeting where a few people who I just met, they told me, “Wow, you never give up, do you?” And it was kind of exciting because I didn’t have to tell them that, somehow just after a few meetings, they learned that about me. It took me 30 years to learn that about myself. But yeah, it’s all discovery project. It’s just we’re doing it for ourselves. Once you do this, it’s continuous, and then you do it for everyone you work with, your teams and your business and everything. You’re all heroes.
Randy Silver (25:27):
I’ve got to say the last few minutes of watching you do that with Lily, Donna, was some of my favourite time ever on this podcast because, so full disclosure, after we had you on last time a few years ago, I called you up and said, “I think I need to talk to you more often,” and I’ve been working with you as my coach ever since. And to see you doing it to somebody else was great. It was fantastic.
Donna Lichaw (25:53):
Yeah, it’s so much fun. And I’ve been wanting to do it more on podcasts and I haven’t figured out how to yet. So thanks Lily, for being my Guinea pig here, because it’s so much fun. It’s part of why I wrote the book. It makes me… So one of my superpowers, which is also value of mine, is accessibility. Just making things accessible to people and being accessible. And it makes me, it’s so hard to have all of my coaching happen behind closed doors. So I partly wrote the book just to share all the goodness and the breakthroughs and these ways of working and thinking with more people. But yeah, I’ve been wanting to figure out how to do it more live with people because it’s really cool.
Lily Smith (26:35):
It’s really cool. No, it was good. Good fun.
Randy Silver (26:39):
So Donna, you talked about the kryptonite there and that being part of your superpower in a way. So I’ve heard different philosophies about how people deal with weaknesses, and is it something where you need to show up your weaknesses and really focus on those? Or is it, you just acknowledge it and say, okay, I’m going to try and put a buffer around it and focus on my strengths?
Donna Lichaw (27:00):
I believe that our weaknesses often are where our secret superpowers are hiding out. So for example, I know before we started the podcasts, the three of us were chatting and I was saying something like, “Details are my kryptonite, and I cannot handle details,” as I’m going through a book launch, which is all details, all the time.
(27:32)
And so on the one hand, certain things, I know better than to fight myself. If details are not my thing, yes, I have a team to help me. I’m a business owner, I’m smart. I know better than to try to do everything all by myself, and so I get help for certain things. On the other hand, just spending life thinking that you’re bad at details is a pretty low energy, deflating way to show up. And it’s definitely not a productive way to run a business, because when you harp on what’s not working, that just, it sucks your energy and you need a lot of energy to show up and do things like run a business or work with humans.
(28:21)
And so when you can look at your weaknesses instead as secret superpowers, you can, I don’t want to say reframe them because it’s not like, no, it’s okay, details, I don’t need details or, no, I’m just really good at strategy, so forget it. But when you can fully honour, so I’ll use details as an example, so the way it works is when you can look at your weaknesses instead as hidden superpowers, you can see what you think is a weakness actually serves you.
(29:06)
So if I use details as an example, I could just say, “Wow, I’m so bad at details and it takes my energy and I show up embarrassed and weak and not getting things done.” Or I can ask, “Well, when I’m missing details or bogged down by details, how is that serving me?” And when I look at how missing details serves me, it’s very, very clear that missing details frees me up to look at the big picture. Not noticing details frees me up to stay a hundred miles up above the ground. Or for those of you overseas, it’s many kilometres, however many that is, 200 and something kilometres.
(30:01)
But it’s actually a strength to miss details. I work with a lot of founders, for example, who are so good at details that they can’t get out of details. And when you’re a CEO of a growing billion-dollar company, you’re now responsible for thousands of people and you cannot let go of details, you’re going to slow everyone down and drive everyone nuts and create a lot of financial issues for your company. And so missing details can be a superpower.
(30:40)
On the flip side, let’s say you’re also that CEO and your kryptonite is details. How does that serve you? Well, I’ve worked with folks who are so detail driven, how did that serve them? They built a billion-dollar company. It worked thus far. So are they just going to be like, nah, I need to be more strategic now because details are driving everyone nuts. No. You have to honour your kryptonite, the things that are holding you back. So how might being really focused on details serve you in a productive way? Well, maybe next time you’re running an executive meeting, instead of critiquing everybody and telling them how they’re getting everything wrong, if you really want to focus on details, maybe make sure that you’re… I’m just throwing this out there, but the venue is the best possible venue it could be. Or that everyone has a little gift on their table, or there are lots of ways to honour your ability to do details. It doesn’t mean that you have to drive everybody nuts.
(31:45)
So everything’s on spectrum, kryptonite and superpowers, you can’t just ignore one and embrace the other. You really need to figure out kind of like how superheroes do. Like Hulk, his strength is also his weakness. You have to figure out how to manage it.
Lily Smith (32:05):
Amazing, Donna. We are going to take a short interlude and come back next week to finish off our conversation because we still need to dig into the mission and the impact. But thank you so much for everything so far. And for those of you that have come to this podcast later, dig straight into the next episode and listen to more information about how we get into the mission and the impact.
Donna Lichaw (32:35):
Thank you both.
Lily Smith (32:35):
The product experience is the first-
Randy Silver (32:47):
And the best-
Lily Smith (32:49):
Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith.
Randy Silver (32:55):
And me, Randy Silver.
Lily Smith (32:58):
Louron Pratt is our producer, and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver (33:01):
Our theme music is from Hamburg based band Pau. That’s P-A-U. Thanks to Arne Kiler who curates both Product Tank and MTP Engage in Hamburg, and who also plays bass in the band for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via Product Tank, regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith (33:22):
If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproduct.com/producttank.
Comments
Join the community
Sign up for free to share your thoughts