My Experience at Leaders In Tech: Building Leadership Excellence Through Vulnerability
This article outlines my life-changing experience at one of the extraordinary Leaders in Tech 🔥 weekend retreats focused on the social-emotional skills that power great executive leadership.
Introduction: When Leadership Training Pays Off
Corporate leadership is a world of high stakes and high stress. Our companies’ success and our colleagues’ job security rests on the quality of our judgment and on our skills as decision makers, analysts, role models, organizers, and communicators—in short, as leaders.
With the consequences both so clear and so significant, improving those skills is a high priority for anyone in the C-Suite, and especially so for those less experienced in their roles. (See my ongoing articles series for new COOs here) It’s no surprise, then, that the leadership training industry is expected to exceed $60 billion globally by 2030.
The industry has a problem, though: training often doesn't work. A team led by Harvard’s Michael Beer identify the key barriers that stop leadership training from producing positive business outcomes, writing that companies consistently struggle with:
Senior executives who don’t work as a team or who don’t acknowledge necessary changes to their own behavior;
Top-down or laissez-faire leadership styles that don’t create space for honest conversations about problems;
Employee fears about speaking truth to power, and especially giving the senior team direct input about obstacles to organizational effectiveness.
Many kinds of leadership development aren’t even trying to address these problems, focusing instead on more superficial skills. A closely related problem is that some programs for mid-level managers offer training that’s incompatible with the way senior executives are actually running the company, creating a situation where existing processes become barriers to implementing new ideas.
What’s needed, instead, is clarity about C-Suite priorities and commitments, plus real openness to feedback and the social skills to get honest input from team members.
Leaders in Tech (LiT🔥): The Quick Pitch
I was lucky enough to attend a four-day Leaders in Tech (LiT) retreat in 2022. The experience was transformative. I mean that very literally: it meaningfully and demonstrably changed my perception of myself and others and guided me onto a more powerful path than the one that led me there.
LiT distinguishes itself in three ways: connections, quality, and learning environment. The retreats focus squarely on the kinds of connection-building, self-understanding, and emotional skills that make leaders effective agents of change.
The retreat is both a laboratory and ultimate safe space, one designed to let you “try on for size” unfamiliar, nerve-wracking leadership styles and get real-time feedback on the efficacy of each approach. It’s both familiar and intensely challenging. It’s summer camp, or a new school, or the first day at a new job, except that this time there’s nothing you could do that would screw it up. It has all of the newness of being around people you don’t know, but the comfort that comes from meeting strangers whom you almost immediately grow to respect as peers. And the whole thing is designed in such a way that you can experiment with how you make your first (and second, and third) impressions.
My experience of the event as transformational is hardly unique. I was nominated for attendance by the wonderful investors who support my current employer, but they are hardly alone—the organization’s backers are a who’s-who of top minds in American and international business.
Their enthusiasm is warranted, both by results and by history. LiT runs on a core model that’s been in use at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for more than four decades. MBA students call it the “touchy feely” course. At its heart is training in interpersonal dynamics using the model of “t-groups,” open-ended, semi-guided discussion groups focused on the emotion-driven nuts and bolts of communication and interaction.
Research on t-groups as a training method dates back to the ‘50s and ‘60s—Stanford and LiT are just the institutions that do it best.
What I Experienced at Leaders in Tech
I arrived at my LiT weekend deeply depleted. I had been sprinting at work for 18 months without an adequately structured self-care routine to keep me functioning at my best. I was jet lagged. My routine was disrupted after three packed days of work in San Francisco.
I have a vivid memory from the long ride to the LiT location as we passed through Cupertino, and—true to its reputation—the weather was perfect. I wanted to cry with exhaustion and overwhelm, thrilled by my surroundings and anticipating an exceptional weekend. The long, silent (thank you, driver!) ride gave me a chance to change my headspace: I was tired, but I was going to choose energy and openness. I was nervous, and I was going to choose curiosity. I was going to put everything I had into the weekend to make sure I learned as much as I could.
So…I showed up, and I cried almost immediately. In the very first t-group session, answering a typically personal prompt (“if you really knew me right now, you would know that…”), I said my piece and burst into tears. Looking back, this was a sign that I had made the right choice. That I was succeeding in giving the experience my all and showing up authentically, however embarrassed I might have felt in the moment.
Over the course of that first day, we all learned that the more we showed up—the more we expressed our emotions rather than suppressing them in the name of professionalism or even just out of habit—the more we got out of it. The more I gave, the more useful the feedback I received.
I saw first-hand that my emotional range and instinct to lead with love resonated with my cohort. I gave love, I used love to protect a fellow participant, and I tried my best to receive love. I learned that giving is easy, I saw that giving is powerful, and my goal for the weekend became to receive it.
The very fact of my exhaustion became a source of unexpected value. While I certainly don’t recommend attending a career-changing weekend retreat in a state of deep depletion, in this case, it was a gift. Because I simply did not have the energy to keep my guard up in the way we all usually do, I started the weekend’s intense emotional work several steps ahead of my peers. As they worked to let their guards down, I got on with the practice, listening, and learning.
The weekend’s combination of t-groups with exercises like the Johari Window showed me that I am powerful, resonant, and inspiring when I lean into my most authentic leadership style, which is one rooted in love. I am always concerned, in the first instance, with the social-emotional-interactional conditions that allow my team members to thrive. I am at my most effective when I am fully present, allowing my own enthusiasm, genuine concern, and appreciation to create space for others to engage with equal candor.
My peers celebrated the power of my authentic leadership style and encouraged me to be louder and prouder. They recognized my abilities, supported me at my most vulnerable, and allowed me the rare chance to cosplay a hold-nothing-back style for the long weekend.
If it isn’t already clear, I can’t recommend the training enough. The LiT experience combines professional skill development with personal growth and much-needed perspective on our own views, abilities, capabilities, and approaches to leadership. As with most chances to learn, you get what you give. For that reason, I encourage anyone attending to commit to giving it their all, to suspend judgment or reserve, and be open to seeing what happens.
A closing note. Once the main sessions of the weekend were over, a wrap-up session prepared us for re-entry. The rest of the world, we were told, does not operate in a way that welcomes immediate feedback or the expression of unfiltered emotion. So, one final lesson: the next time I do a LiT weekend, I’ll build in a day or two to relax, process, and prepare to apply my new skills.
Speaking of which…
Outcomes and Impact
I noticed three immediate changes following my LiT weekend:
My emotional intelligence and awareness was sharper: I observed the emotional dynamic in meetings and leaned into acknowledging my emotions, rather than suppressing them.
I led by example with my colleagues, naming my reactions using “I feel…” style-statements, and trusting that by doing so, I was being my most powerful self. It was terrifying! And it was effective.
I spoke candidly about my experience to anyone curious and I encourage them to leap at similar opportunities if they are serious about developing as a leader.
Two years on, those changes have stuck with me, and the LiT experience remains a powerful force shaping how I approach the COO role. The skills I picked up over the course of the retreat are vital parts of my tool box, and the more I use them, the more muscle memory I build to resort to those means of expression and communicative strategies.
I’m extraordinarily grateful to the team behind the Leaders in Tech program, the facilitators of my weekend, and my cohort of beautiful humans. They were with me during a deeply transformative weekend and will forever hold a place in my heart.
If you want to learn more about my experience, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Actionable Next Steps
For those not in a position to attend an LiT weekend right away, I suggest reading Connect, by David Bradford and Carole Robin. They are the two primary architects of the Stanford GSB’s “touchy feely” course in its current incarnation, and are probably among the best leadership trainers on the planet.
I also strongly recommend Ed Bautista’s blog (and, if need be, his coaching services!). He’s one of American business’ leading experts on this style of training, and his advice is useful to anyone and everyone in a leadership role.