Stretch Responsibilities

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

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4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are you being pushed outside your comfort zone? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Jerry Colonna, a professional coach and a former venture capitalist. They talk through what to do when you don't feel qualified for your new role, you're covering an absentee boss's responsibilities, or you have been assigned to lead a team but haven't been given formal power.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:32.8	Today we're talking about stretch roles with Jerry Colonna.
0:36.4	He's an executive coach and former venture capitalist and the author of the book Reboot, Leadership and the Art of Growing Up. Jerry, thanks so much for coming on the show.
0:45.0	Oh, thanks for having me. It's a blast to be here. So when you were a VC, you were often investing in unproven people and now you're a coach. How can you tell when someone is ready
0:55.2	to stretch? Well, usually they break out and sweat and start shaking. Do I really have to grow? I don't
1:05.3	really want to grow. Oh my God, I'm growing. But how do you know that they're ready? I watch and see
1:10.8	the ways in which they are
1:13.0	responding to new assignments, and this may sound odd, the mistakes that they're making. As the
1:20.8	father of a friend of mine likes to say, if you're not standing on the edge, you're taking too much
1:25.9	space. There is this inherent risk of failure, though.
1:29.1	Have you seen people take stretch rolls and not do them well?
1:34.1	Of course.
1:36.1	But Allison, you say that as if failure is the problem.
1:40.3	You know, not to get all Zen Buddhist on you, but there's something really, really powerful and liberating.
1:46.6	When we think about each step in that stretching towards doing something new as precisely that,
1:53.7	and the expectation is we are going to get it wrong, that's growth. That's learning.
	...

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