Lenny's PodcastRachel Lockett: Why you, not your manager, own your career
Through coaching, the GROW framework, and level-three listening; reports surface their own answers, and tracking your gifts daily prevents leadership burnout.
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Transforming Tech Leadership Through Coaching, Conflict Skills, And Purposeful Design
- Executive coach Rachel Lohse joins Lenny to unpack how technical leaders can evolve from being the smartest problem-solver in the room to becoming effective coaches who unlock their team’s potential. She introduces core coaching skills—active listening and powerful questioning (via the GROW model)—and demonstrates them live with Lenny. They dig into preventing burnout by deliberately designing roles around personal gifts, managing co-founder dynamics and difficult conversations, and creating operating rhythms like a one-page plan that align vision, strategy, and execution. Throughout, Rachel emphasizes that business-building is fundamentally human work, and that attending to relationships, emotions, and purpose leads to better performance and richer lives.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasGreat leaders coach more than they advise.
Leaders who always provide answers train teams to depend on them and become bottlenecks. Shifting into a coaching stance—especially when reports have the context and capability—builds ownership, speeds execution, and frees leaders to focus on vision and strategy.
Active listening and powerful questions dramatically improve 1:1s.
Rachel breaks listening into three levels (self-focused, word-focused, and global) and shows how level-three listening plus the GROW framework (Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward) helps people surface their own solutions, feel deeply understood, and commit to action.
Design your role around your gifts to avoid burnout.
Sustained energy comes from spending ~80% of your time in activities that align with your natural strengths. Tracking daily what energizes vs. depletes you, asking others about your gifts, and then proactively reshaping your role and team around those insights can restore motivation and performance.
You—not your manager—own your career and your gifts.
Managers are hired to ensure you perform in your role, not to architect your ideal job. It’s your responsibility to know your strengths, communicate them, seek aligned opportunities, and push for changes (or moves) that better fit your zone of genius.
Healthy conflict aims at mutual understanding, not winning.
Most people enter tough conversations armored up to prove they’re right, which triggers defensiveness and stalemate. Using Nonviolent Communication (Observation, Feelings, Needs, Request) and staying “on your side of the net” shifts the goal to shared understanding, which naturally supports better solutions.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWhen you try to advise and have the answer all the time, you're not actually equipping your team to solve the hard problems.
— Rachel Lohse
Professionals have feelings. We operate in tech like this is all logical, but it's completely emotional.
— Rachel Lohse
The goal of any conflict is to create mutual understanding, not to convince the other person they're wrong.
— Rachel Lohse
It's no one else's job to help you live in your gifts. Your manager’s job is to help you perform the job you were hired to do.
— Rachel Lohse
The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our life.
— Rachel Lohse
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