Donna Lichaw
Donna Lichaw is an internationally sought-after executive coach, keynote speaker, and best-selling author. She helps visionary founders, CEOs, and executive teams level up their leadership and scale their impact while staying true to their mission, purpose, and themselves. Donna works with leaders at companies like Google, Disney, Twitter, Microsoft, Mailchimp, and Adobe, as well as a plethora of mission-driven startups and nonprofits.
Career Skills
To navigate career changes, identify recurring 'superpowers' in your past peak experiences to determine where you will be most effective in the future.
"Pull your superpowers out of your stories from your past and your present, and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future. But if you look at your peak experiences..."
Communication Skills
Offsites focused on soft skills like storytelling may fail if there are underlying interpersonal conflicts or a lack of genuine influence among leadership.
"They pulled me aside halfway through the offsite, and they were just like, 'Honestly, storytelling is not going to fix our problems. This is silly.' And what they were able to tell me is that their le..."
Leadership Skills
Effective delegation for senior talent involves providing a clear vision and problems to solve rather than prescriptive tasks.
"When you're hiring super senior, whip smart executives to work for you, they don't want to be told what to do, they want to have a grand vision that they're excited about... Give us a vision, give us..."
Apply lean product methodology to personal growth by treating new behaviors or career goals as hypotheses that require small-scale experimentation.
"You don't leave a session with me without having tried a little experiment first. The analogy there is we would call it an in the room experiment versus then get out of the building and do an experime..."
Evaluate the success of a decision or experiment using a holistic 'Head, Heart, Hands' framework to ensure alignment across logic, emotion, and physical intuition.
"Run it through three filters... head, heart, hands is what I like to think of, which is head, okay, how's this going? What are my thoughts? ... Emotionally, how is this going in your heart? ... But th..."
The guest discusses the specific skill of auditing energy (not just time) and using physical tools (fidgets) to manage the neurological load of remote work.
"If you subscribe to... this idea of managing your energy, not your time... this will help you do that. If you're using your superpowers, you will have more energy."
Product Management Skills
The 'working backwards' framework is highly effective for identifying subconscious life goals and creating a roadmap for career fulfillment.
"Start with the ending. Come up with how you want things to turn out, and then work your way back. And start as far out as you want... imagine you're there. Engage all your senses... And then if you've..."
Treat leadership self-perception like product discovery by gathering objective data from 'customers' (colleagues) to validate or debunk internal narratives.
"Take a data-driven approach to the stories that you tell yourself. For example, the story, 'I'm too nice,' it could be true, it could not be true. How did we get down to the bottom of that? In this ca..."