Connecting to Admired Leadership
Know Your Worth
Episode Summary
A conversation with CRA | Admired Leadership Managing Director and Coach John Schoew and host Wes Bender, exploring one of the most underexamined leadership practices: knowing — and communicating — your worth. John unpacks the difference between strengths and true talents, why some of your best skills may actually be working against you, and how leaders can communicate their value without ever coming across as self-promotional. The session also covers how leaders can help their teams see and own their worth, and what to do when you feel consistently overlooked or dismissed.
Episode Notes
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Key Highlights
- Talents are a subset of strengths — and the distinction matters: A true talent is something you're distinctively good at, get better at faster than most people, don't find exhausting to develop, and that energizes you when you do it. Strengths that drain you are actually weaknesses in disguise.
- Talk about impact, not traits: Saying "I'm a world-class listener" lands very differently than describing the specific outcomes your listening produces. Shifting from trait to impact is one of the simplest and most effective ways to communicate worth without sounding self-promotional.
- Your leader always has an appetite for four things: Talented people on your team, honest project and client updates, market intelligence, and organizational shifts they can't see from where they sit. Feeding those four things regularly is one of the most natural ways to demonstrate your worth without ever making it about you.
- When people brush you aside, check five things: Competence, honesty and candor, reliability, the respect you show others, and your availability to them. Being dismissed is rarely random — it usually traces back to one of these.
- Help your team see their own worth: Specific, detailed positive feedback — not vague praise — is what actually helps people understand what makes them distinctive. Name their talents explicitly. Many high performers have never heard it said out loud.
Notable Quotes
- "It took me a lifetime." — Picasso, on the three-minute sketch that cost 40,000 francs.
- "Talents are things where getting better at it doesn't feel like homework at all."
- "Weaknesses are also things you're really good at — that drain you."
- "Don't talk about the trait, talk about the impact."
- "People get burned out not because of the hours. They've ended up in roles where they're not playing to their strengths — not bringing their strongest and highest levels of worth to a role. That's when burnout happens."
Featured Speakers
- John Schoew is a Managing Director and Executive Coach at CRA | Admired Leadership. Before coaching, John held senior leadership roles at Accenture, Honeywell, and Palantir, including leading Accenture's cybersecurity practice in North America. He brings a rare combination of real-world business experience and deep coaching expertise to his work with leaders across industries.
- Wes Bender is the host of the Connecting to Admired Leadership webinar series.
Resources Mentioned