Scientists trust data. Engineers live by it. When they step into coaching, they expect the same precision—psychometrics, KPIs, and numbers that map neatly to performance. But here’s the truth: leadership isn’t built in a lab.It’s more like practicing law—where experience, precedent, and nuance matter far more than any single measurement.
The Partnership of Intelligence & Wisdom:
I once worked with a CTO who believed leadership development could be quantified like an engineering problem. He leaned heavily on 360-feedback scores and psychometric tools, convinced that if he could just measure his way forward,he’d become a more effective leader.
The issue wasn’t his intelligence—he wasn’t lacking in smarts, but what he needed was wisdom.
His feedback told the same story. He worked relentlessly to become smarter, consuming more data, more books, more assessments. But the effectiveness he sought wasn’t on the other side of accumulating knowledge—it was on the other side of integration.
Leadership required something harder to quantify: a nuanced understanding that even the most capable people—his direct reports, peers, and the CEO—are filled with contradictions.
Why Contradictions Matter in Leadership:
One of his natural talents was remembering conversations in detail. A year after someone made a comment, he’d recall it, often noting how their current statements contradicted their past ones.
He was good-natured about it—he wasn’t pointing out flaws, but genuinely wanted to help. Still, this hyper-awareness of inconsistency kept him focused on misalignment rather than the broader patterns behind it.
As part of our work, we talked about how contradiction is part of being human. People shift perspectives over time, sometimes in ways that don’t fully reconcile. Growth creates friction, and a leader’s job isn’t to eliminate that friction but to recognize it, navigate it, and sometimes, hold space for it.
Once he accepted contradictions as part of leadership—not as flaws—his coaching feedback improved. The shift wasn’t about new data; it was about recognizing patterns beneath the surface. His success, and the success of his R&D function, began to reflect that change in meaningful, measurable ways.
The Illusion of Precision in Psychometrics:
In leadership, contradictions can’t always be measured—but many leaders still try. This is where the limits of psychometric tools become apparent. Many scientists assume psychometric tools—like personality assessments or 360-degree feedback—are as precise as the instruments they use in their own fields. They see a five on a five-point scale and believe it reflects something exact, something that can be optimized or improved linearly.
But the human sciences don’t work that way.
Measuring a CEO’s personality impact would require control groups, isolation mechanisms, and decades of data—none of which exist at scale. Even if they did, human behavior is too nonlinear to fit neatly into metrics.
The Family Attorney Approach to Leadership Coaching:
In the real world, wisdom-based decisions outperform numerical ones. Consider how trusted family attorneys navigate complexity:
How They Decide:
- A trusted family attorney doesn’t just interpret facts; they advocate for their client’s success within the truth.
- Attorneys build cases grounded in reality, but their loyalty lies in moving their client forward, not in maintaining neutral detachment.
A coach operates in the same way. Yes, the job is to surface contradictions and offer objective insights, but the goal isn’t academic. A coach stays close to the facts but fights for the leader’s growth, even if that means holding up uncomfortable mirrors along the way.
Why This Matters in Coaching:
This is why coaching can’t rely solely on psychometric assessments. Whether you’re evaluating a leader, diagnosing team dynamics, or supporting personal growth, the process is far closer to interpreting complex, human realities than running statistical analysis.
Coaches, like family attorneys, hold both objectivity and loyalty—sifting through the messy truths, seeing what’s useful, and guiding leaders toward growth that’s sustainable. It’s not detachment—it’s investment.
Smart & Wise Together:
A coach isn’t a researcher seeking absolute truth through data; a coach is like an attorney—building a case from patterns, facts, and contradictions. They document what’s true, apply experience to weigh the options, and guide their clients through complexity, not around it.
Attorneys don’t wait for perfect conditions—they operate with the facts they have. A coach does the same, helping leaders align their internal contradictions to build a more coherent and effective leadership style.
Speaking Their Language (Without Pretending It’s Yours):
To effectively coach scientists and engineers, credibility matters. They need to know you respect their world—where precision and data drive decisions.
But credibility doesn’t come from trying to out-analyze them. It comes from acknowledging the limits of data and offering a complementary perspective.
Where they bring rigor and analytical depth, you bring pattern recognition and insight. They search for exact answers, while you search for narrative threads and underlying coherence.
Final Thought:
Coaching technical leaders means embracing the paradox:
- Be data-informed, but not data-driven.
- Use psychometrics as conversation starters, not verdicts.
- Anchor your approach in human complexity.
Coaches, like great attorneys, stay close to the facts—but they never forget who they’re fighting for.
