99: Turning Soft Skills Into Power Skills W/ Andrea Wanerstrand

Leaders often talk about “soft skills,” but as Sean Patton and leadership expert Andrea Wanerstrand reveal in this episode, those are no longer soft — they’re power skills. Andrea shares insights from nearly two decades at T-Mobile, Microsoft, and Meta, where she helped leaders shift from transactional management to truly human-centric leadership. Together, she and Sean unpack Andrea’s A³ Framework — Authenticity, Autonomy, and Accountability — and explore how emotional intelligence and self-awareness have become the ultimate competitive advantage in the age of AI. 

Listeners will learn how to: 

• Reframe soft skills as power skills that drive real business performance
• Apply the A³ Framework to create resilient, high-trust teams
• Build coaching cultures that empower growth and innovation
• Navigate the evolving intersection of AI and human leadership

 
👤 Guest: Andrea Wanerstrand
 
Andrea Wanerstrand is a leadership and culture transformation expert, former leader at T-Mobile, Microsoft, and Meta, and the founder of A³ Culture Lab
.
She helps organizations build human-centric workplaces grounded in authenticity, autonomy, and accountability. Andrea is also an ICF-certified coach, yoga and meditation instructor, and the creator of the upcoming Mindset Maven Method (M³ Lab) — an eight-week program launching in early 2026 that helps leaders strengthen self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
Follow her on LinkedIn
for daily insights on leadership and culture.
 
 
🕒 Timestamps
 
00:00 Why “soft skills” are now power skills
02:50 Reframing leadership for a social and AI-driven world
07:40 The A³ Framework: Authenticity, Autonomy, Accountability
13:49 Authenticity done well vs poorly
14:01 Building autonomy and accountability through trust
19:50 Leading from love vs fear
26:15 Creating a coaching culture inside organizations
31:38 Training leaders before they lead people
41:12 How AI is changing the future of leadership
45:17 Where to find Andrea and learn more about A³ Culture Lab
 
 
#NoLimitLeadership #SeanPatton #LeadershipDevelopment #AndreaWanerstrand #A3Leadership #HumanCentricLeadership #PowerSkills #EmotionalIntelligence #AuthenticLeadership #CoachingCulture #FutureOfWork #A3CultureLab #MindsetMavenMethod

No Limit Leadership is the go-to podcast for growth-minded executives, middle managers, and team leaders who want more than surface-level leadership advice. Hosted by executive coach and former Special Forces commander Sean Patton, this show dives deep into modern leadership, self-leadership, and the real-world strategies that build high-performing teams. Whether you're focused on leadership development, building a coaching culture, improving leadership communication, or strengthening team accountability, each episode equips you with actionable insights to unlock leadership potential across your organization. From designing onboarding systems that retain talent to asking better questions that drive clarity and impact, No Limit Leadership helps you lead yourself first so you can lead others better. If you're ready to create a culture of ownership, resilience, and results, this leadership podcast is for you.

Transcript

Sean Patton (00:00)
Leaders talk a lot about soft skills, communication, empathy, emotional intelligence. But here's the truth. Those aren't soft anymore. They're power skills. The very traits that separate high-performing leaders from everyone else. In the world of AI automation and constant change, your technical knowledge will keep you in the game, but your ability to connect, communicate, and stay calm under pressure is what will win it. Today I'm talking with Andrea Wannerstrand.

a leadership and culture expert who spent nearly two decades at T-Mobile, Microsoft, and Meta, helping organizations shift from transactional management to truly human-centric leadership. We unpack our A3 framework and explore how to make emotional intelligence your true competitive edge.

Sean Patton (00:57)
Welcome to the No Limit Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Sean Patton, and I am very excited to have Andrea Wannerstrand, a leadership and culture transformation expert who spent nearly two decades at companies like T-Mobile, Microsoft, and Meta, leading global programs in performance management and organizational effectiveness. She's now the founder of A3 Leadership.

And through that, she helps leaders and organizations create human-centric workplaces built on authenticity, autonomy, and accountability. She's also an ICF certified coach, yoga, meditation instructor, and passionate advocate for what she calls the rise of power skills, the emotional intelligence and human connection abilities that will define not just current, but the future of leadership. Andrew, thanks for being on today.

Andrea Wanerstrand (01:38)
Thanks for having me, Sean. I'm looking forward to this discussion.

Sean Patton (01:40)
I am very much looking forward to this discussion. And we had our pre-interview call. I just loved your reframe of quote unquote soft skills to power skills. So what does that mean for leaders today?

Andrea Wanerstrand (01:54)
How you show up in the workplace sets the tone for everything as far as innovation, productivity, and accelerating the performance of your team. If you're able to regulate your emotions in the workplace and be the calm in a never-ending change storm that is the life and world we live in, you are able to move your team in higher performance.

We know physically our brains do not think creatively, innovatively, or with any true capacity to achieve more or different when we're in fight or flight, AKA fear stressed out to the max.

Sean Patton (02:37)
So why is it important to reframe for sort of the market, right? As we think of, we always hear soft skills being the people skills, the leadership skills we're talking about. So why is it important to reframe those?

Andrea Wanerstrand (02:50)
We lived in a transactional world for so long and now we are an interconnected social world. Yes, we have AI, yet we have social platforms. We communicate more than ever. We are actually right now participating in a communication platform by you and I having this conversation and then sharing it with others. And so how we show up, how we manage what we talk about, how we talk about it and how we

influence those around us matters. And it's not just a simple transaction. It is how you actually move the dial with anyone that you're interacting with, whether that's the grocery clerk packing your stuff in a way that you like it. So when you get home, the frozen stuff's not next to the spinach. Yes, that's pet peeve of mine because it melts the spinach. But how you show up really determines the out

that you can have and I would dare say how you actually achieve the highest performance for yourself, let alone for your team. And so the how we got things done, yeah, we might've given space for yes, that's important in the past, but it was more about the technical skill. Technical skills are still super important, but there's a reason that LinkedIn has listed communications in the top skills.

is the aspect of how we get things done influences pretty much your bottom line. And so if you're not clear in how that you're wanting to show up and you're trying to fake it to make it, you will fail. And because we all fail at some point, but that mask is going to fall down. So being really clear and working on those communication skills, which were considered soft, the nice to have.

is now the must have in order to differentiate yourself, especially as we look at things like AI and other tools in the workplace that can automate the transactions.

Sean Patton (04:51)
Yeah, I agree 100%. I see that so much with, you know, it's interesting. I actually ⁓ like wrote this whole ⁓ keynote and thought leadership thing and then like never gave it. So it's still in my vault. So, we'll save it for later, but it was around, labeling, I read somewhere where they were labeling this ⁓ rise of AI, the fourth industrial revolution.

So they're like, you know, we've always have been in like how this is so fundamentally transform. And as part of that, and I think a different way or different lens to even talk about what you're addressing here is that management, like, right, the efficiency of a system is management. can manage people, non-people, usually a combination of people and non-people in a system. The efficiency of that system is going to be done better by machines than people. But what machines can't do is leave.

They can't inspire and empower and you talk about communication. So it's the divide here. you have the management and leadership side, it's sort of like both used to be almost management. couldn't be that technical side. That transactional side could be the side that gets you more, more important for your business outcomes. But as everyone has access to sort of the same tools to create managerial efficiency, what's going to differentiate

teams and groups in the future is this human side, which I just love the reframe from Soft to Power Skills for them.

Andrea Wanerstrand (06:09)
Absolutely, and it's a multi-generational item as well. For those of us who were raised with the lack of the internet for a good portion of our lives, yes, I'm in that category, instant connectivity or if you lived on the other side of the country from your family or on another continent, you weren't as close in communicating, whereas now you can be communicating

wherever you are all over the world. And the Alpha generation has more of a desire to live life, AKA I was at a conference in California by Fortune on Workplace Innovation, and there was a panel of generational on the stage, and they said, know, Gen X and the Boomers, they were taught to go to school for 20 years, work for 40, 50 years, and then live for 10. And the Alpha said, I want to live for them all. And that

just means that we don't just come to work anymore and do our tasks and then go home. There is an interaction and I dare say a social aspect to how we build our networks. Look at the platform such as LinkedIn ⁓ for some businesses, others, it's Instagram, Facebook, this aspect of community and the rise of community. And so this idea that

your soft skills are nice to have is very outdated and it is now the power skills that we need them to be.

Sean Patton (07:40)
Love that. Another framework that you built your work on and your impact on is the A3 framework, authenticity, autonomy, and accountability. Can you kind of give us an overview of that and why those three things? Like, why is that where you put your effort and where you see impact being made?

Andrea Wanerstrand (08:02)
Absolutely. As I've had the privilege to work in some pretty large global organizations, the one truth that held that I saw in high performing teams was a leader that could show up authentically as well as the team members showing up authentically. And I don't mean oversharing or, sharing every aspect of their life, but they showed up in consistent ways that people could count on them.

it lowered stress, that whole fake it to make it as I mentioned before, the mask is gonna break. because you will fail at some point, it's guaranteed. And then how you act in that moment when it fails, there's an inconsistency because it doesn't align to the mask. So a leader and a whole team that shows up authentically as themselves can communicate better. They're not trying to be something else which puts us out of

⁓ It puts us in a stress mode, quite frankly, when we're trying to act the part rather than be the part. so authenticity is the baseline in order to create true trust. The next you add in is if you want to scale, you have to have autonomy. And that's where learning to go from individual contributors into management, you go from doing to doing through others. And doing through others requires

Yes, they say empower them. I told them that they're empowered. But are you still checking on everything that they did in order to make sure it was done the way you wanted it? Are you micromanaging it? And you might not even be calling it micromanaging. You might be, helping them, or I'm just ensuring quality. And so the autonomy is super important. And you need to validate so that your expectations are met.

But when you have true autonomy, accountability comes more naturally to it because it's not your idea that you've commanded that they do. It's their idea in action, in partnership, in collaboration with you. And so those three items of, or three areas, excuse me, of authenticity, accountability, and autonomy are a never-ending loop wheel of an infinity wheel, if you will.

in the aspect that when you have those three things, you can reduce toxic stress in the workplace, you can have greater clarity so that you achieve things faster as a team, and you up the accountability so those dreaded performance conversations aren't surprise moments and you're actually able to have a growth conversation about, okay, what's next? How are we gonna progress your career? Or what pivots and adjustments do we need to make?

So those three have just been this consistent for me that I found all over the globe work. And so thus I started a three culture lab when I left my corporate work.

Sean Patton (10:49)
And what I'm also hearing there and I, ⁓ the autonomy piece, right? It's time. And accountability and that balance you talked about, like micromanagement versus like giving, I mean, all around, I see that the connective tissue being that communication piece, right? Cause all too often, what I've found is the limiting variable of a leader's ability to sort of balance that autonomy and accountability aspect is actually

Andrea Wanerstrand (11:01)
Yes.

Sean Patton (11:12)
a lack of ability on their end to effectively communicate the outcome that they want in order for that person to perform and get the end result they want, but empower to do it their way. Like that is like the crux of trying to make that happen. And so I'm really interested with your wealth of experience. maybe we just run down each one real quick, like can you maybe use examples where appropriate like

Andrea Wanerstrand (11:18)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Patton (11:40)
What is an example of like when authenticity is done well and when and what does it look like when it's not done well? Like let's maybe compare contrast that.

Andrea Wanerstrand (11:48)
Well, authenticity is your presence is consistent. And I don't mean like the bad 90s movies where the boss comes in and everybody starts looking like they're working. It's about you walk the talk that you talk and you are there in service to others. An authentic leader generally has to be a kind leader in order to be effective.

What I mean by that is that they're willing to say the courageous thing because it's in service to the other and growth. If conversely, you're not being authentic, if you're being nice, I'm just gonna be nice about everything. We're not gonna talk about anything in the room. I'm just gonna be nice. And that is something that most of us as humans, I mean, you laughed when I said that, but you can imagine exactly what I mean when I say if you're just being nice. Nice is.

It is all about us rather than about others and the team. And so when you're authentic, people know. You know whether somebody's being real with you or whether they're putting on a mask and a display or a performance. And if you're comfortable enough in your own skin to know that you don't know everything, but you're going to be okay, that's the highest level of confidence you can ever really achieve.

is confident that you're gonna be able to navigate the ambiguity. And after that, you just are able to navigate the ambiguity even though it's unknown. And it doesn't feel less stressful in some ways, but at least you're able to do it with an even keel. So that's authenticity as far as you really, you're not being authentic, people know, and you don't have the highest level of trust that you can have.

and you need to be able to trust those around you in order to create autonomy and accountability, let alone to innovate or to be able to meet and beat your competitors in the marketplace.

Sean Patton (13:49)
Great. All right. So I love that. like, just want to go down. what does, like real terms, what does autonomy look like when it's done well versus not done well? Like what are those two environments? How's that a difference there?

Andrea Wanerstrand (14:01)
Yeah. So I hear a lot of organizations and leaders go, well, I told them they are empowered. And I go, first of all, have you set up the mechanisms by which they're empowered? Do they have to come check with you for everything? Well, they do because they don't give me what I want. OK, so you haven't set expectations. Well, I told them, yes, but what they heard is not necessarily what you said. How did you validate that? What do you mean validate? I was like, well,

Did I ask them if they understood? Is that what you mean? And I go, well, you could do it that way, but that's a little offensive to say, okay, did you comprehend that? But what you could do instead is be able to ask them, say, okay, great, you're gonna be taking this. Can you share with me how you're thinking of going about this to achieve the outcome? Or do you need a little space? Let's get together maybe tomorrow, three days from now. And I'd love to hear your plan. And...

You give them some space and they come back to you and then you go, huh, curious, what about this? What about that? How are you thinking about this? And you start understanding how they're going to do it. And you might just actually be surprised, that maybe they had a better idea. Maybe they have a shorter way to do it. Or yet, yeah, maybe they're missing something. But just telling them is not actually empowering them.

you're not going to get the outcome that you want if you haven't validated that the expectations that you think that you've communicated actually have been received. So here's where the beauty happens to go to this third item for accountability is that when they start coming up with their own ideas as to how they're going to do this and in that, you know, session whether it's in the moment and you say, know, how are you thinking about going about this now that you're the owner of it or a follow-up.

you can say to them, okay, how are we gonna track progress on this? How are we gonna know we're achieving this? And they come up with the KPIs, if you will, of what that looks like. And if they don't have the highest level of KPIs, that's where you coach them. You go, okay, but we should have something that we're measuring this or measuring that. ⁓ Or we just have some check-ins to make sure that it's moving forward. And then you ask them, how can I help? You'd be there in support.

You've given them the out if they have a problem, they should be coming to you. And if they want to go handle it on their own, they're going to be able to handle it on their own. But see, they've just came up with their own measurement of what success looks like. So if they don't meet their own definition of success, you've made that accountability conversation a lot easier because it wasn't you that was necessarily putting it upon them and defining it for them. It was a collaboration. We as humans will actually own up to something that we've put out there.

a lot easier than telling somebody and then they come back, yeah, but that was unrealistic to begin with. I was never gonna get there.

Sean Patton (16:48)
Mm-hmm. You're hearing on something so fundamental right now that I just want to call out because you put it beautifully, around, know, as human beings, all, when we're in a job where we get to have ownership and we get to be creative and we're challenged and we're solving problems, ⁓ we're engaged, right? Like we're excited and we feel fulfilled that we're giving input. And when you are, you know, that

just giving direction, do this, do A, do B, and you're sort of like, you know, you're treating someone, you know, like a business terms of widget, right? Like a random thing. we're treating someone like a widget, if we're treating someone like they're a cog in a machine, they will act like a cog in a machine. And that is not a fun place to your point. That's not getting the most out of those people. And is that person excited to come to work? Are they giving you their all or they feel, you know,

Andrea Wanerstrand (17:32)
Absolutely.

Sean Patton (17:43)
when none of us want to feel, we all know what that feels like to be, here's your steps, one, two, three, four, five, and feel like that cog in the machine and none of us like it. And yet I feel like a lot of us, when people get to those leadership and management roles, we sort of divert because of a lot of reasons to that very top-down directional approach.

Andrea Wanerstrand (18:05)
And that's the transaction, right? And what you get from that is a culture within your team where people are on edge. A lot of times I'm working with an organization or when I'm speaking and I'll say, you know, it's fear-based and they're like, ⁓ that's a little extreme. We don't have fear-based here. And our body does.

Actually, it does know that when we have to run away from the saber-toothed but our body is still reacting to the micro stresses. And so we are creating a stressful, fearful environment as far as our physicality is concerned. And it keeps us from creativity. And you want people think out of the box? Well, stop putting them in the stress box to begin with.

Sean Patton (19:02)
And I don't know if you can disagree or expound on this perspective, but one thing that I have last few years have really come to believe is that there's really only two primary motivators, love or fear. That's it. And so if you say, you're motivating your people. Okay. It's either love or fear. If you had to put it in that box, which would you say this top down direction, know, style, transactional style is, is that,

Do you think they feel love and support and abundance and like input or do they, if you, it's almost like if you draw that line in the sand and say, is it this or that it sort of becomes, well, it seems like a lot more obvious that it's, that it's fear of those two. don't know. Do you, do you like that, that reframe or sort of that, that dichotomy or no? Do you have a different approach?

Andrea Wanerstrand (19:50)
⁓ I love the dichotomy because it doesn't make you make a choice. And it also speaks to the fact that there is a myth that emotions don't belong in the workplace. If humans are in the workplace, emotions are there whether you want them to be or not. Your nervous system does not know the difference between a work you and a personal you. In fact, part of why we have, ⁓ you know,

lack of work-life balance is you're ruminating on a Sunday afternoon about everything that's going to happen on Monday morning. Right? That's you're not at work. It's not like necessarily even doing work. But your thought process, your emotions are turning about, that presentation that we're going to do tomorrow or the hard conversation you have to have next Wednesday. And it seeps in. So

If we can understand that emotions are there, they actually can be something very positive in the workplace. They are physical energy. Have you ever had a good belly laugh? You can't stop a good belly laugh. You also can't stop the gut churning fear when you say something that might activate another person such as, we need to talk about this. And they're like.

don't have any context, they're like deer in headlight and it's really not even about you, it's about the two managers beforehand or the colleague in the last job that would say that before the hammer came down. And so if we recognize emotions are at play in the workplace and yet we can become more regulated in them, knowing the physical symptoms of stress in our stomach is churning or our shoulders are tight, before they get

out of our own control to regulate.

you get the human centricity there and you're able to understand others around you a little bit better once you start understanding your own. And so I like the dichotomy of it. Is it fear or is it something that you could love? Right. And I say could love because you don't have to necessarily like everybody that you're working with, but you do have to treat them as humans.

And so can it be just even a love for humanity that you're showing up in a way that is with integrity and respectful in the workplace?

Sean Patton (22:05)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm. A hundred percent. mean, so we've talked about how, you know, if you, every business, if you've got employees, it's a, it's a human business, right? I always say, you know, businesses, every business is a human business. And you know, what's interesting on the emotion side too, if we're going to that is like, you mentioned that. And what came to mind for me was, you know, any seasoned business person, right? Like you don't have a business unless you, you're selling something, right? I mean, there's not a transaction, like you don't have a business, right? That's just the simplest form, right? And

every marketing senior person knows that we make buying decisions based on emotions first, and then we justify them with our logic. you know, like that's, like well established. We know that's how human beings work. So we know that people are making decisions and taking actions really with emotions that sort of, ⁓ as a driver of that, right. And how important that is. And that we sort of like, to your point, try to sometimes ignore that as the

Andrea Wanerstrand (22:59)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Patton (23:07)
drivers inside of our own organizations. You know, it's like, it's like, so I think that's an interesting call out. I've had conversations with different people in sales or in business. And it's sort of, when you're looking at external, they're like, yeah, obviously, like people are emotional creatures and that's why they make buying decisions. That's why we run ads this way and make use of certain colors and aspirational things. Like all those things are to get this person, you know, to motivate them to make a certain decision or to influence them.

It's like, okay, well, how does, so how are you turning that internal? And there's like a lack of emphasis or acknowledgement that that is how things work internally as well.

Andrea Wanerstrand (23:42)
Well, that's because we have to acknowledge that we have emotions in the workplace. It starts with you. So I call it a form of skill stacking, that emotional intelligence and understanding first and foremost my own emotions and then being able to perceive and understand other people's perspectives and emotions. Perspectives is another aspect. It's kind of the culmination of their experiences and their vantage point on what needs to be done.

And then that third level of emotional intelligence is really how do you adjust your behavior in accordance? And then if you wanted to look at other skills like truly communicating, are you using storytelling and are you taking in those insights that you have about their perspectives and emotions to appeal to the aspect of the story that they're going to actually relate to?

If you want to influence them, you have to know what's in it for you, yes, but what's in it for them and speak to those items. So just to even influence, let alone influence strategy, but just influence people to ⁓ a standard idea or just a deviation from a process that you want to go and put in. The aspect of understanding their perspectives and emotions comes into play.

So if you're truly intransactional and you're not aware of yourself and you're just looking at influencing in your marketing plan because you know the consumer is gonna think this way, it tells me I already have the skills in you. You just need to start looking at yourself first and then apply it to everybody and everything else around you. Because I say, once it's been seen, it can't be unseen. Doesn't mean you won't catch yourself on occasion and still do the old habit, but it starts with ourselves.

Sean Patton (25:23)
self, you can't, you can't effectively before you, can learn to lead yourself. I'm the self leadership guy. carve it into stone if I could. So I love that you're bringing that forward. And when you talk about it, you know, communication, listening, developing people, it comes to mind, the power of coaching itself and

every leader kind of, I think, seeing themselves as a coach, as a developer of others. And that's a certain skill set. So you've touched on a little bit, but let's formalize. Like, what does it look like for an organization to truly embrace a coaching culture? And again, us the two sides of that, right? Of like, what does it look like, maybe a standard non-coaching culture in terms of how they look at...

development or evaluations or performance management versus a ⁓ coaching culture. Like where are those two things and how do they play out?

Andrea Wanerstrand (26:15)
Yeah, so I had the honor when I was at Microsoft to really look at manager coaching capabilities. And so the capability to coach another individual really leans into the professional practice of coaching, which the ICF, the International Coaching Federation has a sense of competencies for it. But part of that competency is staying in curiosity and knowing that the answers really all lie within the other person.

So we're asking open-ended questions so we get their thought process going. And we are trying to get their perspective out. And what we do in doing that is we're increasing their confidence that they know more than they think they do, or we help them verbally brainstorm in a safe space of what maybe some limiting beliefs are that they have and they can't move forward.

So what coaching does in the workplace is it opens up the possibilities. And Microsoft, when I was there, had gone through a shift, what Sacha Nadella called it, from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all. And they brought in Carol DeWick of a growth mindset. And if you have a fixed mindset, this is the way we've done it. It's the way it's going to be. It's never going to change. And a growth mindset is, how do we learn from this?

but yet how do we learn and increase our confidence that we're going to go back in, get back on the proverbial horse and ride? And that's what coaching as a leader or a manager does, is it takes the errors, the missteps, the oops that happen, because they all happen, and it's about coaching through that or coaching through a lack of confidence in order for them.

to get to their highest level of performance. And you gotta be very careful. If they truly don't know something, you need to flex your style and be teacher in that moment. It's new to them. But as they're trying it out, you move into coaching and there isn't such a thing as just coaching conversations, especially when you're a people manager. It's a mix of a flex of different communication skills, whether you're.

Mentoring, sharing your scars, letting the other person know it's going to be okay. I've been on that road or I know somebody else. They've survived, you're going to survive. It might be teaching. It might be a moment where you're setting direction. Setting out ABC is still necessary in the workplace, but how you do that in a way that also incorporates and collaborates with them is you can coach them and you can ask for their perspective and what they're going to do and how they want to do it.

so that you can see the learning in action. You can actually appease your own fears that they're not gonna be able to do it. So having this list of communication skills, coaching in itself opens up and enables a growth mindset culture versus any of the other communication skills themselves. And so the difference to your original question of what's the difference between a non-coaching culture and a

coaching culture where managers are expected to act as coach as part of their role is the coaching culture is setting themselves up to learn and fail fast so that they can accelerate. And it comes down to business performance. You can actually tie it not just to the employee health score of do they like where they work, but you can actually see the results in the bottom line of the business.

Sean Patton (29:51)
Yeah. I love how you called out those, you know, different types of, uh, the helping conversations, right. And skill sets around our, it is a teaching moment, uh, mentoring you mentioned, you know, I've kind of been there, done that coaching. Um, a fourth I like to call it is like consulting. mentioned, right? Like I'm going to solve the problem. I'm going to show you how to solve the problem. Right. Like I've been there, done that, but I love how you talk about the, the almost leadership muscle of being able to flex between those four and mastering those four. And of course.

The first step of that is recognizing. know when I've taught this to different clients, it's this light bulb moment because they kind of all know that you do those different things, but it's that awareness of, I can teach, I can mentor, I can consult, or I can coach which tool is right right now. You know, like intentionally being able to make that communication decision is the, what I see is like a huge difference maker is when they have that awareness of like, ⁓

I can be intentional with which tool I need to bring to this particular moment in order to get the most out that person. That seems to ⁓ make a pretty big impact on, I guess, the competency of those leaders in terms of how confident they feel going into those conversations, especially if it's new. When you're working with leaders or going to organizations that...

where it's a new leader who this idea of coaching seems foreign, right? doesn't, they're maybe moving into their first leadership role or these haven't been trained on it. What are some things that you can do as a ⁓ senior to begin to train, to foster, to create the culture inside your team so that you can sort of be, if you're a leader of leaders,

How do you help create this coaching culture and foster the skill set and develop your managers into coaches?

Andrea Wanerstrand (31:38)
You don't wait until they're in management. Right? So it was interesting at Microsoft, we partnered with a wonderful gentleman by the name of Mike Begay Stannier wrote The Coaching Habit. And I've had the opportunity to work with Michael and his team, Shannon Menafee, who's his CEO. And their concepts were were very straightforward, if you've ever read the book. And it's about getting curious. And so we created a

cohort training in partnership and we had salespeople go through it. We didn't just block it for only people managers and it actually became, it was an open enrollment. It wasn't like a required on the learning path and managers would refer them. And what we found is that it became more popular with the individual contributors and they were using it internally with each other. But this was also used in the sales force.

So this idea of getting more coach-like and coming in with curiosity, which we wanted with growth mindset at Microsoft, but we could better understand our customers. Hmm, what's the real challenge here? What's going on for you? You go into solution partner a lot easier and build relationship when you are coach-like because you're curious about them. It's about them, not about you.

And so flipping the script as a salesperson was this idea of getting curious about the customer and the customer we know from Gartner's research, they're doing a lot of their online research before they ever talk to the human. And what we found is that the sales teams that actually went through this coach-like training,

earlier on were having higher success in their sales quotas. So yes, you want to offer up the coaching skills so that we can be curious with each other as just part of a learning plan within the organization on soft skills. We can coach each other. We can coach our manager. We can coach up. We can coach down and we can coach with our clients.

because it keeps us in a curiosity mode. If you're gonna wait until they're in leadership and you've already put people underneath them, and I say this for any type of leadership training, not just the coaching skills, you're doing a disservice to them as well as to the people. Train your folks before you put them into a people manager role. And whether that's exploring manager ⁓ track or it's leadership.

skills so that you're building that arm muscle before you actually put them in charge of a very large investment called the human capital of your organization. And I'm not a big fan of human capital as a word, but the idea that you would promote somebody and then train them to be a leader seems a little backwards from a business bottom line.

Sean Patton (34:38)
⁓ I want to throw like a hallelujah out there. Like, amen. I know it's like in church right now because it's ⁓ the idea and God, you see it so much and hopefully we're seeing it less. I'm not sure if we are right of this idea of ⁓ the Peter principle in business playing itself out of like, just because someone is a good salesperson doesn't mean that they're ready to

like they're going to be a good sales manager or they're ready. Like it's a different skillset and being a, you know, a direct supervisor, first line supervisor, and being a leader of leaders. Like those are different skills. Like, are you training that person for the next role? And I know I have to say that this was ⁓ one of the biggest differences in things that I, I saw coming from the military, my time in military to the time to the civilian world and the corporate world. in the military, they sort of have the luxury of

you go to say you move in, first of you train for five years to be a platoon leader. So your first leadership role, you go as a platoon leader as an officer, and then they pull you out and you go to another school for seven months where you just train and then they make you a company commander, right? And they do this over and over again. So there was like pulling you off, train you, put you in the next role, pull you off, train you, put you in the next role. And of course, there's different versions of that in the corporate world, but you're not gonna pull a VP out and be like, you just go to school for another seven months before we move you up.

There's a productivity piece of that, but there's such a value in doing that. like, how can we create that sort of environment? Because I mean, how often the amount of training that you give someone to show up to the next role in most companies. And I've talked to, I interviewed ⁓ a tech CEO who's had multiple ⁓ successful exits and he's like, dude, it's getting worse. Like you mentioned the AI is like,

people are showing up to a new role and they're just like, here's some loom videos, here's your checklist and your Asana login, go. Like that's onboarding, you know? It's like, it's crazy, like, wait, wait, wait, what are you doing? know, with how, human capital, how expensive that investment of time, energy and operational or opportunity cost to hire one person, especially in a leadership role and not investing into making sure they're prepared.

Andrea Wanerstrand (36:30)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Patton (36:50)
for that role is absolutely crazy. So you give a few examples there. What are some examples of organizations or strategies that you have seen that do it well? Like what does right look like?

Andrea Wanerstrand (37:06)
⁓ When you can, promoting from within, so long as you're offering those trainings and setting expectations and understanding what good looks like, they're really clear on what good looks like. Even in a startup environment, and I've worked with entrepreneur companies ⁓ over the last few years in particular, yes, you are moving really fast, you're growing really fast.

And so you see a lot of founders and entrepreneurs that they themselves are not prepared for how big things are going to get. Right. So bring in now, bring in the cohort, the coaches. You might not even have a full like learning and development. That's really nice, Andrea, if it's at a big Microsoft or a big Metta, but I'm just a small company. But there's so many resources out there today for learning and.

ways to invest in your people and starting with yourself, especially if that company is growing so fast and you're leading, needing to lead in a way that you've never had to lead before, in order for you to achieve your own goals, make the investment just like you're investing in the right hardware, software, applications that are going to be running your business to make sure that your people side is going to

be the optimum that it needs to be to keep up with everything else that you're automating in the workplace.

Sean Patton (38:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I.E. Get a coach. Like if you're that person, you're so like, get. That's how I see it, right? Like I don't, I would argue that it would, it's almost, not maybe impossible. Maybe you have a different perspective. I would say it's almost impossible to be a great coach without also having a coach. Like having someone coach you. Like it's very hard if you have never been coached.

Well, right, like get a great coach. The fastest learning curve I've ever had is not from YouTube videos or LinkedIn learning or anything else on coaching. It's being coached by a great coach. Like that's how I've gotten better at least.

Andrea Wanerstrand (39:09)
Absolutely. And there's different entry points for that as well. You could hire a team coach for you and your team. And ⁓ and I'm still a big believer in the online trainings, but it's learn, practice, apply. Where are you giving space for practice? Right. And and being a coach. ⁓ Yeah, I'd love to to work with leaders, but I also if you are with me, you know, for

24 months, there's a problem, right? I've become a dependency in your decision-making process. So a good coach should be used ⁓ at different intervals as you're moving through change so that you're building that arm muscle forward. But there's, again, different entry points to do that. ⁓ And the most important thing is the learn, practice, apply, and having that practice be in the safe space, because what a lot of folks do

is they might actually say, yeah, we do onboarding. They get to learn. And then you have them applying it because you want to onboard and to ramp them up as quickly as possible. But there's none of that practice space. And that gets curious for us in coaching what AI can look like. But they also need a human to talk through some of their.

doubts, their concerns, the, well, did I do it right, pardon? It's like, well, maybe you didn't do it perfectly right, but progress over perfection. Hearing that from AI does not mean the same thing as hearing that from another human who might have circled the Earth a few more times than you and has been down that road because if I flash back to 25 years ago, 30 years ago, I was a horrible manager. I really was. I was command and control. I was horrible as an IT manager. ⁓

That was the work environment and that's what I knew success and what good looked like. Didn't feel really great, was stressful as heck, but we all have to learn. So yes, get a coach, but also there's other ways to go at it as well.

Sean Patton (41:12)
You mentioned AI and obviously that's the buzzword and it is transforming work and how we think about even what's possible and the structure of companies and that sort of thing. So when you look forward, as leaders look forward to the next 10 years,

If they're anticipating and trying to plan for that, what a key advice would you give them in terms of their own skillset, culture and leadership inside their own company?

Andrea Wanerstrand (41:41)
as far as the balance with that in the human side or?

Sean Patton (41:47)
Yeah, just like as, as they prepare for, know, cause we, nobody wants to say, well, you nobody wants to build a company that's ideal for the environment 10 years ago. They're trying to build the company that is in culture. That's an ideal for the future. And so as they look ahead with what's available to them for AI in terms of task management, admin, all things that can do all its limitations, ⁓ and how you think that might affect.

companies and leadership in general, if you think there is maybe no change, but is there certain skills or certain way to create a culture that you would say, you have limited time, energy and effort, like here's where to put your resources and skill development.

Andrea Wanerstrand (42:27)
Absolutely. First, everyone should be learning, no matter what age you are on this planet, how to work with AI. I equate it to, for me, the internet coming in, right? ⁓ Or even desktop computers where every business has that, yes, I am that old. So it's a different way to work. And it is going to change

especially at certain levels of organizations and certain functions. ⁓ How work gets done, I'm thinking in the warehouse from an automation perspective that required dozens of people before. So organizations need to look at how they're using AI, what the impact is onto the jobs that are done by what the AI will replace.

Does that role morph? Do you upskill them to do something different? ⁓ So that has to be part of the strategic people planning as to how is AI being introduced? What's the standards and expectations in the organization as to how AI should be utilized, what it shouldn't be utilized? We get all the warnings on chat GPT as an example that it might not be 100 % accurate. So how are we holding people accountable for validating that?

So it needs to be hand in hand with any tool or ⁓ almost co-working environment of a technology as to what's the impact on the roles and how they're doing it. And if it's eliminating a certain function, what new function is being created and can the people that were in the previous function be up skilled for it? That may or may not be possible.

But how do we all learn in AI? And I think we also have to set expectation that change is happening faster than ever than it was 30 years ago. And so your culture needs to be resilient and really made for change as the constant. So people have to have the confidence to navigate an ambiguity. But they need certainty.

in that role definition and what role AI plays.

Sean Patton (44:43)
Yeah, 100%. And it's funny how almost circle we've almost circled back to ⁓ growth mindset to clear communication, right to ⁓ those sort of baseline foundational skills that create a resilient person and organization. And Andrew, this has been awesome. I really appreciate your time and the work you're doing. This has been great. ⁓ People love what you hear had what

Love to what you said today. Sorry, I need a drink of water. Love what you had to say today. And if you want to find out more, where do they find you?

Andrea Wanerstrand (45:17)
On social media, my primary place is LinkedIn. I post there five days a week, at least, and you can find out what's going on there. Also, you can reach me at a3cultrelab.com, and in early 2026, I will be launching my next cohort of my mindset maven method, which is the M3 Lab is what I put it out there as, and it's really working on how you can show up authentically.

And it's very tactical and helpful, but it's also transformative in the idea that it starts with you. So over eight weeks, we work with folks to really look at how do you introduce awareness to yourself in a different level? Because awareness is, you're not a self-aware person, you're somebody who has self-awareness and becomes more more self-awareness as each day changes before you.

Sean Patton (46:08)
Beautiful, I'll make sure we get those links in the show notes so people can find that and check out that cohort. So again, thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate your time today. been great.

Andrea Wanerstrand (46:16)
Thanks for having me, Sean. It's been great.