Content People: Coaching, Radical Candor and the Power of Growing Pains

On Content People, host Meredith Farley interviews creative professionals and leaders to get a behind-the-scenes look at their career experiences and turn that into actionable advice for listeners. Tune in to hear from experts in various media, and get inspired to find contentment in your own creative career.

Episode #7 Summary

In this chat with Meredith, Brianna de L’airre, a senior manager of Wayfair’s coaching enablement team, discusses everything from radical candor to the importance of embracing growing pains.

In the seventh episode of Content People, I had the pleasure of talking to Brianna de L’airre.

Brianna is a senior manager of the coaching enablement team in Wayfair’s Business to Business department. Although she has a background in education, she says teaching and coaching are two different things. In fact, she tells me the latter is more about encouraging self-discovery in the folks you’re coaching (as opposed to just imparting your own wisdom).

“You have to care, but you have to challenge,” she says — and that gets us talking about radical candor. That’s what Brianna calls “caring implicitly,” and it’s an important part of her coaching philosophy. It’s also an important part of being a manager, worker or creator in today’s world.

Here are a few more things we discuss:

• Why growing pains are actually your friend.
• What it means to be a good coach.
• Why the best salespeople are also the best listeners.
• The importance of asking for feedback.
• Balancing the...