The Other Half of How Leaders Get Built

By Sarah Brobeck, President & CEO of ALM

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Liz Remillong, and about the people who water our growth. That post is true. I believe it. It is the leadership I want to give the people coming up behind me, and the leadership I want to keep receiving for the rest of my career.

But it isn’t the whole truth about how I got here.

A member wrote to me after that post. There was a line in his message I kept thinking about. He said some of the most important lessons of his career came from people whose motivations he questioned at the time, and that in hindsight, he was grateful for every lesson, whether their intentions were good or not.

I sat with that for a minute. Because I have a person like that, too.

His name is Rocco Romeo.

Rocco is the loudest voice in the room. Always. His tone is direct, and at first it landed on me as harsh, and I didn’t know him well enough to know what was behind it. I questioned his motives. I assumed there was something in it for him, or some agenda I wasn’t seeing, or some reason he was pushing this hard on something I hadn’t asked him to push on.

But here’s the thing I couldn’t ignore, even when I wanted to. Every time I left a conversation with Rocco, I had the same thought.

He’s not wrong.

He pushed on things nobody else was pushing on. He refused the status quo when everyone around him had quietly accepted it. He held a higher bar than I was holding for myself, and he held it loudly, and he held it consistently, and it took me a long time to understand what I was actually looking at.

What I read as harshness was passion. What I read as agenda was conviction. What I read as someone making my life harder was someone who believed I was capable of more than I was currently delivering. The support I needed from him was right there the whole time. I just hadn’t learned how to recognize it yet, because it didn’t come in the shape I was expecting it to come in.

Here is the thing about Rocco that took me the longest to see. Underneath the volume and the directness, he is a softie. He cares about the people he pushes. He cares about the work. He cares about the organization in a way that makes him willing to be the most uncomfortable voice in the room because he believes the room is better for it. The hard exterior is real. So is the heart behind it. And the second one is actually the engine of the first.

The clarity came the day I humbled myself enough to go to him for help with a situation I was wrestling with. Whatever defenses I had been holding against him quietly dropped on the way to that conversation. And the man I had been bracing against was sitting across from me, fully present, fully invested, ready to help. He hadn’t been pushing me because he wanted something from me. He had been pushing me because he wanted something for me, and for the organization, and he was willing to be the loud voice nobody else wanted to be in order to get it.

The results showed up fast after that. Significant strides in a short amount of time, all because someone was insistent that things be done, and I finally let myself hear the insistence as care instead of pressure.

Rocco has been in this work alongside me from the beginning. He started as a director. He moved to treasurer. On July 1, he steps into the role of vice chairman. Each of those moves was a deliberate choice, not a default one, and each of them happened because I kept seeing what the rest of the room would eventually need to see too. Someone of his caliber, with his willingness to push, belongs in a seat where his voice carries the weight it deserves. That’s not a small reversal from where I started with him. That’s a complete rewrite of what I thought a loud voice in the room was for.

So here is what I want to say, and where this gets harder than the manifesto.

We owe the people we lead the kind of leadership that waters their growth. That hasn’t changed. I still believe it. I still teach it. I still try to live it every day.

But we also have to be honest about something the leadership literature rarely admits. Some of our most important growth comes from people who push us harder than we are ready for. People who do not soften their delivery to make us comfortable. People whose motives we question because we cannot yet see what they are doing for us. The support is there. We just have not learned how to recognize it in the form it is being offered.

I am not romanticizing bad leadership. There are environments that take from people without giving anything back, and I have lived in those, and I would not wish them on anyone I care about. There is a line between hard and harmful, and Rocco has never crossed it. He holds a high bar, not a cruel one. That distinction matters, and any leader who wants to push their people the way Rocco pushes me has to understand it before they try. Hard without heart is just harm with better branding.

But within that line, here is what I have come to believe.

It is what you take from it. You can experience someone pushing you as something done to you, or you can do the harder work of finding the support inside it. Sometimes that takes years. Sometimes it takes humbling yourself enough to ask the person for help. Sometimes you don’t see it until you find yourself doing the same thing for someone coming up behind you, and you realize where the instinct came from.

The leaders who shaped me were not all the obviously supportive kind. Some of them were the kind I had to grow into understanding. Some of them are still in my life because I finally figured out that the volume was not the absence of care. It was a different shape of it.

So we should water our people on purpose. That is still the work. And we should also prepare them for the truth that not every leader they encounter is going to soften the edges, and that some of their best growth will come from learning to find the support inside the voices they did not initially want to hear.

Both of those things are real. Both of them built me. Liz watered me. Rocco pushed me. I would not be who I am without either of them.