The 4As Journey: A Developmental Cycle

Details in this article have been changed to protect client confidentiality.

I was coaching a senior director at a technology company who had a pattern she wanted to change. In every cross-functional meeting, she would over-explain her team's position. Where her male counterparts would state a recommendation in two sentences, she would provide the full reasoning. For years she was told "be more concise. Get to the point. Be more executive."

She tried to change, and focused on setting intentions before meetings. She wrote shorter speaking notes, and told herself to stop after three sentences. None of it stuck. Within two minutes of any high-stakes conversation, she went back to explaining, qualifying, and hedging.

The problem was that she was trying to change a behavior without understanding the environment that caused it. She over-explained because her ideas had historically been questioned more than her peers' ideas. As such, she developed a strategy to manage being scrutinized more closely.

To break the habit, she needed a new developmental cycle. One focused on understanding the pattern before trying to change it.

The Four Stages

The 4As Journey is a cycle for building new leadership capabilities. It is a practice that you run repeatedly, on different patterns and skills, as your leadership develops.

1

Awareness: Catch the Pattern

The first stage is clearly understanding your default pattern. For example, "I over-explain" is too general and not helpful, while "In cross-functional meetings where I am presenting a recommendation that could be challenged, I provide extensive backup reasoning before stating my position, and I qualify my conclusions with caveats."

The specificity helps you identify when and where the pattern comes up. The more precisely you locate the pattern, the more options you create. Even a response that feels like "just who I am" may intensify around particular people, risks, or forms of scrutiny.

First start by asking yourself: When does this pattern show up most strongly? What triggers it? What is happening in the room or the conversation right before I do this? What does the pattern achieve or protect? And what are the negative consequences?

The senior director realized she over-explained most when certain colleagues were present. Specifically, two executives who had a track record of dismissing women's recommendations without engaging with the details. The pattern was specific to those meetings, with those people, on topics where she expected pushback.

2

Ask: Test Your Reading

The second stage is testing your interpretation with others you trust. This is where many leaders, and women leaders in particular, get stuck.

Typically, we want to skip this step. Thinking you already identified the pattern, and understand the trigger, you want to move on to fix it. However, this stage is critical because it can stop you from working on the wrong problem. Your self-perception may not match how others experience you. The over-explaining that feels like hedging to you might actually be seen as thoroughness and intellectual rigor. Or it might be even more noticeable than you think. Either way, you need data from the outside.

To get that information, you go to someone you trust. Someone who will tell you the truth and you ask them a specific question. For example, "When I present recommendations in the leadership team meeting, do I over-explain? And when I do, what impact does that have on how my recommendation is received?"

For women leaders, Asking for feedback on your leadership can be read as lacking confidence, especially if you are already in a context where your authority is questioned. The key is framing how you think of this step. You are testing a leadership hypothesis with external data, and not inviting judgement on your ability.

Choose who you ask with care. You need someone who sees you in the relevant context, who understands the dynamics, and who will be direct. Avoid asking people who will simply reassure you, and avoid asking people who have a stake in keeping your current pattern the same.

3

Act: Run an Experiment

The third stage is try experimenting. First with something small over a short period of time and seeing what impact it has. You are testing a hypothesis before making a full change.

The senior director decided that for the next leadership meeting, she would state her recommendation first, in two sentences, and then pause. She would not explain, qualify, or preempt objections. She would state her recommendation and pause, and wait to see what happened.

This is a small experiment. It has a specific context (one meeting), a specific behavior change (state-then-pause, replacing explain-then-state), and a specific observation point (what happens after the pause).

Experimentation is riskier for some leaders than others. Leaders whose authority is questioned have less latitude to experiment, that means that selecting the right context and observer for the experiment is especially important.

You should still experiment, but you will need to be intentional about the context. Pick a situation where the risk is manageable (i.e. a meeting that matters but is not career-defining). Also, be clear in advance about what you are testing. This will ensure you continue to experiment, even when it feels uncomfortable. The goal is not to revert back to old patterns.

4

Adapt: Learn and Refine

Finally, in the fourth stage you close the cycle by understanding what you learned and refining it.

After the experiment, debrief, ideally within twenty-four hours, while the experience is still vivid. Ask yourself what happened? What changed? What was harder than expected? What surprised you? What did people do or say that you did not anticipate?

The senior director's debrief after her first experiment was revealing. She stated her recommendation and paused. The silence lasted about five seconds, which felt like an eternity to her, and then one of the executives she was worried about said, "That makes sense. Let's go with that." No one challenged her. The over-explaining had been solving for a problem that, in this instance, did not exist.

That is not always the outcome. Sometimes the experiment reveals that the old pattern served a purpose. Sometimes you try being more direct and it goes poorly. The point of Adapt is to learn. What did this experiment teach you about the pattern, the context, and the people in it? And based on that, you calibrate and decide what you want to try next.

Adapt is the stage that a lot of women leaders skip. Under the pressure of perfectionism, or the pressure to appear to have things figured out, there is a temptation to either declare success or abandon the experiment entirely. They make think that since the over-explaining worked once, now they are a different leaders. Or, alternatively, since the over-explaining was uncomfortable and difficult to change, they opt to go back to the old way and pretend everything is fine. In neither scenario does the leader learn, because learning requires analyzing the data, understanding what it reveals, and using those insights to guide the next experiment.

The Cycle in Practice

The 4As Journey is an iterative cycle. The senior director went through the cycle focused on over-explaining for three months before the new pattern felt natural. Later, she tried the cycle on a different pattern, her tendency to internalize the stress of those around her without recognizing the toll it takes on her.

Each cycle builds the same muscles: noticing your patterns, testing your ability to read situations, trying something different, and learning from what happens. Over time, the cycles get faster and the experiments get bolder. You develop confidence in your capacity to change and to notice what is not working and adjust it deliberately.

As you go through the cycle you also grow. You start to notice with improved precision, testing the diagnosis, intervening at manageable scale, and allowing the evidence to shape the next move.