Don't Feed the Elephants!: Overcoming the Art of Avoidance to Build Powerful Partnerships

by Sarah Noll Wilson

Overview

You see the giant footprints the moment you walk through the door. The conference room is a swirling mess of tension, heaviness, anxiety, and peanut shells. Something is very wrong with your team. Everybody knows it, but nobody is talking about it.

It's obvious there's an elephant in the room. Is it an Avoidephant, feeding off the fears of retaliation and exclusion? Perhaps it's a Blamephant-whom we love to feed because it makes us feel better about ourselves. Or is it one of the other five types of elephants?

No matter what type you're dealing with, executive coach Sarah Noll Wilson knows your elephant is not there by accident. It was created, and someone has been feeding it. Is it you?

In Don't Feed the Elephants!, Sarah explores how you can address the true elephant in the room: avoidance. She shares tips for having conversations you may be avoiding, invites you to get curious instead of furious, and shows how to own your role rather than passing blame. You'll come away with a shared language to free the elephants you see-and the confidence to do so.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781544524504
Publisher:	Lioncrest Publishing
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

SARAH NOLL WILSON is an executive coach and leadership development consultant who's been freeing elephants for fifteen years. Sarah works with leaders to develop more powerful partnerships and helps teams spot patterns that are keeping them from higher performance. An in-demand keynote speaker, Sarah leads workshops and team retreats for leaders and HR professionals. Previously, Sarah worked in management and as the talent development leader for an insurance company, giving her firsthand insight into the challenges of corporate leadership. She holds several coaching certifications and has a master's in leadership development from Drake University.

Editorial Reviews

2022-02-23
A blueprint for dealing with problem avoidance in organizations.

The title of executive coach and debut author Wilson’s nonfiction debut addresses the metaphorical “elephants in the room”: the many ways that people tend to avoid dealing with seemingly unsolvable issues in businesses and other organizations, which only allows those problems to worsen and multiply and cause unnecessary tension and stress. As Wilson notes, the signs of such elephants are many and unmistakable: People become quiet, organizational team members make knowing eye contact with one another, questions about issues go unanswered, and so on. She goes on to detail the different types of elephants, which represent avoidance, blame, deflection, and other unhelpful behaviors. The book aims to propose strategies for understanding signs and smoothing out the underlying problems that they bring to light. Humans bring emotions to everything they do, she notes, and owning up to this is a key element of her strategies: “When we can acknowledge and own our part of creating the elephant, even if it is tiny, and share that with the other person or team,” she writes, “we create an invitation for them to see and own their part.” Wilson’s book is tremendously compassionate and engaging, full of whimsical, uncredited cartoon images to illustrate its points and text insets for easier reading and discussion. The book often circles back to its strongest central tenet: self-knowledge. “In my experience,” Wilson writes, “exploring and owning your role is the hardest of all the questions to explore.” Readers dealing with tangled organizational or team problems will find a good deal of cleareyed good sense in these pages.

An upbeat and insightful guide to confronting behaviors that hinder success.

Kirkus Reviews