Two listeners wrote in this month with basically the same question.

They'd each been asked to lead something temporarily and they weren't sure what to make of it.

A real opportunity or a holding pattern.

Today we're going to talk about why a short stretch in a leadership seat is worth more than it tends to get credit for.

Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor.

I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders to work better by design.

You can reach out to me to speak at your next event at leadabovenoise.com.

And you can find links in the show notes.

So when I was a kid, like maybe eight or nine, my parents lovingly shoved

me into tennis lessons. I can't say I was excited, but I did get my own racket and that seemed

cool. I showed up on day one and the instructor had me leave my racket on the side of the court.

By the lessons end, I still hadn't picked it up.

In fact, it wasn't until maybe my fourth lesson that I even got to put my hands on it.

I was not a patient child, and this was just really annoying. Up to that point, I had been doing

footwork drills, I'd been bouncing balls, stretching, basically everything but what I thought

of as tennis. But then in week four, when I finally started hitting the ball, I was better than

expected. Like not awesome, but not too shabby. The coach had forced just a little bit of foundation

into me, and it had paid off. I work with a lot of

ambitious people, and I am here for ambition. I love it. But often, it looks like one thing, like that

five-year plan or that promotion to leadership, the corporate version of playing in the all-star

tennis match. But we often overlook the power of those foundational

experiences, the ones that may not hold as much allure on the surface, you know, like footwork and

...