Discomfort Is the Compass: Arielle Lechner on Coaching, Experimentation, and Leading Through Change | Ep. 87

Most leaders wait until something breaks before they try something new. Arielle Lechner thinks that is exactly backwards. As an executive coach and startup advisor at NewPo, Arielle works with leaders and teams who are navigating change, building cultures, and trying to figure out why their best intentions are not producing the results they expected.

In Episode 87 of Tools, Talents, and Techniques, Dustin sits down with Arielle to unpack one of the most practical frameworks for leadership growth available. Her core idea is simple and worth sitting with. Discomfort is the compass. Experimentation is the engine. If you are not uncomfortable, you are probably not growing.

Why Teams Get Stuck

Before you can fix a stuck team you have to understand why it got stuck in the first place. Arielle identifies a few patterns that show up consistently across organizations of all sizes.

The most common is a culture that quietly punishes failure. When people believe that mistakes will be held against them, they stop taking risks. They stop surfacing problems early. They stop sharing ideas that might not work. What looks like low engagement or poor performance is often just a team that has learned it is safer to stay quiet.

The second pattern is a lack of clarity. When people are unclear about their roles, their priorities, or what success actually looks like, they fill in the gaps themselves. Usually in different directions. The result is duplicated effort, missed handoffs, and frustration that leadership often misreads as attitude or capability problems.

The Everything Is an Experiment Mindset

Arielle's antidote to both of these patterns is reframing how leaders and teams approach their work. When everything is an experiment, failure changes meaning. It is no longer a verdict. It is data.

That shift sounds simple but it is genuinely difficult to operationalize inside organizations that have spent years rewarding certainty and punishing mistakes. Arielle's approach is to start small. Pick one thing. Form a hypothesis about what you expect to happen. Run the test. Look at the results honestly. Adjust and go again.

The goal is not to find the perfect answer on the first try. The goal is to build a team that gets better at learning faster than the competition.

Designing Rapid Tests That Actually Work

The most common mistake leaders make when they try to experiment is starting too big. They redesign an entire process, roll it out company-wide, and then have no way to isolate what worked and what did not.

Arielle's approach is the opposite. Keep the test small enough that you can see results quickly and cheap enough that failure does not derail anything important. Define what you are trying to solve before you start. Identify one or two metrics that will tell you whether it worked. Set a time limit. Then actually look at the results instead of moving on to the next initiative before the data comes in.

The stand-up meeting is a classic example. If poor communication is the bottleneck, a daily ten minute check-in is a low-cost experiment with a clear outcome you can measure within two weeks.

Creating Safety for Experimentation

None of this works without psychological safety. Arielle is direct about this. You cannot ask people to take risks and then penalize them when those risks do not pan out. The signal that leaders send when experiments fail matters more than any policy or values statement.

The leaders who build genuine cultures of experimentation do two things consistently. They share their own failures openly and without defensiveness. And they celebrate the learning that came out of a failed experiment just as visibly as they celebrate wins.

Both of those things are harder than they sound, especially for leaders who built their credibility on being right.

Embracing Discomfort as a Leadership Tool

The line that sticks from this conversation is that discomfort is the compass. Arielle is not talking about manufacturing stress or pushing people past their limits. She is talking about the specific discomfort that comes from trying something you have not tried before, having a conversation you have been avoiding, or admitting that a current approach is not working.

That kind of discomfort is directional. It points toward the places where the most growth is available. The leaders who learn to move toward it instead of away from it tend to build teams that are more resilient, more innovative, and more honest with each other and with themselves.

Key Takeaways

• A culture that quietly punishes failure produces teams that stop taking risks and stop surfacing problems
• Reframing work as experimentation changes what failure means and accelerates learning
• Effective experiments are small, time-bound, and tied to specific measurable outcomes
• Psychological safety is not a nice to have. It is the foundation everything else is built on
• Leaders who share their own failures openly build more trust than those who only share wins
• Discomfort points toward growth. The best leaders learn to move toward it

Connect with Arielle Lechner

• Search Arielle Lechner or NewPo to find her coaching work and resources

Listen to the Full Episode Catch Episode 87 of Tools, Talents, and Techniques on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or at toolstalentstechniques.com

About Tools, Talents, and Techniques Hosted by Dustin Sutton, Tools Talents and Techniques is a podcast for founders, operators, and professionals who want to go deeper than surface-level success stories. Every episode unpacks how high performers think, decide, and build things that last.