I was sitting in church this weekend when my pastor asked a question that stopped me mid-note-taking. “When you’re about to get good news and bad news,” he said, “which do you want first?” He asked the congregation to raise their hands. Overwhelmingly, people wanted the bad news first. Then he made a claim that...Read More

Organizational change rarely fails because leaders choose the wrong strategy. More often, it fails because organizations mistake discomfort for failure. Every meaningful transformation creates resistance before it creates results. Ironically, I learned one of the best lessons about leading change while sitting in my orthodontist’s chair. Eight months into braces, I thought I knew what...Read More

There are many gurus out there who say “eat the frog” first thing in your day, especially in sales, getting the hardest thing or the thing you dread out of the way to ensure it gets done. I’ve taught this for years. I’ve tried it myself. It works, in the sense that the hard thing...Read More

Your team is keeping score. Not on productivity metrics or quarterly goals, though they notice those too. They’re tracking something more fundamental: whether you do what you say you’ll do. Whether your words match your actions. Whether it’s safe to tell you the truth. You can see it in the small behaviors that shift when...Read More

Every workplace has talk. The water cooler conversations. The internal chat messages. The hushed exchanges in hallways, breakrooms, and parking lots. The real question is whether that talk is strengthening your culture or slowly poisoning it. Here’s what most leaders miss: venting and gossip are not the same thing. And when you don’t understand the...Read More

During a recent coaching session with a C-suite executive, the conversation started where many do, on surface-level updates. We talked about deadlines, projects, and personnel shifts. Underneath the calendar invites and tax return timelines, something deeper was brewing – cultural friction, unclear communication, and the quiet tolerance of behavior that was beginning to rot the...Read More

After 17 years of teaching improv, I recently experienced one of those rare “aha” moments that forever changes how you approach your craft. It happened during a seemingly routine class teaching the classic improv game “Freeze Tag,” and it reminded me of a powerful lesson that applies far beyond the stage. As a teenager in...Read More