Tag
leadership development
Hot Potato Leadership: Stop Catching Every Problem Your Team Throws at You
When every problem lands on your desk, solving it may be the fastest answer, but it’s rarely the best one. Great leaders coach people to bring their thinking along with their problems.Read More
Managing Up: How To Make Sure Your Good Work Gets Noticed
Good work doesn’t always speak for itself. Managing up means understanding what your leader values, communicating what matters, and making it easier for them to make good decisions.Read More
The Bicycle Test: What Great Leadership Coaching Actually Looks Like
A client told me something recently that I haven’t stopped thinking about. We were talking about what coaching has done for him over time, and he shared an analogy that captured it better than anything I could have written myself. He compared having an executive coach to teaching someone to ride a bike. At first,...Read More
Leadership Accountability: When Common Sense Isn’t Common
Great leadership coaching isn’t about doing the work for someone—or disappearing once they find their balance. The Bicycle Test shows why lasting change happens when support continues long enough for new behaviors to become habits.Read More
The Feedback Sandwich Is Broken: What Leaders Should Do Instead
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
What a Power Chain Taught Me About Leading Organizational Change
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
Why Eating Dessert First Might Beat Eating the Frog
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
The New Choice Effect: A Strategy for Eliminating Overthinking
If you struggle with decision-making, it’s probably not because you’re afraid of making the wrong choice. You’re probably afraid of what making any choice means about you. Every day, you make approximately 35,000 decisions, from what to wear to which strategic direction will define your career. Yet despite this constant practice, decision-making remains one of...Read More
Why Trust Matters More Than Talent in High-Performing Teams
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
Gossip vs. Venting: How Leaders Build or Break Culture
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