I've been seeing this a lot in the classrooms I've been in: a manager has a team member who is underperforming (for various reasons, in various ways) and they address it, but nothing changes. They address it again, maybe this time with some consequences (like "we'll have a more serious conversation about this if it continues"), and it continues. They have the serious conversation, and it still continues. Morale is starting to tank because the rest of the team sees them ge

A colleague of mine was trying to decide whether or not to take a new job. There were lots of pros and a couple of major cons, and she was really struggling with her decision. She came to me because her boyfriend had told her to "trust her gut" and, while she knew what that meant (sort of), she didn't believe that her gut would ultimately lead her in the right direction -- it was weak, she argued, and would go for what was comfortable. I encouraged her to break the whole d

Many years ago, I read the fantastic book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink, and it changed the way I looked at motivation. Instead of thinking about the hundreds of ways I could motivate my people - give them more ownership? chances to belong? free time? cupcakes? - it helped me focus on three major things: A utonomy, M astery, and P urpose. Autonomy Pink argues that autonomy - the desire to be in charge of our own time - is a core driver of

Last week, I had a day that was packed to the gills with meetings and each one had something I needed to produce as a result. That night I had to travel to a training location, and the following two days I was in all-day sessions, and I wouldn't be able to get to my computer until night time. When I put my kids to bed. So I was feeling stressed. Which was actually great, because it gave me an opportunity to use a tool I teach for helping manage stress: the ABCs of Stress.

I've been doing some strategic planning work (with some of my favorite people at Wildfire Strategies) for a pair of hospitals in NYC in the last few months, and in one of the hospitals, the CEO had already drafted his ten points of focus for the next few years. We saw two main ways forward: stick to his well-crafted ten points and lose the buy-in of the hospital, or go back to the drawing board and find a way to integrate his objectives into a greater strategy. We quickly c

Your mindset is all about how you see and approach the world (and work, and your team, and your business challenges). There are all kinds of predefined mindsets you can have - fixed, growth, owner, rescuer, whatever - and they all impact what information you seek (and see), and how you interpret it. Done well, it's your greatest asset. But if you're not aware of and in control of your mindset, you're at the mercy of your daily emotions and reactions. And that's not strat

Bad news ages poorly. I've learned this the hard way (and imagine you have, too). Earlier in my career, I was prepping for an all-day offsite with many moving parts - catering, room reservations, handouts, your standard full-day training. But when we got to the training site, the room was all wrong. Not just this-isn't-how-we-imagined-it wrong, but we-won't-all-fit-in-this-room wrong. I asked my team what happened, and the one who had booked the site told me she thought th

Whether you call it corrective , developmental , improvement , or negative , the feedback you get about something you could have done better is often hard to take. Ideally, it's meant to help you perform better in the future, but some leaders and managers (and spouses and teachers) think they're giving corrective feedback when they're actually criticizing the other person. I don't know about you, but I can feel the difference, even if I can't pinpoint exactly how it's diffe

Imagine you're a manager and it's 7:45 pm and one of your very stressed-out employees walks into your office (or calls you on Teams, or contacts you however they do) and gives you the following: I just need to say this before I forget—this reporting change that went live on Monday is completely throwing me off because the instructions keep shifting, and I’m getting Slack messages saying one thing while the spreadsheet says another, and then I’m being told it’s urgent and that

A boundary is only as good as your ability to communicate it effectively. And I don't know about you, but I love a good model to help me do something I find stressful. (Just see the STAR template for feedback if you don't believe me.) So here are the four C's of effective boundary communication, essential for standing up for yourself when someone is about to cross a boundary, or repeatedly does so. Let's start with clear : It's really important to be clear about where, exa

Remember that New Year's resolution you made? How well are you maintaining the necessary boundaries around your time, money, or energy to keep making progress? I've noticed in both my coaching and facilitating work that so many people - leaders and employees alike - are struggling to maintain healthy boundaries. Whether that's a physical boundary (like the vendor who sits too close) or, more often, a time boundary (never leaving at 6, even though you've promised your part

The new year often brings in change, sometimes new change on top of the existing boatloads of old change. And it's all well and good - we know change is a constant - but leading change, especially one you're not wild about, is a challenge I see many leaders struggle with. To lead a change successfully, you have to be a change agent. And being a change agent means more than just changing yourself -- it means actively guiding others through it, whether they report to you or n

I've been teaching goal setting for years, and when I started, the research was pretty clear that sharing your goals publicly would help you maintain motivation and make it more likely that you would reach your goals. It's worked for me for years, and I haven't questioned it. That is, until a client of mine really didn't want to share her goals, and insisted that the research had to be wrong. So I did a little digging to bring you an update. I was pleased to find that there

These goal-setting tools will get you up and running in the new year!

How many times have you delivered something - an email, a report, a simple task that someone offhandedly asked you to do on the way to the bathroom - and not quite gotten it right? Recently, I was working with a colleague who asked me to come up with a different way to present some concepts to our client, and I took that to mean he wanted a visual. I went to Canva and put together a couple of options for attractive visuals and 45 minutes later, when I was done, I learned th

As I mentioned in my recent newsletter (which you are welcome to sign up for here ), many people take time in December to reflect and prepare for the coming new year. Others are crunched with year-end requests, closing the books, or preparing for the onslaught of family visits. Whether you reflect in December or some other time of the year doesn't really make a difference - what matters is that you take the time to look back and find patterns, habits, and, ideally, motivat

The other day, I did some momming worthy of the Golden Globe for Best Parenting in a Comedy Series. My daughter had done something kind of stupid and impulsive and was mortified by her own behavior. My husband and I agreed that punishing her for what she did would just compound her embarrassment and shame, and so we decided to help her process her feelings instead. (And, of course, there was no screen time.) In that moment of parenting, I was intensely focused on the prese

I was talking to a girlfriend of mine the other day, and she mentioned that a guy she was dating was confusing her by praising her too much. "It's weird," she said. "I like it, but after a while it doesn't feel like it's true, or at the very least, that it's not about me." I asked what he was saying, and she said that he was basically just telling her that she was beautiful over and over again. "I'd like that, too," I said, "but I think after a while, if it's not specific,

Many moons ago, I was leading a learning and development team that was part of HR. Our jobs were to get up in front of a room full of skeptical people and share leadership, communication, or interpersonal skills, and so, in my mind, we had to look the part. For as long as I had led them, my team had dressed fairly conservatively (for our industry, at least), and it was never an issue. And then one day, one of my trainers came in wearing something that looked to me like a ba

On a recent business trip, I binge-watched season five of Scandal . I'm not wild about all the acting and the plot twists and turns so much I have whiplash, but the thing that struck me over and over again in the series is how nobody is held accountable for their actions . (Well, that is, unless they get shot. Then there's some accountability.) I won't ruin the plot, but there is a threat that the president will be impeached for doing something bad (that we all know he di