I asked a client recently what got in the way of delivering difficult feedback to her direct report. "I didn't want to say anything until I was sure," Cheryl [name changed] responded. And it’s something I hear all the time. Cheryl’s employee was a new manager struggling to delegate tasks effectively (or at all). She told herself she’d bring it up after one more incident. After the next project. After she had one more example, but weeks turned into months, and Cheryl’s del

It's the quiet commitments and follow-through that build a foundation of trust.

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

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