I was building a training program many years ago, and the CEO and I had very different visions of what the training should look like. I thought we should blend the learning, making it easier for junior account people to learn on their own time, and he thought all sessions should be in person (because that's how they were when he did them three decades earlier). In the end, we went his route (because he wasn't just the CEO, he was also a bully), and I had to inform my team th

Most boundary conversations focus on protecting time, identifying what you don't want to do, or learning how to say no. While those are important, they miss a more fundamental truth: every time we say yes, we are simultaneously saying no to something else. This is the principle of opportunity cost, what the alternative we give up is worth when making a choice. For example, if you spend $100 on a new bag, you can't spend that same $100 elsewhere. If you spend three hours help

How many leaders do you know who were promoted because they had all the answers? They've solved problems, delivered results, and demonstrated expertise. They became the expert widget-maker. And so they were promoted to lead the widget-makers. But what happens next to those expert widget-makers? Over time, their collection of experience and information quietly encouraged them to assume they already understood what was happening and how things would turn out. And those ass

Many managers and leaders I've met think that the people who report to them are bad communicators - they aren’t sharing good enough information, or they aren't sharing often enough. In my experience, however, those leaders often have a questioning problem - they're not asking the right questions with the right frequency. What you ask (and the way you ask it) determines the quality of what you hear. Compare these two questions: “Did the project go well?” “What parts of the

We all know that AI can improve your performance. It helps you do tasks faster and more accurately, but there's a cost: your ability to recall the information you used AI for decreases. In a similar vein, recording a lecture makes it easier for you to quote the lecture later, but it doesn't help you retain the information shared in the lecture. Only taking notes will really help with that. Using a calculator gets your math done quickly and correctly, but erodes your numbe

When people talk about power at work, they usually mean one thing: Authority. It ends up being about your title or whether you get the final say. But that’s just one type of power. And honestly? It’s not the best one (in my opinion). Power isn’t a single thing you either have or don’t. It's not something you can even control, really. It’s a set of tools, and too many leaders are only relying on one. The Six Types of Power (Whether You Realize It or Not) Back in 1959, socia

Good leaders lead each team member differently, meeting them where they need to be met. Maybe George needs more coaching and Amelia needs more training. A good leader will see that and not try to treat them the same. But great leaders are able to meet their people differently on a task-by-task basis, giving them support where they excel, and training where they're learning. The trick is knowing your people well enough to know where they're excelling and where they're stuc

Several years ago, I had a new leader join the HR team. In our first meeting, he sat us down for a super-casual, get-to-know-him talk. He gave us his background and bio, and when he got to why he was hired to lead our team, he said, "I was brought in to blow shit up." He then proceeded to tell us how he would blow said shit up and what his vision for the future was. I pulled him aside a few days after the meeting and told him, gently, that we had built all the shit he was

I'm sitting in a hotel room on a family vacation as I write this. My kids are in kids' camp, and my husband is waiting for me on the beach. I've avoided my computer successfully for five consecutive days, so I'll keep this short so I can get back outside! Time off isn’t just part of your benefits package; it's intended to give you a reset in multiple ways. It has measurable, research-backed benefits for performance, decision-making, and leadership effectiveness. And yet,

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

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

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

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

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

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