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

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

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

Every year on my birthday, my mother tells me the story of Mrs. Jordan, the babysitter she arranged with to take care of my two-year-old...

I recently facilitated two separate conversations between teammates (at two different organizations) where trust had been broken. I...

I sat down to play a card game with my daughter the other day, and she literally made up the rules as we went along. She was emphatic...

I was working with a team recently on building respect and we discovered (unsurprisingly) that we didn't all define respect the same way....

Brene Brown put it well: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” I've experienced this firsthand: Many years ago, my boss gave me feedback...

If you're anything like two of my favorite people in the world, you may be stymied by a confident, emotional, successful person needing a...