Learn to write. I’m not suggesting you need to be the next Pulitzer Prize winner or that you should write a Great American Novel. I am stating that the better you are at writing, whether it’s an email, a PowerPoint deck, a Slack message, or even a text, the more successful you’ll be. Don’t agree? Just think of the endless …
When someone is dragging…
Is someone on your team dragging? It’s hard to know what to do when a team member who’s typically a good performer starts dragging, slowing down, being less responsive, turning in lower-quality work, and just isn’t . quite . there. There’s a lot of emphasis on employee mental health these days, which on the one hand is a great thing …
Are you the company doormat?
My clients are nice people. That’s not a bad thing. As long as they’re not too nice. I was talking with one client recently who wanted help learning how to manage what seemed to them like an abundance of toxic situations in the different jobs they’d had over the years. What could be done to avoid, or at least deal with, …
The Hyde Effect in leadership
Remember Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? The mad scientist and his evil alter ego? A long time ago, I wrote an article on the “Jekyll & Hyde” effect of being promoted into leadership. It was mostly about how a leadership perspective on everything from strategy to budget is different – and rightly so – from the perspective of the individual …
Unpacking performance problems
Unpacking performance problems can be a challenge for managers. And it’s important to do, because many – most? – all? – performance issues are combinations of multiple employee behaviors and multiple manager frustrations. I had a conversation with a client this morning about a problem he wanted to address. In deconstructing what initially appeared straightforward (an accumulation of handwritten “to-do” …
What’s unreasonable?
The other day, I heard from a colleague that the concept and outline they’d put forward for a leadership development program were considered by the CHRO to be too much to take on. It’s unfortunate, because the program would have been a differentiator for their company in many ways – employee retention, hiring attractiveness, and, of course, leadership strength and …
Microaggressions, gaslighting, and other toxicities
I wrote this article for my LinkedIn newsletter The Leadership Leap. I don’t typically cross-post LinkedIn articles here on my blog, but this is an important topic, so I felt it deserved to be here as well as there. See the end of the article for links to subscribe to the Leap. There’s nothing “micro” about an endless stream of …
The elephant in the conference room
Office politics. Something I’m often asked about, and something my clients almost always want help with. More accurately, they want it to go away. But – as I wrote about in my book – you can ignore the elephant in the conference room, but you’ll still have to deal with it, including cleaning up after it. (Yeah. Eww.) The reality is …
Is there room for Captain Obvious?
So much of what I see written about leadership, management, and corporate life in publications such as Harvard Business Review, FORTUNE magazine, Fast Company, and others, seems startlingly obvious to me. “Aye, aye, Captain Obvious”-level obvious. Yet these are well-respected, even venerated, publications. Which makes me wonder: maybe I’m missing something. (Who, me?!) It seems some things require repetition for us …
Tis the season for …
Goals. Plans. Intentions. Let’s hit the ground running – it’s a New Year, New You, New Opportunity! Right? Not so fast. Let’s rethink this whole new year thing. I’m fond of saying that the only New Year’s Resolution I ever kept was … wait for it … to never make another New Year’s Resolution. And I recently heard someone comment …