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, …
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 …
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 …
A different end-of-year question
It’s coming up to the end of the year. Which means there must be the obligatory end-of-year article, right? But let’s look at things a little differently. I tend to notice (or at least, I try to notice) when I’m hearing the same message from multiple sources – and recently two people whose opinions and ideas I respect have been …
Perfectionism, inconsistency, and leadership
A few weeks ago, I wrote a LinkedIn post stating that perfectionism is a recipe for failure and disappointment. Simply put, the more we strive for perfection in any field, especially interpersonal endeavors such as leadership and management, the more likely we are to fail and to feel like a failure. Leadership and management are inherently foggy gray areas, filled with …
“You’re fired” and other tales of psychological safety
The first thing I did when I was promoted to project manager was to ask my team to tell me if there were problems or delays, instead of waiting until things reached a crisis point. Looking back, I was at least attempting to create psychological safety in a company where that wasn’t exactly the norm. Long before anyone was fired …
Pizza, pineapple, and cilantro?
These are three things people feel strongly about: pizza, pineapple, and cilantro. There are those who are adament that pineapple should never be anywhere near a pizza, and then there are those who are fans of Hawaiian pizza (ham and pineapple). And there are those who love cilantro, and those who think it tastes like soap and hate it. I’m …
Tall poppies and sticky-out nails
Once upon a time, when I was still working in corporate, my boss – a VP at the company where I worked – called me in to his office to tell me to stop speaking up in meetings. These were the same meetings where another VP – a woman – was constantly interrupted and talked over. The difference between her …
Let’s just stop glorifying burnout
Everywhere I look, I see articles, podcast episodes, social media posts, all asking what can we do about burnout? I have one very succinct and heartfelt answer: ~ stop glorifying burnout ~ It’s part of hustle culture. It’s part of the “Oh, I’m so busy!” badge of “honor.” (In quotes because yegads, people, let’s just stop – it’s not an “honor” to …