The Cathedral or the Bricks: What People Need to Believe About Their Work
There's an old story about three people doing exactly the same work. Ask the first what he's doing, and he says he's mixing cement. The second says he's laying bricks. The third says he's building a cathedral. Same task. Same physical reality. Completely different...
When Culture Change Doesn’t Trickle Down
There's a pattern I've seen play out in organizations more times than I can count. Leadership decides that things need to change. They invest in development — coaching, training, new frameworks for communication and accountability. The work is real, and the intentions...
Leaders Who Define Tasks But Not Themselves
Most leaders are very good at defining what needs to happen. The goals. The deliverables. The standards. The behaviors they want to see from the people around them. What far fewer leaders have done is define themselves — with anything close to the same clarity. Not...
What Kind of Story Is Your Leadership Telling?
Every leader is telling a story. Not intentionally, necessarily. Not always consciously. But the people around you are receiving one — through how you respond under pressure, how you handle mistakes, what you reward, what you let slide, and what you do when no one...
Comfort Zone, Learning Zone, Danger Zone — And Why Most Teams Live in the Wrong One
Most leaders, if you ask them, will say they want their teams in the learning zone. Stretching. Growing. Taking on challenges that are just beyond their current comfort level. Building capability through productive difficulty. That's the aspiration. The reality is...
Checks and Balances Aren’t a Threat to Your Authority
One of the more uncomfortable truths about leadership is this: the people who most resist being checked are often the ones who most need it. Not because they're bad leaders. Usually, because they're so invested in their own judgment — so identified with being the...
You’re Further Down the Story Than Your Team
By the time most leaders bring something to their teams, they've been living with it for a while. They've turned the idea over in their heads. Stress-tested it. Considered the objections, worked through the uncertainty, and arrived at something that feels ready — or...
Who Did You Decide to Be as a Leader?
Most leaders can tell you exactly what they need to accomplish. Revenue targets. Team goals. Initiatives to launch, problems to solve, metrics to hit. They've thought carefully about what needs to get done and how to get there. Far fewer have answered a different...
The Illusion of Confidence
There's a version of confidence that looks exactly right from the outside. It's decisive. It doesn't waver. It projects certainty in situations where certainty is reassuring. It doesn't ask too many questions, doesn't invite too much debate, doesn't leave a lot of...
Anger Isn’t the Problem — It’s the Clue
When anger shows up in a leadership context — in a meeting, in a difficult conversation, in a team dynamic that's slowly deteriorating — the instinct is almost always to treat it as the problem. Address the anger. Defuse it. Move past it. But anger is almost never the...
