I get asked a version of this question fairly often: Have you ever had a client for whom coaching didn't stick? My answer is yes. But also no. And the reason for both is worth unpacking — because how we answer that question says a lot about how we understand change,...

Mary Pickford — one of the most influential figures in early Hollywood — said this: "All the water in the world cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. All the negativity in the world cannot sink a person unless it gets inside your mind." Read that twice....

When conflict shows up in an organization, most leaders respond to it as an event. Something went wrong. People are in disagreement. Now we need to manage it, resolve it, move through it. That's a reasonable response. It's also mostly too late. Because by the time...

Most conflicts in organizations aren't actually about the problem. They're about who caused it. The moment something goes wrong, a familiar sequence begins. People start positioning. Protecting. Explaining why the thing that happened wasn't their fault, or at least...

Here's something I didn’t previously know about satellites. A satellite orbiting Earth isn't hovering. It's constantly falling toward the planet — it just happens to be moving fast enough, and from a distance high enough, that as it falls, it swings around Earth...

One of the questions I get most often — not from executives, but from the people around them — goes something like this: I can see that something isn't working. I think my leader needs to hear it. But I don't know how to bring it up without making things worse or...

In a recent post, I wrote about leadership as a story — and more specifically, as a genre. The kind of culture you're building, the way people experience working alongside you, the emotional environment you create without always realizing it. All of it adds up to a...

If you had spinach stuck in your teeth after lunch and didn't know it, would you want someone to tell you? The answer is always yes. Every single time. I have never once had someone say, "No, I'd rather walk around like that all afternoon than feel the momentary...

Most organizations are genuinely good at defining their values. They do the work. They gather the right people, have the right conversations, and land on something that feels true — a set of values or a mission statement that actually captures something meaningful...