Imagine if your whole team agreed with you, all the time, about everything. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Too bad that’s about as realistic as certain bacon producing farm animals sprouting wings. If that were the case, there would be no need whatsoever for leadership...

In a recent past post, we talked about how we typically form culture by accident rather than design. Which is important, to be sure. But it also begs the question: When it comes to culture, what do we have the right to define, as leaders?  A client of mine had a...

Have you ever had one of those bosses whose actions and words are out of alignment? Where they talk about collaboration and pretend to solicit your feedback, but you know full well they have no intention of ever taking it? I have several clients facing that very...

If you're a new leader, joining a new team -- or you think you might be doing that some day -- have you thought about your entrance strategy?  Every new boss, manager, CEO, and everything in between, has an entrance strategy -- even if they're not consciously aware of...

Have you ever noticed that in business, we have strategies for everything — everything, that is, except people? Think about it. Most leaders will sit down and thoughtfully design all kinds of strategies with their team: goals, growth, skillset, compensation...

Last week a client said something fascinating: He said he didn’t really know his people. Prior to our work together, that is. A little context: He was the manager of a team he invited me to be a part of to help facilitate communication and improve functionality. Now...

I heard John Mayer in an interview once make a brilliant statement: “The problem with success,” he said, “is that success justifies every stupid decision we’ve ever made.”The irony of some success is it doesn’t always come as a result of good choices. It’s like that...

A lot of people seem to operate under the assumption that Leadership is an Art — that it’s an intuitive action and should therefore come naturally. That great leaders are ‘born’ with the skill to lead, just lying dormant within them until they come across a team. It’s...

Can your team see the thread of your leadership at work? At a human level, people want to see, need to see, the connection between decisions being made and the reasons for those decisions.  Without that, they can feel like automatons simply complying with instructions...

I once worked with a team that was — and there’s no gentle way to put this — highly dysfunctional. Most of the team was unhappy and in conflict with the manager, who couldn’t really see the problem. When I asked the manager about the problems the team had listed, he...