7-minute read A monthly post generated from reflective thought and experience Ask any leader for a list of their top five challenges. Managing conflict and difficult conversations usually lead the list. Managing workplace disagreement is a mandatory management skill that requires leaders to be comfortable with discomfort. It’s one of the reasons leaders get paid [...]
7-minute read What often separates good leaders from bad is the ability to communicate. From an early age, we are taught to speak by learning, repeating, and stringing together words, yet communication - how to influence, successfully convey a message, and employ verbal and non-verbal techniques - we learn organically. If you’ve ever been around [...]
4-minute read In deference to Giving Tuesday, this article is posting a week late. It’s December, a month of both reflection and anticipation. How to sum up a year like no other? The overarching theme of 2025 was uncertainty, about funding, the job market, the stock market, the future of democracy, and the list [...]
6-minute read, 9-minute listen Channeling this past weekend’s NYC Marathon, the end-of-the-year sprint at work has officially begun. And it’s accompanied by stress. Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s part of our daily operating rhythm at work and in life. There are two kinds of stress: healthy stress, the happy marriage of a lot [...]
6-minute read There's a nip in the air, the leaves are gliding from green to red and gold, and Halloween candy is overflowing store shelves; welcome to performance evaluation season. Performance evaluation is one of the most impactful processes for managers. As the culmination of a year’s worth of one-on-one meetings, yearly evaluations provide an [...]
Having difficult conversations is part of the fabric of work. Typically, conflicts at work that require difficult conversations may be about individual performance, organizational performance, compliance issues, or employee disagreements. This year, conflicts at work and difficult conversations are estimated to be even more frequent due to, among others, the upcoming election, geopolitical unrest, and [...]
(4-minute read) Every office has a political landscape. Some office politics are positive and contribute to productivity, like pre-syndicating ideas and forming alliances to accomplish tasks. Yet, negative politics that undermine relationships and stagnate productivity are what many of us associate with the term. Understanding and managing the political landscape of your workplace is an [...]
(2-minute read) It’s Election Day, so let’s talk about politics. More specifically, let’s talk about remaining work friends when you disagree with your colleagues’ political beliefs. In our personal lives, we naturally surround ourselves with like-minded people. But at work, our roles require that we collaborate with lots of different people. We don’t have the [...]
(3-minute read) Why is it that when one person yawns, everyone yawns? The power of suggestion is strong in person and even more pronounced on video calls. Like most of us, I spend more time than I’d like on Zoom. Many calls that I organize and run involve executive or staff trainings. Yet, it’s the [...]
(3-minute read) Kudos to Ken Blanchard, author of the One-Minute Manager for his now- famous line, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” In today’s ‘open conversation’ culture, most of us avoid pointing out what we don’t know. All too often, when we hear something we don’t understand, or someone uses an [...]
