Good at the work. Promoted for it. Nobody rewired you for the switch.So you do what you’re good at. You do the work yourself, or you check everyone else’s version of it against how you’d have done it. It feels like leadership. It’s actually the opposite, and the tell is simple: the operation can only
Money missing. A theory that felt obvious. Nobody had actually checked it.A company had coin-counting machines losing money across its whole network. Month after month, the losses kept coming. The company had a theory: theft. Someone on the transport crews was skimming cash before it ever got counted.So they investigated people. Travel, hotel stays, hours
At a recent strategy session, a leadership team spent 45 minutes reviewing an AI initiative that hadn’t produced a single measurable result in six months.The vendor was still “onboarding.”The executive sponsor was still presenting the same hockey-stick slide from the kickoff deck.Nobody asked the hard question.Here’s what nobody in that room was willing to say
Nobody warned me about this when I started leading teams. The higher you climb, the worse your information gets. Not because people lie to you. Because they curate for you. Bad news gets softened. Concerns get swallowed. What your team actually thinks gets translated into something safer by the time it reaches your ear. Welcome to the bad
“The lesser evil is still evil.” – Hannah ArendtIn 1952, Miller and Murray put rats in harnesses and measured pull strength. The rats pulled harder to escape a learned fear than they pulled toward food. Fear outpulled desire. Seventy years of replication later, the gradient still holds. Humans aren’t rats. But the biology isn’t optional – avoidance is
Most soft skills training has a sequencing problem. You take an active listening module. Then a feedback module. Then something on conflict resolution. Each one is packaged neatly, assessed cleanly, and checked off a list. Then you walk into a real conversation and the wheels come off. Not because you didn’t learn the material – but because real
From the newsfeed:”The proliferation of AI has led to a growing “faux-expert” crisis, allowing those with little actual leadership skills to gain influence through AI-generated insights and polished narratives” (John Winsor, the founder and chairman of Open Assembly)Yep, now we are competing with AI-infused personas. Predictable and unfortunate but hardly a crisis. Here’s the deal: Every one
… And Other Things the Gurus Won’t Tell YouTerms that rub a raw spot:”Irregardless””Outside the box”Labels (Millennial, Gen Z, Gen X, etc.)and the newest entry:”Clarity”Yes, I know, I use it, too. But good grief, it is everywhere. I now see this as a growing issue because it is used as an end state that, frankly,
How Collaboration Bias Is Quietly Killing Your Team’s Best DecisionsThe meeting was supposed to produce a decision. I was brought in to facilitate.One camp wanted harmony. One camp wanted answers. Everyone else just wanted to move on.A senior leader finally broke the silence: “Whatever the group thinks.”That should’ve been a red flag. Instead, it was
More than 2 decades ago, one of my fave mentors suggested I start using Evernote as my “second brain”. Initially, I used the basic features but when I started pondering all of the more advanced features, I scaled back my usage instead. A year or so later, I returned to Evernote and embraced many of the advanced
