Leadership

Leading in Two Time Zones

Premise: One of the biggest struggles that we, as leaders, need to deal with is the need to balance activities that lead to high performance today, while getting the team ready to deliver high performance in the future or, in other words, display contextual ambidexterity, as defined by Gibson and Birkinshaw in their MIT Sloan Management Review article in 2004. This creates tension. In a fast-changing context, what drives high performance today, usually is not what drives high performance in the future. And it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much in delivering current performance while […]

Leadership

How to Deal with a Toxic Leader

I listened to the tiger sisters talk about how to deal with a toxic boss and really liked how they approached this topic. You can watch the entire episode here. If you don’t have the 35 min time to watch the entire video, here is the jist of the conversation. We’ve all been there, or known someone who has had the experience of working for a toxic leader. You wake up dreading going to work, where you’re constantly second-guessing every move you make. Work is hard enough, but a toxic boss makes it ten thousand times harder. 1. Is Your […]

Leadership

Curate A High Performance Culture by Celebrating Small Wins Daily

Premise: I did a 100-day challenge of clicking a picture and sharing it on Instagram of something that I thought was beautiful. Now, I constantly see beautiful things all around me wherever I go. Being intentional about what we want to notice, results in our brains getting very good at noticing it all around us. Leadership works the same way. Culture is shaped not only by strategy and incentives, but by what leaders consistently notice, celebrate and tolerate. From childhood we are trained to find and focus on what is wrong instead of focusing on what is right. When we […]

Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Improv Comedy?

Premise It was a Sunday evening, and we had decided to go attend a theatre performance. It was not a typical performance, well rehearsed, with carefully scripted dialogues, choreographed movements or a strong background music. Instead, two people walked onto a bare stage and asked us, the audience, some simple questions to come up with a scene, a place, some characters and a situation. There was no script. No rehearsal. No safety net. They had to act out the scene and move the situation forward. An actor starts the show and says something absurd (since it is a comedy show). […]

Leadership

Shifting From Human Resources to Human Beings

Premise Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that globally, employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, matching the size of the drop seen at the height of COVID lockdowns. This level of drop has only happened twice in the last 15 years. Even a single percentage point increase in engagement can lead to millions of dollars in productivity gain. This made me think about the reasons for this drop and I believe that the answer is hiding in plain sight. It lives in two words. Two words that have become so deeply embedded in the vocabulary […]