Leadership

The Ladder of Problem-Solving Expertise

Have you ever attended a meeting that was called to solve a problem and exited the meeting feeling that the meeting was a catastrophic waste of everyone’s time. You’re not alone. Most of us have been in that room. And most of us, if we’re honest, have also led that room. Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with leaders and teams: the quality of a problem-solving meeting is not primarily a function of the people in the room. It’s a function of the level at which the leader chooses to operate. In my experience, when done […]

Leadership

Are You Burning Out Your Team?

The problem One of the findings of the 2023 Work in America™ Survey was that Workplace stress remained at a concerning level, with 77% of workers having reported experiencing work-related stress in the last month. Further, 57% indicated experiencing negative impacts because of work-related stress that are sometimes associated with workplace burnout. This burnout is not just due to having too much work. This overwhelm is due to a combination of various reasons, including but not limited to information overload, cognitive overload, technology and related change initiatives, attention fragmentation and unclear expectations. And as leaders, we are responsible to address this […]

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 […]