Next Generation Leadership

Managing Up Is a Skill You Can Build Think about the last time you walked out of your supervisor's office frustrated. Maybe you'd made a case for more staff on a project, or a new service, or a change in how your unit works. You had the facts. You'd thought it through. And the conversation ended somewhere between a polite "let me think about it" and a quiet no. Most managers I work with can name...

Every organization has one.

You're in a meeting with a colleague. They've just walked you through an idea — a plan, a proposal, a first draft of something they clearly put real effort into — and you want to be useful, so you jump in with a question: "Have you thought about doing it this way instead?"

Saturday was the first football game of the season. My son is a first-year student and football player at Tennessee State University. He didn't play — not surprising for a first-year player — but you couldn't have kept me away. It was the John Merritt Classic: Tennessee State and Jackson State, two Historically Black Colleges and Universities, opening the season in Nashville. And yes, there was...

We underestimate decision-making.

If you asked me the number one “topic” people come to me about, I would say communication. That's the specific word cited most often. When I ask more questions, what gets shared ranges from trust to transparency, from inclusivity to managerial effectiveness. But when we finally land on the actual thing, 99% of the time, the real topic is decision making.

Here is something I have watched play out in organizations for years, and it still catches people by surprise. We complain about something for months, sometimes for years. "Nobody knows who to go to to make a decision." "There's no coordination across departments, and when it does happen, it's fraught with miscommunication." "Our silos are making it impossible to get work done without twice...

A few months ago, I went to Bangkok. It was magical. And one of the first things I did — right off the plane — was climb onto the back of a scooter. A little Vespa. You order it on an app, the way we order an Uber at home. Up pulls a driver who looked all of fifteen, hands me a helmet, and tells me to hop on. He was going to take me to a restaurant on the river — about ten miles away, over a...

We love a butterfly. We rarely think about the cocoon.

We have a phrase for what happens to managers, and I've come to think the phrase is a small act of dishonesty. We call it a skills gap. I want to take it apart, because naming it correctly changes what we do about it. Start with how someone becomes a manager. Almost always, it's a reward for being excellent at the work. The strongest clinician. The most reliable analyst. The person the whole...