Next Generation Leadership

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...

One of the most common mistakes I see organizations make is assuming that every problem lives in people.

For a long time, I thought I was in the leadership business. Or maybe the culture business. And then, as organizations started navigating more and more disruption, I decided I was probably in the change business. I've come to think those were never actually the thing. They were the visible expression of something underneath — something I couldn't quite name for years, and have only recently...

This week I've been thinking about what people are really asking for when they ask for more communication. Every engagement survey says some version of the same thing. We want more transparency. More communication. More trust. We want to feel engaged. Leaders read those results and do the reasonable thing — they add. Another all-hands. A monthly update. A new channel. More words, sent more often,...