Next Generation Leadership

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,...

I was in a room a few months ago with a leadership team that had done everything right. They had dashboards. They had a real strategic plan — a good one. Quarterly OKRs. An engagement survey with an 80-something percent response rate. A data team that could pull any number you asked for in about four minutes. And when I asked them one simple question — "Where is this organization right now?" — I...

One of the most profound realities of organizational life is this: Employees don't actually experience "the organization." They experience their manager. A strategic plan is finalized and announced.The organizational values are on the website for everyone to see. The email from the executive is delivered to all-staff. And yet, depending on who someone's manager is, the experience can be...

I’ve been at a lot of “family and friends” events lately. Sometimes the family and friends are family of friends, people I don’t even know and have no context for knowing. Of course, I have to make small talk. That’s what we do, isn’t it?

For years, conversations about organizational effectiveness have focused on familiar questions: How do we improve collaboration? How do we make better decisions? How do we become more efficient? How do we reduce duplication of effort? Those are important questions. But increasingly, I think they are secondary questions. The real insight is not that organizational effectiveness...

“I took a management skills workshop that you led 15 years. It changed the trajectory of my career. My biggest take away was that management doesn’t have to be scary or intimidating, and that as a manager, I’m not being mean by sometimes having the tough conversations. You have this ‘kind but firm’ approach that really stuck with me.” This was the beginning of a conversation last week; a dean...

There’s a moment many leaders are finding themselves in right now—and it doesn’t always have a clean name. It shows up somewhere between intention and reality. You’ve set direction. You’ve aligned on priorities. You’ve named what success looks like. And then, almost immediately, something shifts. Not enough to start over. But enough that what you defined no longer fits quite the same way. And...