Next Generation Leadership

A few years ago, I coached a manager who was facing an impossible choice. Budget cuts meant her team had to be reshuffled. No option was good. Every path would create pain, disruption, and disappointment. She told me: “I’m paralyzed. I don’t want to choose wrong.” That’s the gray zone.

In every era, leadership has been defined by a scarce resource. At one time it was land, then capital, then information. Today, in a world overflowing with data, tools, and competing priorities, the resource that sets leaders apart is neither money nor knowledge. It’s trust.

For many managers and leaders, “playing it safe” feels like the responsible thing to do. Stick to what you know. Avoid rocking the boat. Don’t risk making mistakes. On the surface, it seems like a protective strategy—for yourself, your team, and your organization.

Resilience is a word we’ve all heard a thousand times. It’s celebrated in leadership books, motivational speeches, and even corporate slogans: Bounce back. Power through. Keep going. At its core, resilience means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty. It’s the ability to get knocked down and stand back up again.

—and how The Inclusive Manager’s Toolkit and CultureRoad Close the Gap In today’s volatile workplace, traditional leadership playbooks don’t work. Here’s why managers need a new model—and how ongoing support ensures lasting impact. Engagement, culture, and leadership aren’t just aspirational ideas—they’re measurable drivers of organizational success. Consider this:

We are living in a paradoxical moment. Never before have we had such extraordinary access to knowledge, technology, and global networks—yet many leaders describe their daily reality as one of chaos. Economic volatility, social fragmentation, climate disruption, and rapid advances in AI are reshaping how we live and work. For leaders, the question is no longer if we will face uncertainty, but how...

Accountability. It’s a word managers often use, but few feel confident about executing well. Leaders are asked to “hold people accountable,” but what does that actually mean—and why is it so critical to organizational success?

It’s a common leadership pitfall: a decision is made with the best of intentions—sound reasoning, thoughtful input, even a hopeful eye toward progress. But when it’s rolled out? Resistance. Confusion. Distrust. The backlash can feel disproportionate to the substance of the decision itself.

There is a moment—sometimes it stretches for days, weeks, even months—when we find ourselves not quite where we were, and not yet where we’re going. A moment in between. That’s where I am right now. Not at the beginning. Not at the end. Just… here.

Certainty is the quality of being reliably true, fixed, or guaranteed.