What do many of us do all day?  “We spend most of it putting out fires,” many leaders say.  And that’s the reality.  In a world of constant change and increasing demands, uncertainty is the new certainty.  We’re trapped in a burning building of crises.  No wonder many good people leave otherwise good organizations and … Read more

            Onboarding.  We often treat it as a checklist procedure, right?  It’s something we do using a clipboard (or the electronic equivalent of one).  Usually the HR team  monitors the clipboard, and we consider we’re being successful when all the blocks get checked within a certain time frame for each new hire. So if we’re … Read more

How many forgettable leadership programs have you attended?  I’d venture more than one, and each time we always ask ourselves as HR professionals and senior leaders, “Why did we do this?” as we put the glossy notebooks with colored tabs on the shelf – never to be opened again. With all this scar tissue, we … Read more

Wells Fargo. Enron.  The Challenger disaster. The Ford Pinto.  The Baylor University football program.  The list goes on for a long, long time.  These are examples of doing the wrong thing – often with the senior leadership actually leading the wrong, or at the very least condoning the wrongdoing. It would be almost natural at … Read more

Patience:  “The ability to remain calm and not become annoyed when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people”, per Merriam-Webster. If we as leaders have a consistent shortcoming other than being poor listeners, it is probably our lack of patience. And why should we? Far better in most cases … Read more

  One of the toughest tasks of leadership is the difficult conversation.  That’s why we don’t have them.  When team members consistently underperform, we tend to compensate through doing their work for them, and consciously or unconsciously making the rest of the team take up the slack.  Either way, we set the conditions for poor … Read more