Tough Talk, Tough Listen

  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

Ending the Curse of Bad Meetings

How many of us have endured bad meetings?  How many still do?  The fact is, most of us fall into both categories.  We’ve grown up with bad meetings, and now we perpetuate them on others as sort of a leadership punishment mandate – whereby we feel a perverse obligation to make our team suffer as … Read more

What’s Your Why?

“I’m sure there is a reason why we have to walk along the sides of the hallways and square all of the corners inside buildings, they just don’t tell us.”  West Point Plebe (freshman), in a video from the late 1980s All too often, it seems, we hear the request “Why?” from people we work … Read more

Establishing a Climate of Openness

As we wrote in our last blog on creating a high performing culture, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson established the concept that a climate of openness is one of the three main conditions for building an environment of “psychological safety” among teams. So how do you get there?

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A High Performing Culture Requires Psychological Safety

Did you know that developing strong leaders does not necessarily translate into strong teams? You may have developed the best leaders, but unless you cultivate a culture defined by openness, learning, and trust, it will all be for naught. That is because most of us do not work individually or independently. Most of us work … Read more