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The unexpected link between humility and frustration
As I have written a few times before, the most promising trait to look for in a candidate is coachability. To be coachable, you need to be exceptionally humble, capable of listening to feedback and...
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Leaders everywhere: Your career is not the most important thing
Shortly after becoming a mid-level manager, I started my quest to acquire talent. My primary focus in bringing people to my team was finding people who were ridiculously capable, had strong...
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Brainrules: A different kind of attachment
I don't read nearly as much as I should. On plane rides I tend to grab a Vince Flynn, James Patterson or David Baldacci, they are usually enough to entertain me on the way there and back. One of the...
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8 red flags that might suggest you aren’t leading effectively
Imagine a room full of key functional leads at your company. They are sitting around a conference room table when someone from outside the company whom they have never met walks in. The woman asks...
View ArticleMore important: Where you are going or where you have been?
There is an interesting dynamic that occurs in most of our careers as we ascend the corporate ladder. The further from the bottom we get, the more meta our jobs become. We evolve such that we are less...
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Be careful what you incentivize: Outcomes vs. behaviors
[Special thanks to Nils Swart (@NLNils) for being my muse for this particular post. He says I don't give him enough credit for blog ideas.] There's a pretty interesting story I came across in a...
View ArticleThe source of corporate inertia: institutional memory
There was a study done with chimpanzees a couple of decades ago. Researchers put a collection of chimps in an enclosure from the top of which they hung a bunch of bananas. Every time a chimp went for...
View ArticleAre you suffering from Battered Employee Syndrome?
There is a very powerful psychology behind Battered Person Syndrome (sometimes called Battered Woman Syndrome). After prolonged exposure to abuse, battered people go through a psychological...
View ArticleDon’t ask before you take vacation
I returned from a vacation in Peru just last night. When I was going through my work emails, I came across one asking me if it was ok to take a half day of vacation the Wednesday before Thanksgiving...
View ArticleAct the part: Tuning your leadership skills
Certainly you have heard the cliche that you ought to dress for the job that you want, not the job you have. This has been a popular one among the leadership ranks for decades now, and it makes good...
View ArticleSmartest-person-in-the-room Complex
A few weeks ago, I came across one of those LinkedIn stories that pop up in everyone’s feed. Basically, it was an advice column dedicated to answering a question from someone who asked if he should...
View ArticleThe absence of No: Decision-making in corporate America
Picture this: you are sitting in a conference room surrounded by leaders and middle management. Someone has just finished delivering a presentation about whatever the hottest new project is. The...
View ArticleThe biggest source of individual failure: Shame
In 1997, Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin made a movie called The Edge. The basic premise of the movie is that a couple of people go down in a plane crash in the middle of the wilderness. They survive...
View ArticleNerves wrack us all
In my previous job, I delivered a lot of customer briefings at the Executive Briefing Center – to the tune of hundreds. At one point, I was the leading presenter for a couple of years in a row and had...
View ArticleSources and sinks: Which are you?
We all know people who are energizing to talk to. Whatever the topic, they are full of energy. They make ideas better. Moods improve when they are around. And there are people who fall into the...
View ArticlePositive feedback should roll uphill too
If you ask someone if feedback ought to go upward as easily as it goes downward, people will reflexively say yes. But how often does feedback really flow uphill? And when it does, is it positive or...
View ArticleCreating high-performance teams: Get rid of judgment
The biggest difference between high-performance teams and more average teams is that the high-performance group actually acts like a team. That statement is so obvious, I am going to let it stand on...
View ArticleJob hunting in tech: The company, the product, or the team?
There is nothing that is simultaneously more nerve-wracking and exhilarating than the hunt for a new job. For most of us, our search begins with identifying the companies that we hold in high regard....
View ArticleBright spots: Focus on what’s right, not what’s wrong
Before I get into this post, I want to credit one of the books responsible for shaping my experiences here. For anyone who is leading or wants to lead organizations, you simply must read the book...
View ArticleManaging the capability-experience gap
It is exceedingly difficult for individuals to match their capability to perform a job or function exactly with their experience in that role. For the upwardly mobile, being promoted into a new...
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