What part of you do people see? Great leadership requires awareness of your unconscious thoughts and behaviors, and the willingness to examine how others experience them. Alignment is the goal. Are your intentions and actions aligned with how others experience you? If not, what gets in the way? Fear: Unconscious or consciously, we are always navigating safety. Protecting our fears and eliminating threats. Childhood: Many of the defense mechanisms that we developed were extrem

Organizations will naturally pull you beneath the surface. Leadership is the discipline of coming up for air and resisting the pull. Have you ever been snorkeling? You put your face in the water and a whole new world emerges. It is easy to lose yourself in the colors and wonder of the light, the coral, and the fish. And then, without realizing it, time passes. You forget to look up. You stop surveying the beach, checking for boats, noticing changing currents. You become lost

In cardiology, “irregularly irregular” describes a heart rhythm with no predictable pattern. Even the irregularity is unpredictable. Leaders can do this too. If you are consistently difficult, I can develop a strategy for navigating you. But erratic unpredictability creates something different: stress, anxiety, and hypervigilance. Energy is spent watching, assessing, and navigating rather than strategizing, collaborating, and challenging. I am reading Careless People, and thi

My goal this year is to give you fewer solutions and more ideas that make you stop, question, and think. Because something has changed. AI has arrived! When answers become cheap, questions become valuable. Type in a question and bam! Answer. I worry that the convenience and speed of answers will allow complacency and dull our thinking. The scarce resource is no longer information. It is the ability to ask a really good question. AI can synthesize extraordinary amounts of in

Your’e in the ocean, feet in the sand and in the next second the ground disappears beneath you with the incoming wave. Disconcerting. Stable one moment, uncertain the next. Leadership can feel much the same way. You have done the work. Clear communication. Strategic thinking. Accountability. And it is working! The team is collaborating. Communication is improving.Trust is building. Yet somewhere in the back of your mind, the question lingers: “When is the shoe going to drop?”

When organizations cut leadership development to survive today, they often sacrifice the very leaders and innovators required to help them thrive tomorrow. It’s a popular move. When money is tight, the first things to go are coaching, mentoring, skill building, and training. Cut the “extras” and focus only on immediate results. Shortsighted, to say the least. What often follows is short-term relief paired with long-term instability. Negativity goes unchecked. Harmful microbeh

I am a romantic at heart, today I stumbled across a pile of love letters from years ago. As I read these beautiful notes I was struck by...

Is being a controller serving you well? Who do you want to be and what are you prepared to do to get there? Many of you let me know that...

In Positive Intelligence there are 10 identified “saboteurs”; these are behavioral and cognitive traits that shape the foundational...

Met·a·cog·ni·tion noun: awareness and understanding of one’s own thought process.It refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and...