Some leaders are making significant changes in how they think and act since COVID-19 turned the world upside down. This client’s story highlights lessons for many of us. When she was ten years old Sonia’s family immigrated to the United States from the Middle East....
“In my twenty years as an executive I’ve never been on such a dysfunctional a team,” “Coming to team meetings fills me with dread,” “I’ve been thrown under the bus so often I have tread marks on my back.” These were just some of the comments I heard during my...
Every client I work with complains that they need more effective cross-organizational collaboration. They say that collaboration is more crucial than ever, due to increasingly complex environments and the speed of change. Yet people still work in their silos and spend...
I can’t blame you if you greet this post with skepticism. Leadership and poetry seems like an oxymoron, like rain and San Diego. I’m even a little surprised you are still reading. But here are lessons from two senior executives who recently used poetry to align their...
Ann was upset with her boss. During a leadership program I was conducting she complained that he scheduled team meetings every Friday at 5pm. Oh, I said, 5pm on a Friday does sound like an unproductive time to meet. When I asked what her boss said when she confronted...
Two founding partners of a technology startup asked me to resolve some of their conflicts. Hal initially convinced me that Dave was an antagonistic bully. Dave then convinced me that Hal was a scheming weasel. Yet when I met them individually, they both seemed quite...
