Insights

There’s nothing like an election season to make sport of the blame game. “If my opponent were doing what I’m doing instead of what they’re doing, everything would be fine.” Or worse, “If my opponent would stop doing the thing I’m accusing them of but doing myself, everything would be fine.” I’ve been talking to […]

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a senior leader at a Fortune 500 company. That means that her organization has a pipeline for new talent hiring. And when I asked what her biggest challenges are, she said “diversity in the hiring pipeline.” “But not by the traditional DEI measures,” she said. “The company […]

This month’s Harvard Business Review has a photo of an office chair with a five-point seatbelt on it, as in, “Prepare for turbulence!” What?! As it is, we’ve been dancing on a rolling log for the past few years. It’s like a guy with a “mua-hah-hah!” laugh is about to throw a bucket of oil […]

Polarizing may not be the term you use, but you know this person. They are extremely good at something the organization needs — operations, digital media, sales —  and they are loved by a few. At the same time, you are forever recruiting because of high turnover in their team, your HR office has become […]

Years ago on vacation, I saw a t-shirt that said, “Beatings will continue until morale improves!” As ridiculous as that sounds, again and again, I see team leaders use this approach. They believe performance will improve when employees are directly confronted with their weaknesses, so they can get to work fixing them. And are surprised when […]

Yesterday I attended the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. The opening session featured Dan Schuman from PayPal and Lynn Forester from Inclusive Capital Partners and the topic was stakeholder capitalism.They called out Virtue Signaling,Green washing, and Wall St hijacking ESG, are all the tropes of putting on a good show but not doing […]

Technically it’s not the new year, but September always carries expectations. Which inevitably rolls into a bunch of “shoulds.” Which pretty quickly can lead to overwhelm….and exhaustion. Monday was that day for me. The expectations and shoulds sounded like, “Summer’s over! You had a great time. You did amazing things. Now that you are rested […]

In my corporate trainings, I often joke that the 3-Martini lunch is dead. And that’s not good. Yes, executives can walk a straight line when they get back to the office. OK, that is good. But what’s lost is the connection and skills and experience transfer that used to come from spending time with the […]

I wrote this week’s post in advance. And I’ll post it two weeks in a row. You won’t see me writing in real time from some fabulous location about how wonderful it is to be on vacation. That doesn’t sound restful to me.   I won’t write, or see clients, even though those are my […]

I don’t know if it’s a New York fashion and cosmetics thing, but most people I know have had a “Devil.”   Mine was so harsh in meetings, that when we’d leave my colleague would say, “Oh, sweetie, I can see your two black eyes.” Morally beaten down, and totally, totally disengaged. You probably think […]