One of my best friends from college, Scot, used to talk about how he wished he had a soundtrack for his life that would play as he meandered through. Before digital music, that was a bit of an impossibility, but now, you could almost cobble together some version of that if you liked…
We are working with a company on the back end of cleaning up an incredible mess. Unknown to them, two key employees seem to have “quiet quit” many months before they actually left. Like a college student going through the motions for an entire semester, fooling everyone but themselves, the report card at the end of the term was a sobering reality to those who didn’t know…
I met with a leader of a large company before their annual offsite. We were scripting the event, and I wanted to help him create an introductory statement of where he felt they were and how he thought they were doing. He struggled mightily to say much good…
Sometimes when we work with a senior leader with a struggling area of their business, they are forced to make a leadership change. They level all their efforts on getting a proper replacement. But rather than hastily making the new hire, we often ask them to embody the role of the exiting leader for a season as a first step…
I was having coffee and working on a project ahead of a lunch meeting. A younger man I used to coach came into the shop, noticed me, and joined me at my table for two. There was a lightness and ease with him that surprised me. He was expressing the joy he was experiencing in this season and giving me updates on how well his professional and personal life was trending…
There is a woman in one of our leadership classes that I'm especially drawn to. She is a brilliant and successful leader who can take charge and "get things done." When she came to her first meeting several years ago, she had this authentic beauty about her, but it was buried under years of pain and heartache that gave rise to a defensive posture and unattainable perfectionism. The tenderness in her eyes didn't match the clinching of her jaws, but it was there.
