May 5

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May 2025 Leadership Development Carnival

By Sara Canaday

May 5, 2025

career success, leadership, leadership development, professional development

The May 2025 Leadership Development Carnival brings together fresh, practical insights from leadership experts around the world. Inside, you’ll find strategies for leading through change, cultivating a culture of trust, and inspiring creativity when it matters most. Whether you’re guiding a team through uncertainty or focused on driving meaningful results, this curated collection delivers grounded advice to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and real-world impact.

Communication

Sean Glaze | The Seven Steps of the Change Process and How It Sounds to Become Coachable

Understanding the emotional journey of change – the 7 stages of team adaptation – is crucial for navigating these potentially choppy waters. That’s why it is helpful to be able to recognize what people say in the seven steps of the change process.

David Grossman | Resistance to Change in the Workplace: How to Overcome It

Resistance to change is one of the most common (and costly) challenges organizations face. Whether it shows up as disengagement, pushback, or quiet compliance, it can derail even the most promising initiatives. This practical guide explores the psychology behind resistance, how it manifests, and what communicators and leaders can do to address it head-on and help employees not just accept change—but champion it.

Diana Peterson-More | The No Surprises Rule: The Power of Apology

Unless it’s a birthday party, a marriage proposal, or a public display of gratitude by a boss, most of us don’t like to be surprised. Some don’t even like to be surprised by those three happy events! What about unhappy or negative events, situations, or circumstances in the workplace? Do bosses like to be surprised after the fact? What about implementing the no-surprises rule?

Creativity/Inspiration

Jon Lokhorst | Pressing the Pause Button on Leadership Goals

Do you ever find yourself running faster and faster, striving to keep up with your leadership responsibilities? Though it may seem counterintuitive, slowing down to take a pause can have you moving further and faster toward your professional development and leadership goals.

Bernd Geropp | My Personal Learnings From The Past 3 Weeks

My personal impressions, encounters, and entrepreneurial experiences from the last 3 weeks traveling in India, Masterminding and Networking.

Bill Treasurer | How To Inspire Workplace Creativity

Inspiring creativity in the workplace isn’t just about encouraging new ideas. It’s about disrupting routines and helping people see their work in fresh, meaningful ways. Learn how open-door leaders can spark imagination and drive innovation by creating environments that shift thinking and energize teams.

Culture

Brenda Yoho | Critical Pieces of Leadership

Culture is the critical piece that determines whether strategies thrive or die. It’s the invisible force that holds everything together—or tears everything apart. A strong culture is not built by accident. It is formed through a clearly defined mission, vision, and values—and most importantly, through daily actions and behaviors aligned to them.

Development

Art Petty | Managers, pay attention to the coaching trilogy to support growth

Guidance every manager needs to strengthen their effectiveness as coaches for their team members.

Frank Sonnenberg | If You Don’t Stand For Something, You’ll Fall for Anything

If you haven’t defined your beliefs and values, the world will make that decision for you.

Ann Van Eron | Gratitude and Contribution: Fuel for Joy and Motivation

Appreciating who we are and what we have is a worthy habit to cultivate. I encourage you to make it part of your daily rhythm—pause for a few moments each day to reflect on what you’re grateful for. Even in difficult times, there is always something to appreciate. We are deeply interconnected, and recognizing the support, beauty, and connection in our lives changes how we show up. But there’s another practice that is just as powerful and often overlooked: reflecting on your contribution.

Engagement

Michael Lee Stallard | From DEI to human connection: A better way to unlock human potential

After several years of emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, many organizations are now moving away from these initiatives. Michael Lee Stallard suggests that leaders consider filling the void left by DEI with something ultimately more effective: fostering a connection culture where people feel seen, valued, and heard.

Julie Winkle Giulioni | When You Can’t Fix It, Care: The Leadership Imperative for Uncertain Times

In today’s turbulent work environment, uncertainty is testing the resilience of employees and the resolve of leaders alike. When solutions are scarce and outcomes unclear, the most powerful thing a leader can do is simple—but profound: care.

Foresight

Marcella Bremer | Foresight: facing our futures from worst to best

Our images of possible futures are crucial to what future becomes a reality. Many people dread the future privately. But at work, anything else than progress and (techno)optimism is a taboo. Yet, anticipating the worst may help us work toward better tomorrows…

Inclusion

Angela Hummel | Embracing Life’s Transitions: Let’s Reframe “Resume Gaps” as “Life Milestones” Life happens outside of work. It’s time to stop viewing time spent away from the workforce as a negative and instead recognize it as an opportunity for personal growth, reflection, and invaluable life experiences. Embrace “Life Milestones” on resumes, and allow those experiences to enrich your hiring process.

Leadership

John Spence | What the Great Recession Taught Me About Leadership

What did the Great Recession really teach us? In this article, I share three lessons I watched companies learn the hard way—and why they still matter now more than ever. I also break down what leaders need to do right now to move forward with clarity, courage, and action. Leadership

Process Improvement

Jon Verbeck | Run Your Business Like a Pilot: The Power of a Weekly Financial Dashboard

Imagine a pilot only checking the plane’s instruments once a month. Sounds insane, right? Yet that’s exactly how many business owners operate—waiting for monthly financials to tell them what already happened, but successful leaders don’t fly blind.

Productivity

Priscilla Archangel | Navigating Rocks in the Fog

As leaders we come to expect certain challenges in our work. We believe we know the controllable forces vs the variable forces. But what happens when the basis of our expectations, the very foundation that we operate on, presents new and unimaginable obstacles that present unbelievable and disheartening roadblocks?

Sara Canaday | How to Cut Through Mental Clutter and Reclaim Your Engagement & Focus

This piece explores the often-overlooked internal distractions that silently drain a leader’s energy and clarity, those unresolved issues or conversations that hijack focus without setting off alarms. While external demands and priorities are easy to spot, it’s the lingering, unspoken challenges that often cloud our thinking and impact.

Relationships

Randy Conley | What Kind of Trust Are You Feeling? A Simple Map to the 4 Ways We Connect

There’s a kind of magic that happens when we trust someone—but have you ever stopped to wonder what kind of trust you’re feeling? In this post, Randy shares the four kinds of trust we experience in relationships and how we can build greater trust with others.

Resolving Conflict

Mary Ila Ward | Conflict, Conflict Everywhere: How to Resolve Conflict at Work

As we launch our series on how to resolve conflict at work, I can’t help but think about this story my friend shared with me. If you are a leader in an organization, you can take your first cue from this story and realize that if you don’t know the stress that others may be under (inside or outside of work) and actively work to help them manage it, you may not be the best leader.

Work Culture

S.Chris Edmonds | Want a culture of respect? Here’s how to build it Simply announcing your values and behaviors doesn’t mean people immediately embrace them. Senior leaders must model, celebrate, measure, coach and mentor your valued behaviors daily to build credibility for the change and to ensure all leaders and team members embrace your ideal work culture.

Leadership is a Continuous Journey

The insights shared here remind us that leadership is a continuous journey of learning, adapting, and connecting. As you reflect on these powerful ideas, challenge yourself to put them into action—whether it’s fostering deeper trust, navigating change with greater empathy, or building a culture of creativity and respect. Small steps today can create lasting impact tomorrow. Let’s lead forward, together.

Found a post that sparked new ideas? Take action—share your thoughts, tag the authors, and keep the momentum going with #LeadershipCarnival!

Until next time,

Sara Canaday

About the author

Sara began her journey working full-time while she earned an MBA. As she climbed the ladder of corporate America, she repeatedly observed a surprising phenomenon: the most successful people weren’t necessarily the ones with the highest IQ or best job skills. She recognized instead that career advancement was much more closely linked with how people applied their knowledge and talents — their capacity to collaborate, communicate, and influence others.

Today, Sara is happily fulfilling that commitment as a keynote speaker, author, and executive coach. These venues have given her the opportunity to mentor and support thousands of people in diverse situations, inspiring many of them to move from insight to action with dramatic career results.

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