Last year, I had the opportunity to participate in a strategic planning process for a local nonprofit. It started out as a way for me to give back in terms of my experience with leadership and corporate culture. In reality, it ended up being a big lesson for me. Let me explain. I’d been through [...]
I am humbled by the leaders who have continued to produce at high levels during the past two years. Think about the intense layer of challenges they have been facing during these unprecedented times: A global pandemic that forced an instant disconnect with remote teams The need to support employees struggling with the uncertainties about [...]
In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, I’d like to share some of my insights about the natural characteristics among Hispanic professionals that tend to make them influential and charismatic leaders. What qualifies me to weigh in on this topic? My father is a second-generation Hispanic from Mexico. I also grew up in the border [...]
Prickly discussion topics have been rippling through workplaces since 2020, and today’s leaders are getting plenty of industry advice about how to handle them. Just check out these business journal headlines: “How to moderate the work-from-home debates that are dividing companies nationwide.” “How to facilitate conversations with your team about social unrest and lapses in [...]
Most people would agree that 2020 was a rough year, but there’s one group that felt the pain in a unique way: leaders. While they were personally struggling to process the uncertainty of the pandemic, they were also bombarded with information about how to help their team members navigate the situation. They felt responsible for monitoring [...]
As someone who coaches, advises and speaks to leaders for a living, I do my best to arm them with insights and strategies to handle our volatile, uncertain, and always-on world. Now, with leadership conferences and workshops cancelled due to the global pandemic, it’s time for me to demonstrate that I practice what I preach. [...]
While speed and efficiency are necessary leadership traits in our always-on, do-more world, there’s also a point of diminishing returns. If we let agendas and clocks dictate all of our meetings, we could be undermining our own efforts to encourage meaningful collaboration and innovative thinking. Consider the unfortunate impact. Many people are reluctant to speak [...]
Every day we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. This information has led to some tremendous breakthroughs with the potential to improve thousands of lives. As leaders, we also have mountains of data available to us—honestly, more than we can assimilate or make sense of. Yet huge decisions are made every day based solely on [...]
This year, Netflix released a wildly popular new program called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. In the series, Japanese organization expert Marie Kondo visits the clutter-heavy homes of selected American families and helps them tidy up using her now-famous KonMari method. The springboard for this media sensation was Kondo’s worldwide best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic [...]
Many companies today are worried they don't have the right leadership to succeed in the digital and disruptive age. Maybe they've got it all wrong. What if they actually have the right leaders—but they’re being held hostage by the same old expectations, metrics, and rewards? Here’s the problem. The very nature of business is continually [...]