How to Regulate Your Nervous System When the Problem Can’t Be Solved
Almost four years ago I spent time at the Next Practice Institute, learning how to work with complexity from Carolyn Coughlin. That week has stayed with me ever since. It did not hand me a set of answers. It gave me a way to keep moving when there are no answers, which Carolyn describes as […]
The Real Reason Employee Engagement Keeps Falling
Gallup’s newest State of the Global Workplace report landed with a number that should stop every executive mid-scroll: just 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, the lowest reading since 2020. The cost of all that checked-out capacity? Roughly $10 trillion a year in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP. Here’s what troubles […]
Compassion Is Not Nice. It’s the Leadership Edge the AI Age Demands
Fear works. That’s the uncomfortable truth almost nobody in leadership development wants to say out loud. Fear hits deadlines. Shame gets the report turned in. Command-and-control produces results, but only in the short run. That method also burns people out, destroys trust, and builds cultures that function only by consuming the very people inside them. […]
What Leading in Chaos Actually Requires
Leaders spend 60-70% of their time in meetings. And 60-70% of people will tell you those meetings are ineffective. We keep running this madness anyway. More meetings, more speed, more effort. I’ve believed for years that this is not a productivity problem. It’s a presence problem. In a recent conversation on the Flourishing Edge podcast, […]
What an Employee Engagement Program Really Is (and Why the Standard Definition Falls Short)
Ask ten leaders to define an employee engagement program and you tend to get ten versions of the same answer. An annual survey. A recognition platform, organizational health assessment. A few perks, an annual pulse check, maybe a technology solution. The tools vary, but the assumption underneath them almost never does. Engagement is treated as something you […]
What 700 CEOs Do Before Their To-Do List
Most leaders I know start the morning with a to-do list. Very few start with a to-be list. That distinction, small as it sounds, may be the clearest line I have seen between leaders who inspire and leaders who merely instruct and it comes from an unusual dataset: the 700 CEOs who have gone through […]
Improv Is the Leadership Skill AI Cannot Replace
Three years ago I walked away from a 17 year career at McKinsey. The reason was simple. Since the days of the Model T we have become extraordinary at optimizing physical assets. Machines, plants, supply chains, capital. We never learned to do the same for people. Most organizations still treat the humans on the payroll […]
Miserably Successful: Why the Change You Want Starts Within
~80 to 90% of the time, we’re running on our sympathetic nervous system. That’s what our research found when I was at McKinsey. Fight or flight, all day long. Foot on the gas, tank near empty. Here’s the part that took me years to understand: no promotion, no title, no perfectly curated external life actually […]
Will AI Make Work More Human? The Choice Is Ours
I asked a partner at a consulting firm what he was doing with all the time AI had given him back. He told me about the process of evaluating employees on his team, the review cycle that comes around every year. Evaluating a single person used to take him four hours: reading his notes, writing […]
We Spent $50 Billion on Recognition. People Feel Less Seen Than Ever.
We have never invested more in making people feel valued at work. Recognition platforms. Wellbeing programs. Perks, points, awards, even pet care benefits. We have outsourced recognition to a 50 billion dollar industry. People are more disengaged than ever. I have spent years studying what makes people flourish, and the answer keeps surprising leaders. It […]