Most leadership books teach high-level principles and so-called “laws.” I’ve read books that tell the reader to create purpose or meaning for their followers, or to engage them, without describing how to do those things. Leadership is experiential. We gain high-level principles from experience, not the other way around. High-level instruction like that doesn’t help people learn to lead. It helps the people who need it most least. It’s like[…] Keep reading →

Within the first few steps of this morning’s run, I could tell I didn’t have the energy I normally did. I kept running anyway. I don’t know why sometimes my body has less energy. Sometimes my legs feel like lead. Other times I have tons of energy. I haven’t done a long run, nor pushed myself hard on the rowing machine lately. I surfed earlier this week, which takes a[…] Keep reading →

If you’ve sat in a traffic jam on a highway, you’ve thought to yourself “If they only built an extra lane, I could pass all this congestion. Why don’t they build an extra lane to this highway? Or build an alternative route?” This type of questioning led to building many new roads and widening many existing ones for decades. Eventually people realized the flaws in that thinking. University of Toronto[…] Keep reading →

Following up yesterday’s post about conversational mistakes, here’s another I see all the time. This one is more serious than yesterday’s for two reasons. First, it will more likely kill a conversation. Second, people who do it seem unable to stop themselves, even when they realize the problem. It affects all types of conversations, but I’ll describe it in the context of my Meaningful Connection exercise. It goes like this:[…] Keep reading →

I see the following conversational mistake a lot. While it doesn’t necessarily kill a conversation, if you want to have great conversations, it helps to know what you’re doing. If you’re reading this blog, with the phrase “If you want extraordinary performance, know extraordinary performers” on the top left of the home page, you probably want to perform extraordinarily. It came up when I was coaching a friend on Meaningful[…] Keep reading →

Kids often say things more clearly than adults. Actually, I think I should credit the insight below as much to inquiry-driven project-based learning as to the innocence of youth. Context: When I visited Science Leadership Academy last winter, a student led a tour of the school. A question came up about school uniforms, which the school didn’t have. During the discussion on the topic, someone asked if any problems ever[…] Keep reading →

“My manager sucks. How do I get them to manage me better?” People ask me this question all the time. The words differ for each person but the concept is the same. Probably every client I’ve coached, no matter what issue they started with, also wanted to work on improving their situation with their manager. Having coached enough on it, I’m putting the main concepts here. If I see demand[…] Keep reading →