Let me tell you about the CEO of a multinational financial services firm who came to me absolutely convinced he had a serious strategy problem. His leadership team had agreed on a strategy two years earlier, and execution had been uneven ever since. To say the least. For eighteen months he’d been pushing on execution discipline: more tracking, more follow-up, more pressure. None of it produced the consistency he wanted.

After my last post on power techniques, the ways people make someone smaller in a meeting, several of you messaged me about your own experiences. So for the next couple of posts I’m going through how they work, what actually stops them, and how you can use them yourself once you see them. They’re far more common than I understood early in my career, when they first happened to me.

Some leadership behaviors really blow my mind, and there’s one I keep seeing over and over right now. The number is behind, year end is close, and the executive team answers it by piling on check-ins, status reports and follow-up meetings. It shows the opposite of what a confident leader with executive presence looks like. It shows loss of control and people scared for their own jobs. When a senior leader tells me this is how they’re handling it, I tell them to get their s#!t

Here’s something I’ve seen over and over lately. A woman comes to me for help with her leadership. Or with time management. Or a difficult team, executive presence, getting more influence, figuring out what the next step looks like. Sometimes she’s running her own company, and the question is why the business still can’t move without her. The problem she brings is always reasonable. It’s always something real. And then we start talking. I ask questions, I go a little deeper,

The first time I walked into an organization that was destroyed from the inside, the dysfunction was so far gone that journalists were writing front page news about it. The mayor and the council brought me in. Not to consult. To take it over and turn it around. The executive team, and people under them, were running shadow operations. The board had lost control -even though they pretended they hadn’t. The people still trying to lead with any integrity were being shut down,

A few weeks ago I told you about a client doing three other people's jobs and calling it being helpful. This is the other half of that story. A different client. Same machinery, one level deeper. Let's call her Savannah. Senior leader. She came to a session still turning over a promotion cycle that had just closed. She did not get the role. A peer did. Call him Michael. She was not falling apart about it. She was composed. She had a read on it, and she laid it out for me,

Kathryn called me at 9:47pm on a Tuesday. She had been refreshing her email since seven. Her boss was traveling, time zones off, and she was waiting on a response to something she had sent earlier that afternoon. Could have waited until morning. She knew that. Refreshed it anyway. Kathryn is three years into a VP role at a company most people would recognize. She got promoted because she earned it. The board approved her. Her boss is happy with her. By every objective measu

I was at a leadership offsite last month, and one of the leaders there, I'll call her Kelly, pulled me aside on a break. She wanted ten minutes about a person on her team. Let me tell you about him. We'll call him Brad. Brad reports to Kelly. They came up together once, roughly peers. Then Kelly got promoted and he did not. Since then something has been off. In their one-on-ones he complains about his title, his workload, his pay. When Kelly's boss is in the room, he is me

I had a call last week with a client. Let's call her Salma. Salma is in one of those leadership development programs, the kind a company puts its high-potential people into. Someone senior nominated her for it. She was picked out of a very large group. On paper, she is doing everything right. Early in the call she told me the program had given her an assignment, and she was a little embarrassed about it. The assignment was simple. Write down where you want to be...

I have now done five Pilates classes. Yesterday was the fifth. I can barely walk today. My butt muscles are so sore that going down the stairs in the ranch house this morning was a project. The Cowboy asked if I needed help. I said no. I did not need help. I needed a different body. Here is the schedule I have lined up for the week. Wednesday, private class. Thursday, 6:30am class. Saturday, 8am class. A logical person, in my current condition, would cancel at least one of