Reading Time: 5 minutesWhat a stubborn horse taught me about leading people A horse knows what you’re feeling before you know it yourself. Pull the reins too tight and the animal fights you. Let them hang slack and the animal decides where you’re both going. Somewhere between those two is the grip that works, and finding it is […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesYou’re setting the tone whether you mean to or not. Every leader leaves a wake. Few of us ever turn around to look at it. Jason Kaplan’s LinkedIn post, the Ripple Effect of Leadership, crossed my feed and lingered. He described leadership the way you’d describe a stone dropped in water. Every decision, every word,
The Monday the Room Went Quiet Read More »
Reading Time: 7 minutesThe Exercise That Started It More than twenty years ago, I was drifting. On the surface, everything looked fine. Career moving forward, hitting my targets, earning praise for my work. Inside, I felt a growing frustration. Work kept pulling me in directions that didn’t feel right, and I couldn’t figure out why. Vicki Flier
When “Values” Became V-AL-UES Read More »
Reading Time: 7 minutesSome messages arrive fully formed. Mine never do. It started as a line I wrote in service of someone else’s purpose. I was supporting employee and business communications at Cox Enterprises, working on content related to its purpose statement at the time: Empower People Today to Build a Better Future for the Next Generation. Somewhere
Build the Lighthouse. Beam the Message. Read More »
Reading Time: 4 minutesAs leaders, we set the emotional tone for our teams. Most of us never notice we’re doing it. A reel in my social media feed asked a question that got me thinking. Are you a thermometer or a thermostat? A thermometer reads the temperature. The thermostat changes it. The Marine Officer’s Point Landed
Be the Thermostat, Not the Thermometer Read More »
Reading Time: 9 minutesThe Two Sides of How a Leader Leads Lead with Light™ lives at the intersection of logic and light, competence and character, systems and soul. I call it rigor and radiance. Rigor and Radiance Most leadership development obsesses over rigor because rigor is measurable. You can certify it. Test it. Put it on a résumé.
Rigor and Radiance Read More »
Reading Time: 9 minutesYou Heard It from a Stranger Picture the moment. You open a news app on a Saturday morning and learn something important about the company you work for. A reorganization. A leader’s exit. A shift in direction that touches your team or your own job. You didn’t hear it from your leader. You didn’t
What Gets Shared on Friday Read More »
Reading Time: 7 minutesHere’s the question that comes next. If you’ve read Start with Why, you know the power of Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. The idea is elegant. Most leaders communicate from the outside in. They lead with what they do, then explain how they do it, and rarely get around to why. Sinek flipped that. Great
Simon Sinek got leaders to ask Why Read More »
Reading Time: 6 minutesThere’s a framing problem at the heart of how many leaders think about developing people. Without realizing it, they approach leadership like carpentry. They’ve got a blueprint. They’ve got tools. And they set out to cut, shape, and sand the people around them until they fit the design. The problem? People aren’t lumber.
Leadership is like Gardening, Not Carpentry Read More »
