*Meet Regularly.  You should have developmental conversations with this employee – and every employee – twice a year.

*Show Them the Path.  Once you get the inkling that you have a future “star” on your hands, tell them this.  Outline the knowledge and skills that they will need to develop to ascend to the next level.  Support their development.  Make sure your bosses know early on that you have a developing star.

*Be Proactive.  As the development process moves forward, be proactive with your bosses.  If there are not going to be any promotions available in due time with the current org chart, are there roles you can create that provide additional responsibility, compensation, and a new title?

*Be Honest with Your Star.  Tell your star what you are able to do and what you cannot do.  Try to maximize additional compensation, training, and job responsibility – even if you cannot provide a title change.

*Support Them If They Decide to Leave.  Encourage them to be honest with you.  If they decide they need to look around, encourage them and offer to support them in every way possible.

*The Door Swings Both Ways.  If they leave, make sure that it is on the best of terms.  Keep them in mind when you have future job openings.  If they are a real hotshot, this person could end up being your future boss!

There is no substitute for treating people right.  If you build the kind of culture in which you treat your star this way, word will spread.  Future stars will be attracted to your organization.  You can’t keep them all, but if you attract enough of them – it won’t matter.

A new challenge and a new opportunity.

Regardless of the quality of the relationship you had with your former boss, you are best off assuming that there will be changes – and remaining open-minded about those.

If your new boss is an insider, then maybe you already have a relationship that you can build on.

But a new boss from the outside is a special situation.  While a boss transition brings undeniable disruption, it also delivers a rare gift: a completely clean slate. Here are some ideas from a recent article in Harvard Business Review on how to grab the steering wheel and make the transition work for you:

1. Your First Impression.  A new manager has no history with your past mistakes, old patterns, or previous workplace struggles. Because people form lasting judgments within seconds—a psychological phenomenon known as “thin-slicing” – you must be intentional about your visible behaviors from day one. Decide what you want to be known for moving forward.

2. Provide an Executive Briefing.  Your new boss is likely drinking from a firehose, navigating enormous complexity while trying to evaluate their new team. Help them orient faster by sending a concise, well-crafted briefing before your first meeting.

3. Decode Their Working Style Fast.  Don’t wait for your new boss to volunteer their operating preferences. Proactively initiate a conversation early on to align your workflows. Ask targeted questions to clear up any ambiguity:

• What are your top priorities in the short and medium term?
• How often do you want to meet and what would you like me to prepare for each meeting?
• How would you like us to communicate – email, text, phone, Slack?

4. Choose Cohesion Over Competition.  Leadership transitions often trigger a survival instinct among colleagues, leading to political jockeying for position and resources. Resist this pull. Reach out to your peers proactively to resolve overlapping responsibilities before your manager walks into them. Standing out as a unifying, mature team player builds immediate executive trust.

Taking a passive “wait-and-see” approach during a transition is a major risk. By actively managing up, you can successfully turn leadership uncertainty into a powerful launchpad for your career.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Smith, D. D.  “The Keys to Succeeding Under a New Manager,” Harvard Business Review online, May 18, 2026.

In fact, high performing teams are subject to overwhelm even more than an “average” team since they have such high aspirations.

Even the best teams need to pace themselves.

Overwhelm can sneak up on us and be hidden.  One team member who was interviewed for a recent article in Harvard Business Review said:

“I was holding it together on the outside, yet inside, I felt like I was screaming.  I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate, and even small tasks felt impossible.  I was overwhelmed.”

As a leader, it is hard to see when things have gone too far.  Some stress is stimulating and good.  But it can go too far and produce burnout: “Burnout is an outcome of unmanaged chronic stress that develops over time. (Meister & Dael, 2025, p. 2).”

Identifying overwhelm can be difficult to spot.  It emerges when the three core pillars sustaining employee productivity fracture:

• Lack of Predictability: Overwhelm surges when people feel powerless to influence their environment or cannot see what challenges are coming next, reducing their sense of agency.
• Changes in Work Standards and Expectations: Employees feel crushed by unrealistic external demands or toxic, self-imposed perfectionism. This triggers a harsh inner dialogue where they assume they are “not good enough” because they are struggling.
• No Time for Recovery: The system breaks down when employees lack time, staffing, or support. Over one-third of participants cited severe time pressure as their central trigger.

Because we – as leaders – are often part of the problem, we must actively redesign the conditions of work to become the solution. The HBR article outlines five specific actions leaders can take:

1. Spot Both the Silence and the Strain: Do not assume a quiet employee is a thriving one. Look for subtle behavioral shifts such as decision paralysis, withdrawal, or frantic, break-less working.
2. Engineer Micro-Control: While leaders cannot remove macro corporate uncertainty, they can help teams break overwhelming backlogs down into small, clear priorities.
3. Recalibrate Performance Standards: Actively disrupt perfectionist cultures by explicitly defining what “good enough” looks like.
4. Create Psychological Permission to Say “I’m at Capacity”: Establish a social environment where setting boundaries carries no professional stigma or risk of reprisal: “What would you need to adjust to make this task manageable?”
5. Design Work for Recovery, Not Endurance: Normalize micro-breaks, mental detachment after hours, and rest as legitimate performance practices.

In the modern workplace, overwhelm is no longer an occasional hurdle – it is a defining feature of work life. By recognizing the subtle warning signs early and fostering cultures that value recovery alongside results, leaders can transform operational strain into long-term, sustainable performance.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Meister, A. & Dael, N. “Do You Know If Your Team Is Overwhelmed?,” Harvard Business Review online, December 8, 2025.

A slow but steady shift has taken place in organizations over the past several years.  The result is that managers are leading larger teams than ever, often with significantly less administrative or organizational support.

Responsibilities continue to multiply, but the resources do not.

If you find yourself trapped in a daily cycle of firefighting rather than thinking strategically, you are experiencing a common modern plight: your team has simply grown too big for traditional management models.

While you may not have the power to change your company’s organizational chart, you can change how your team operates. Based on insights from research reported in Harvard Business Review, here are four strategies to regain control when your span of control feels unmanageable:

1.  Shift from Individuals to Small Groups.  Running traditional one-on-one meetings with a large team will completely devour your calendar. Instead, cluster your employees into small groups of three or four based on project alignment or operational specialty. Meet with these small cohorts collectively to facilitate collaborative problem-solving.  Hold one-on-one meetings much less frequently.

2.  Learn to Say No to Good Ideas.  Knowledge work accumulation is notoriously invisible, making it easy to say yes to “just one more thing” until the team is completely buried. Highly competent teams naturally generate a steady stream of great initiatives, but as a leader, you must ruthlessly prioritize and say no to good ideas to protect execution capacity.

3.  Flip Your Meetings.  Many leaders use communication channels backward: they use face-to-face meetings for simple project updates and turn to Slack or email for complex problem-solving. This fills your inbox with exhausting threads of clarifying questions. Flip this dynamic by handling routine status updates via text or email and dedicating valuable synchronous meeting time exclusively to real-time problem-solving.

4.  Protect Your Calendar and Be Transparent.  Stop attending every meeting. Trust your instincts on where your presence is mandatory, and view skipping non-essential sessions as a development opportunity to send a direct report in your place. Concurrently, be entirely transparent with your team about your bandwidth constraints. Explicitly invite them to follow up or “bug” you if an email slips through the cracks, removing the guesswork from their workflow.

You need to protect your time so that you use your work time effectively and have a life outside of work.  Leading a large team requires abandoning the desire to do everything yourself. By restructuring your communication and establishing firm boundaries, you can lead effectively without burning out.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Knight, R. “When Managing Your Team Becomes Too Much,” Harvard Business Review online, October 3, 2025.

Every now and then it helps to follow the KISS Principle: Keep It Super Simple.

As someone who has written a book about strategy, and teaches both corporate strategy and nonprofit strategy at University of Maryland, I can definitely complicate strategic planning.  But let’s keep it simple.

The first thing I ever learned about strategy is that it answers three questions:

Who are we?

Where are we going?

How are we going to get there?

Let’s apply KISS to these questions:

Who are we?  What is your mission and purpose?  What are your values; what do you stand for?

Where are we going?  What is your vision for the future?  What are the 3-5 most important Strategic Goals you want to accomplish in the next three years?

How are we going to get there?  As you make your plans for the goals, you can look at your SWOTs.  What Strengths do you have that will allow you to seize Opportunities to accomplish your goals. What Weaknesses do you need to improve upon in order to achieve your goals. What Threats do you need to watch out for?

As you answer these questions, it will be wise to gather input from stakeholders, e.g., employees, alumni, customers, clients, donors.

You don’t have to overcomplicate it.  Following this Strategy KISS approach will give you focus, direction and acceleration to make even more of a Mission Impact.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the [person] who points out how the strong [person] stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the [person] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spend [themselves] in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if [they] fail, at least fails while daring greatly, so that [their] place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

One of my Board members was giving me a pep talk once and told me: “No one ever built a statue to a critic.”  How true!

Many of you reading this – regardless of your level of responsibility in your organization – are “The Person in the Arena.”  Have courage!  Have faith in your mission and vision!  There are many of us cheering you on as you “dare greatly!”

In these moments, it is tempting to focus on external obstacles like organizational bureaucracy or employee attitudes. However, recent research reported in Harvard Business Review by Muriel Wilkins suggests that the most significant limiting factors often lie within: our own “hidden blockers”.  Additional detail is provided in her book, Leadership Unblocked.

Hidden blockers are unproductive beliefs so ingrained and habitual that we are often unaware they even exist. Despite their invisibility, they quietly shape every aspect of how we think, feel, and act, ultimately dictating our performance and professional outcomes.

Based on an analysis of many leaders, the research identified seven beliefs that frequently stall careers:

• “I need to be involved”: The drive to touch every detail, which leads to micromanagement and team stagnation. You slow down the decision-making process and become a bottleneck.
• “I need it done now”: A demand for immediate results that creates false urgency and triggers burnout. People rush their execution and become numb to your requests.
• “I know I’m right”: A belief that shuts down collaboration and stifles innovation. You miss good input from others and make sub-optimal decisions.
• “I can’t make a mistake”: A fear of failure that encourages perfectionism and risk avoidance. Your belief that you need to be flawless is unhealthy for you and others.
• “If I can do it, so can you”: Setting unrealistic expectations by assuming others must work exactly like you do. Everyone has different talents.
• “I can’t say no”: The inability to set boundaries, resulting in blurred priorities and overwork. This further exacerbates the “I need it done now” problem.
• “I don’t belong here”: Impostor syndrome that leads to self-sabotage and reduced influence. It also reduces your visibility and ability to communicate.

To overcome these barriers, leaders can apply a three-step framework designed to get them “unstuck”.

1.  Uncover the blocker by recognizing the problem and naming the specific belief creating it.

2.  Unpack the belief by reflecting on where it came from and how it is currently limiting your growth.

3.  Unblock yourself by reframing that belief into something productive and embedding that new perspective into tangible action.

Real organizational transformation cannot occur until there is a fundamental change in the consciousness of leadership. By identifying and reframing your own blockers, you spark a cycle of personal growth that leads to positive collective change and extraordinary achievement for your entire team.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Wilkins, M.  “The Hidden Beliefs That Hold Leaders Back,”Harvard Business Review, November – December 2025.

The annual performance review was focused on “what do you need to work on?”

These days the “weakness-fixing” era is fading and more people realize that real success is when you can develop your strengths; when you can move from being very good at something to being SuperFantastic.

Unfortunately, some people believe that this means you can ignore your weaknesses.  Not so fast, my friend.  Ignoring your weaknesses can be a huge career derailer.

So what do you do?  Develop your strengths or fix weaknesses?

According to research in the Harvard Business Review, the answer isn’t to pick one approach over the other, but to diagnose what your specific situation requires. Before deciding where to invest your energy, you must work through four diagnostic questions:

1.  What does success require in my role? Identify the baseline capabilities needed to perform effectively, which vary significantly by level and function.

2.  What are my current capabilities? Rigorously map your strengths and weaknesses against those role requirements.

3.  What can be compensated for? Determine which weaknesses can be addressed through team design, delegation, or support systems rather than personal development.

4.  Where is my untapped potential? Look for capabilities you haven’t yet discovered because you were busy leveraging existing strengths.

Once you have diagnosed your needs, focus your development efforts on three critical categories:

• Superpowers: These are exceptional strengths that set you apart. Small investments here often produce significant improvements, so you should double down on them.
• Dangerous Derailers: These are unmanaged weaknesses that damage trust, psychological safety, and relationships. Addressing these must take priority over everything else.
• Untapped Potential: These are new capabilities you may need as your business shifts or you move into a role requiring different skills.

Your focus will also be shaped by your career stage. In early to midcareer, you can often succeed mainly by enhancing strengths. However, as you rise to more senior levels, you must address weaknesses that were previously tolerable. For example, a vice president moving to the C-suite must master enterprise strategy even if execution has always been their primary suit.

Ultimately, the debate between building strengths and fixing flaws is solved by judging what you need most in your current context. By mastering this diagnostic framework, you can move past instinctual development and begin to truly move the needle on your professional growth.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Anderson-Finch, S., Lenniger, K. & Watkins, M.  “Should You Develop Your Leadership Strengths – or Fix Your Weaknesses,” Harvard Business Review online, April 15, 2026.

Lots of our bosses could really benefit from having an executive coach!

We have all probably had bosses like this.  They have a lot of talent and many good qualities – but there are some blind spots!  If they could only get past these then life would be much better for you and the organization.

What do you do?  How do you approach your boss about coaching?  Here are some suggestions from a recent article in Harvard Business Review.

1.  Maybe You Should Not Deliver the Message.  If you feel your position as a direct report makes the conversation too risky, consider if a different messenger—like an HR business partner or a trusted cross-functional peer—might be more effective. You can also lower the stakes by suggesting a time-bound experiment, such as an eight-week trial focused on a specific initiative or transformation.

2.  Identify the Real Barrier.  If they have resisted coaching, diagnose the likely source of their resistance. It usually falls into three categories: ego, where they view needing help as a sign of weakness; misconceptions, where they see coaching as purely remedial for underperformers; or time, where they view it as just another meeting they can’t afford. Tailoring your approach to their specific barrier is crucial for success.

3. Solve a Pain Point, Don’t Fix a Gap.  The quickest way to trigger defensiveness is to point out their personal flaws. Instead, anchor the suggestion in the frustrations they have already voiced—such as executive team misalignment, exhausting workloads, or intense board pressure. Position the coach as a strategic tool to help them navigate these complex business challenges rather than a way to “fix” their personality.

4. Normalize Elite Performance.  Frame coaching as a hallmark of high-performing leaders rather than a remedial fix. Remind them that top athletes and high-profile CEOs from companies like Google and Salesforce have used coaches to manage complexity. Emphasize that a coach provides a confidential, politically neutral space for strategic thinking and pressure-testing decisions.

Ultimately, the decision to engage a coach must belong to the leader. If you notice increasing irritation or find yourself excluded from key meetings after raising the topic, it is time to stop pushing to protect your own professional credibility. The real objective is to create the conditions where they can opt-in to growth on their own terms.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Lyons, M.  “How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach,” Harvard Business Review online, April 10, 2026.

And yet, so many leaders do this very poorly.

Some of the implications for lack of accountability include:

• Below average performance of the team and organization
• Resentment builds among team members
• Lack of accountability becomes a part of the culture and spreads
• Lose high performers who leave the company

Here is what you need to do to become better at holding others accountable:

1.  Make sure that you set the standard by following through with every commitment.  You set the tone.  Learn more here.

2.  Establish specific outcomes for every job.  Hold people accountable for the results they need to produce, not progress on their to do list.

3.  Make sure you are clear on the specific expectations of every team member.

4.  Communicate commitments made by each team member in writing after every team meeting.

5.  When people miss deadlines, contact them and ask for an update.  Discipline yourself to do this every time.  Don’t play favorites.  And, you don’t have to be a jerk about it.  Just ask.

6.  Encourage your team to hold one another accountable.

This is a good start.  If you do these things consistently, then you will build a culture of accountability.  In time, this culture will reinforce itself.  High performers will be drawn to your team.