5 Ways to Protect Your Career in Post-COVID Recovery
COVID-19 has disrupted many areas of our lives, including our careers. Fortunately, you can take steps to strengthen and secure your career during these uncertain times. Due to the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant industry, one of my coaching clients, Alex, who served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) in a regional chain of […]
Google’s Myth of Losing Social Capital in Hybrid Work
Google recently announced its new post-pandemic hybrid work policy, requiring employees work in the office for at least three days a week. That policy goes against the desires of many rank-and-file Google employees. A survey of over 1,000 Google employees showed that two-thirds feel unhappy with being forced to be in the office three days […]
A Fatal Blindspot: Are You Preventing Bad News From Reaching the Top?
A tall, thin man in his late fifties approached me after my closing keynote for a manufacturing association conference on how manufacturing leaders can avoid business disasters. He looked distraught and agitated. I hoped he wasn’t angry with something I said. Mark introduced himself and asked me to tell him more about one of the […]
The Future of Work: The Best Practices for Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams
Are you worried that hybrid, especially full-time remote employees, will undermine junior employee on-the-job learning, integration into company culture, and intra and inter-team collaboration? This issue recurrently came up with organizations that I guided in developing strategies for returning to the office and establishing permanent future work arrangements. On the one hand, these leaders acknowledged that the […]
Recognize the 12 Problems of Zoom Fatigue and Work-From-Home Burnout
Have you or your employees been feeling work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue these past months despite the supposed convenience of working from home and using videoconferences to meet? Unfortunately, the vast majority of efforts to address WFH burnout try to treat the symptoms without addressing the root causes. The fundamental root cause of WFH burnout […]
Your Best Return-to-Office Plan: A Team-Led Approach
Surveys show that anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of all employers intend to have a hybrid workforce after the pandemic as part of their return to office plan. Employees would come in one to three days weekly to work on collaborative tasks with their teams. The rest of the time, they would work on their own tasks remotely. Many […]
Why Do Smart Leaders Ignore Serious Risks in a Post-COVID World (and What to Do About It)
When a threat seems clear to you, it’s hard to believe others will deny it. Yet intelligent people deny serious risks surprisingly often. A case in point example comes from my experience helping a mid-size regional insurance company conduct a strategic pivot to thrive in the post-COVID world in January 2021. While doing a pivoting audit, I observed […]
This is What Your Employees Want When They Return to the Office
What do employees want when returning to the office? It’s easy to assume we know what they want due to a dangerous judgment error termed the false consensus effect. This problematic mental blindspot causes us to perceive others who we feel to be in our team as sharing our beliefs. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. The […]
8 Powerful Questions You Need to Ask Before Stakeholder Engagement
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership. Stakeholders can be anyone from your frontline employees to suppliers to business partners, and your organization’s relationship with them is dynamic and can change over time. There are many advantages to identifying and getting to know your stakeholders, and even more disadvantages to not […]
Leadership 2021: “It’s Not Going Away, and We Have to Face That Reality.”
“It’s not going away, and we have to face that reality.” That’s what the CEO and founder of a high-tech manufacturing startup with 180 employees told the leadership team in early July to convince them of the need to do a strategic pivot to address COVID. Previously, the startup’s executives took things one step at […]
