The Last Two Years
Announcing a departure converts a leader into a temporary one, and the organization reorganises around that fact within days. What can still be accomplished afterward is…
Read →Idaho leadership
Leadership Lessons
Practical leadership lessons from experienced Idahoans across the state's industries, institutions, and communities — guidance you can apply in your own work.
Thinking About Succession From the First Day
A leader who intends to hand the thing on makes different decisions in the present. Succession planning is not preparation for departure; it is a constraint…
Read →Endurance and the Long Decision
Judgment degrades under sustained pressure before anyone notices, and it degrades in a specific direction. The person losing it experiences no sensation of loss.
Read →The Isolation of the Role
What gets called loneliness is usually something more specific: there are things you know that you cannot say to anyone in the building, and the load…
Read →Who Tells You the Truth
Three or four people who will contradict you, constructed deliberately, from outside your hierarchy. Nobody arrives at a senior role already possessing this, and nobody is…
Read →The Filtered-Truth Problem
Nobody lies to you. Each person rounds slightly toward what you seemed to want, and four layers of small kindnesses produce a picture that is consistently…
Read →Attention Is the Scarce Resource
Time management assumes hours are interchangeable. They are not. A leader with sixty available hours and four hours of genuine judgment has a different problem than…
Read →Praise and Its Inflation
Recognition is a currency and it inflates the same way any other does. A leader who praises everything has not made people feel valued; they have…
Read →Firing Well
Two obligations run at once: to the person leaving and to everyone staying. Most of what goes wrong happens in the months before the conversation, not…
Read →The Productive Employee Who Violates the Standard
The exemption is never announced and is understood by everyone. What the organization learns is not that this person is valuable, but that the standard has…
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