Letting Someone Fail Safely
A person who has never been wrong in your presence has not been tested. The work is engineering the conditions under which being wrong is instructive…
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.
The Stretch Assignment
Real responsibility with real consequences, sized so that failure is survivable. Most development assignments fail because the leader retains the decisions and hands over only the…
Read →Spotting Capability Before It Is Proven
The signals that precede a record are behavioural and observable. The proxies most organizations use — polish, confidence, credentials, visibility — measure something else entirely.
Read →Mentorship, Sponsorship, Coaching, Networking
Sponsorship is what moves careers and it is the one nobody asks for, because asking requires naming what you want from somebody who would have to…
Read →What Mentorship Is For
Judgment is the thing being transferred, and it is the one thing that cannot be taught directly. Everything in this chapter follows from that constraint.
Read →The Culture Audit
Five questions, answerable in an afternoon from records the organization already keeps. It reveals the operative standard rather than the stated one, and the findings are…
Read →Inheriting a Culture You Did Not Build
A new leader has one period of unusual latitude and almost no information. Spending the latitude before acquiring the information is the characteristic error of a…
Read →Why Culture Programmes Fail
A programme addresses culture as a message. Culture is precedent, and precedent moves only when observed behaviour and observed consequences move, which no communications effort can…
Read →Reading a Culture Accurately
Surveys measure climate and self-report. What you want is behavioural evidence, and most of it is already sitting in records the organization keeps for other reasons.
Read →Crossing Fifty
Somewhere between forty and eighty people, informal coordination stops working. The transition arrives without an event, and the usual reading is that the wrong people were…
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