Bring Balance Back.

On a recent podcast episode of “Teams Transformed” I shared a Team Coaching experience that has stayed with me. My co-coach and I had been working with a large leadership team for months. In one of our final days together, something shifted. You could feel the tension had been building throughout the morning. Then a moment of emergence, and I felt a pull toward an intervention we hadn’t planned on the agenda for the day. Right behind that pull to *do something*, was a wave of doubt – “this...

Your team doesn’t need you to be authentic, or “more authentic”. They need you to be an island. Margaret Wheatley talks about “islands of sanity”, the pockets of steadiness leaders create when everything around them feels chaotic and crazy. Herminia Ibarra calls out the “authenticity paradox”, how “this is just who I am” quietly becomes the thing that keeps leaders stuck. Many I’m working with are feeling this paradox right now. Here’s where they meet: // The command-and-control leader who...

“I really didn’t get much done today.” “I’ve been in meetings for 8 straight hours.” “I block time off for myself, but never get to use it.” Have you thought or said anything like this recently? I’ve noticed this come up often from leaders: a subtle and minimizing downplay of the work they do as a leader. A nagging guilt they feel when they spend even 1 hour in strategic thinking instead of “producing” something tangible. Perhaps you feel you “didn’t get much done today”, but what about the 4...

You’ve done the offsite. You’ve done the personality assessments. Maybe even happy hours and icebreakers. And yet, something still feels stuck. As a team coach, here’s what I keep seeing with leadership teams: they invest in knowing about each other, but not in noticing together. There’s a difference. Recent research on self-connection found that individual well-being isn’t just about self-awareness. It’s about three things working together: awareness of what’s happening inside you,...

Setting a vision for your team is hard work. The people you work with need something to point their minds toward – the place you’re going, the environment, the emotion they’ll feel – all the things they can visualize being part of once they get there. I remember hearing Suzy Welch say in a “Big Think” video, “You have to tell the drummer what the words of the song are about.” And in that phrase, she combines not only “giving the drummer the words” but what the words mean. And if you’ve ever...

Over the last few days, I’ve had several coaching sessions with leaders who wanted to focus on developing goals for the new year. Goals for themselves personally, and larger goals for their teams, and what they want to accomplish in the year ahead. Seriously, there’s no shortage of people writing about goals. James Clear, Mark Manson, Simon Sinek, and Mel Robbins – they have scientific guides, and “it’s as simple as these 6 steps” takes. Lots of great ideas on goal setting, coming from all...

You know that moment in a meeting…someone says something inaccurate, or there’s tension that lingers after a sharp comment. Or, you sense a “bad” decision is about to happen, and your first instinct fires up inside: “I need to fix this. Now.” Familiar? As leaders, many of us have been wired over the years to jump in, to rescue, to correct, even when the room is full of capable, smart people. But there’s a different move: the practiced pause. That choice to sit in the moment. To resist the...

Being a leader can be a lonely job. I remember talking to a senior leader many years ago and asking them what the biggest difference was in leading at new levels – they said: “Your lunch group gets smaller.” It’s easy to rely on what we know and what has worked for us – not just in leadership, but in anything, really. And at some point, doing only what we’ve known to work will hold us back from learning and growing. It’s a little like solo mountaineering or backpacking. Even with binoculars,...

“There are commitments you have, and there are commitments that have you.” ~ Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey It’s hard to imagine waking up one day and all of the challenge is gone. Nothing is difficult, nothing feels hard to accomplish. But yet, here we are, each and every one of us, in a struggle with a change we want for ourselves and struggling to make it. It’s like a foot on the gas, and a foot on the brake. A “brake” that’s deeply internal, and perhaps has been there for years and years. It’s...

Recently, I was with a team and noticed something interesting happening when challenges came up – there was a draw to blame the challenges on people outside the team. “Can we stay inside the house a little longer?”, I asked. I got a few curious glances back. “Can we stay inside the team for a little longer, and see if there’s anything more we can learn about how we’re contributing to this?” That willingness of the team to re-center and “stay inside” helped them learn and do more within their...