Tag: Collaboration
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What If Your Job Could Be Anything You Wanted?
At some point in your working life, you’ve probably heard, or even said yourself, “That’s not my job.” Perhaps you’ve encountered or deployed the more polished and weaponized version: “That’s not really in my job description.” In conventional workplaces, these phrases sound reasonable on the surface. People have responsibilities outlined in their job descriptions, and…
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Your Brain on Trust and the Neuroscience of Collaboration
In my last post, “The Science of Collaboration,” I explored the research connecting intentional collaboration to measurable outcomes in wellness, productivity, and business performance. The numbers are compelling, but what I didn’t get into was why collaboration has such a profound effect on how people feel and perform. For that, we need to look at…
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The Science of Collaboration: Why Working Together Makes Us Healthier, Sharper, and More Successful
There’s a reason we feel better after a really good team meeting, the kind where ideas click into place, and everyone walks away energized instead of drained. It turns out that feeling isn’t just anecdotal. A growing body of research shows that collaboration, when done intentionally, goes beyond making work more pleasant. It also makes…
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Five Leadership Tensions You’re Probably Navigating Alone
If you’ve ever felt like leadership is harder than it should be, you’re not imagining things. Most leaders I know aren’t struggling because they lack talent or dedication. They’re struggling because they’re caught between competing forces that no one ever helped them see clearly, let alone navigate. I call these leadership tensions, and after twenty-plus…
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The Art of Collaborative Leadership: Leading and Following at the Same Time
There’s a quiet assumption baked into most of our ideas about leadership that leaders lead, and followers follow, and never the twain shall meet. You’re either at the front of the room or you’re in the seats. You’re either the one with the answers or the one with the questions. Leadership, in this view, is…
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Where Do You Stand in the Power Equation?
Something shifts when you realize you’re standing in a power dynamic you didn’t choose. Maybe it happened this week when a policy changed at work without consultation, when a decision got handed down that affects your team but none of you had a voice in it, when you watched someone in authority dismiss concerns without…
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Building Infrastructure for Self-Managing Organizations
I’ll be honest, I’m spread thin right now. Building infrastructure for self-managing organizations across multiple channels and services centered around my recent book, Organizing for Impact, is definitely a lot. Some days it feels like too much, like I’m trying to gain visibility and traction with seven different things at once, and doing none of…
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Why I Keep Fighting for People-Positive Workplaces
Every week for the past year and a half, I’ve shown up to write about something most organizations still treat as optional: creating people-positive workplaces where people can actually thrive. I published a book. I launched a Substack. I wrote blog posts exploring everything from dehumanizing corporate language to the mechanics of distributed decision-making. I’ve…
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Looking Toward 2026: Making Friends with Uncertainty
“In these uncertain times…” How many times have we heard that phrase lately? How many times have we written it ourselves? At some point, if everything is always uncertain, the phrase loses its meaning. More importantly, it reveals that we’re not actually struggling with uncertainty itself but rather our relationship to it. We’ve been taught…
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Why Letting Go of Control Is the Hardest Leadership Skill to Master
“To move from a ‘power over’ to a ‘power with’ approach means redefining power as shared, collaborative, and grounded in partnership rather than control.”– Organizing for Impact I’ve worked with many leaders who intellectually understand that controlling everything is unsustainable. They know that micromanagement stifles creativity, that centralizing decisions creates bottlenecks, and that their teams…