Tag: Decision-Making
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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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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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Self-Management Isn’t the Absence of Structure, Just a Different Kind
When people first hear about self-management as an organizational structure, a pretty reliable reaction comes up. It usually sounds something like: So… it’s just chaos? Nobody’s in charge? Anyone can do whatever they want? It’s an understandable assumption. If you remove the org chart, the titles, the manager who approves your decisions and signs off…
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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 the Bridge to Decentralized Organizations
Last week, a friend sent me a McKinsey Quarterly article titled “A new operating model for a new world.” She leads a very rare and special doctoral program in transpersonal leadership and business at Sofia University, and she has been reading my book, Organizing for Impact. Her message to me, with the article included, contained…
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Why Hierarchies Struggle to Build Adaptive Organizations
Recent research from Gartner reveals a stunning statistic. Seventy-nine percent of employees don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively. The majority believe their organization has made poor change decisions in the past and will likely fail in the future. This goes far deeper than poor change management. Organizations have a legitimacy problem. The same…
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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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Stop Planning to Avoid Failure. Start Planning to Create Possibility.
Picture a planning meeting where most of the energy goes into identifying what could go wrong. People talk about risks, contingencies, and backup plans. The conversation focuses on how to protect against failure rather than what you’re trying to create. This is fear-based planning, and it’s incredibly common in organizations. While it may feel responsible…
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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…