When a people situation at work becomes a challenge, the reflex is to react quickly and resolve the problem. The more effective skill is to read the situation — including what it's stirring in you — and choose deliberately. 

Every leader experiences this regularly: someone on the team becomes a pro...

Why a culture of perfection quietly undermines learning, honesty, and performance — and what psychological safety offers instead.

Modern people are not merely tired. They are over-edited. Across workplaces, families, friendships, digital spaces, and inner lives, a quiet standard has become normaliz...

There is no shortage of commentary on leadership breakdowns inside modern organizations — widening power distances, executive insulation, and the subtle ways authority begins to distort communication and trust. These patterns are often described as "friction," but that term obscures more than it exp...

Field Notes · by Kristen Tolbert

If we're not creating anything original, are we really thinking at all?

Someone says something fluent, well-organized, and entirely borrowed, and everyone in the room — including them — treats it as thinking. Is it though? They've read the thing, they can restate t...

Leadership assessments are everywhere, and they promise a lot: identify who will thrive in complex roles and who won't. These tools can surface genuinely useful data. But the uncomfortable truth is that they rarely predict who will actually succeed in a leadership role. What they capture well are tr...

When the Number Becomes the Goal: Goodhart's Law and the Limits of Measuring People

The moment a measure becomes a target, people optimize the measure instead of the thing it was standing in for. For anything as human as leadership or growth, that's not a risk to manage — it's a reason to be carefu...

Trust is invoked constantly in organizational life and defined precisely almost never. It is treated as a mood, a virtue, or a byproduct of good intentions. The research tells a more useful story: trust is a specific psychological state with identifiable antecedents and measurable consequences, ...

The demands on leaders have grown more psychological. As organizations flatten and work becomes more interdependent, a larger share of a leader's effectiveness now rests on managing team dynamics and interpersonal friction rather than on technical direction alone. The research points consistently to...