Every interaction gives you two sources of information: the person in front of you and your own reaction to them. Understanding people requires learning to read both.

Most advice about working with difficult colleagues offers a list of tactics: set boundaries, listen actively, address the behavior,...

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...

Organizations spend enormous amounts of time teaching people how to deliver feedback. Models, acronyms, conversation guides, communication frameworks — most of them organized around a single question:

How should I say it?

It's a reasonable question. It's rarely the one that determines whether feed...

The Leader Who Sees It and Doesn't Act

There's a particular failure that has nothing to do with a leader's judgment and everything to do with what it costs them to use it.

A leader watches an employee underperform, deflect, or quietly work against the team. They see it clearly. They've seen the pa...

Field Notes. 
By Kristen Tolbert

Anyone leading a team of people is inevitably going to end up in a situation where they're managing some kind of chaos and a lot of heated emotion in the room. When I'm working with consultants, for instance, they're expected to be the experts in the room. They're wo...

The disposition that generates breakthroughs is real, temperamental, and genuinely valuable. It also has a cost — to the person and the people around them. The answer isn't to fix it or worship it. It's to hold it well.

There's a particular kind of person most organizations have a complicated rel...