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...

What to do when everything is urgent and everything matters.

One of the most expensive mistakes in organizational life is assuming every leadership problem yields to more effectiveness. Work harder. Prioritize better. Delegate more. Communicate more clearly. Get more resilient.

Sometimes those are...

When people picture leadership, they picture visible moments. The keynote. The company-wide announcement. The hard negotiation, the board meeting, the decisive speech in a crisis. Those moments matter. They are not, however, where leadership mostly happens.

Most of it is invisible. It happens quiet...

The three traits that make or break a team and what the research says about each.

Building a business partnership or a high-performing team is, at bottom, a series of judgments about what each person actually brings. The most durable shorthand for those judgments comes from Warren Buffett, who has ...

Someone Is Always Unhappy. You Can't Make Them Happy (And That's Not the Goal).

Most leaders feel it at some point. You make the decision, fund the raise, fix the process, send the thoughtful message — and someone is still frustrated. It is easy, in those moments, to conclude that people are irrati...

What the research on threat, emotion, and stress actually says about why capable teams falter when conditions get hard — and what the leaders who hold them together do differently.

A project slips. A major client cools. A senior person leaves at the worst possible time. You'll read these as opera...

Why teams need agency and structure especially in times of turbulence. In periods of prolonged uncertainty — political, economic, organizational — leaders tend to reach for the same question: how do I keep my team motivated when everything feels unstable? It is an understandable instinct, and a misl...

Leadership is built in hard moments. 

Leadership is not control. It is not being liked. And it is not automatically created by a title, credential, or years of experience. In the hard moments, people are watching for judgment. They are listening for clarity. They are sensing whether the person lead...

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...

Four laws of human systems. 

Leadership is described in the language of vision and influence. Experienced leaders know something less flattering: no matter how fair, generous, or thoughtful you are, dissatisfaction arrives anyway. The benefit you fought for gets absorbed into the baseline within ...