My 11-year-old came home from school with his first assignment of the new year which was to "Create a few goals for the year." And his list was exactly what you’d expect:  Finish a LEGO set. Get better at Fortnite. And then one more: “I just want to keep going.” I smiled when I read it. It felt honest. It also very familiar in that I hear some version of that answer from many of the leaders I talk with.  At 11, “keep going” means school, friends, and routines that mostly work

“I play dumb really well.” It’s a line I’ve used for years. It is part humbling and part true. But mostly because it reminds me of a mistake I’ve made multiple times in my career when I've heard broad direction like “Let’s be more strategic.” or “We need to show more value.” And I nodded along, convinced I knew exactly what was meant. Only to realize later that I was solving the wrong problem. Often, I wasn’t alone. Other team members walked away with different interpretatio

Most leadership teams don’t struggle to make decisions. They struggle to make decisions that stick. In a past life, I worked on a leadership team that prided ourselves on how quickly we could move forward on something. We would hash out an issue, agree, and move on before lunch. It felt efficient. Until the same issues resurfaced a few weeks later. When we dug deeper, we saw a pattern. We were making decisions within our little bubble. We rarely gathered input from others in

I’ve heard leaders describe their calendars like a loop they can’t escape: “I don’t have time to plan.” “Because I don’t plan, I spend...