Not Feeling Motivated? Use These 5 Questions to Fuel Your Drive

When you’re feeling stuck, these questions will help you shift out of avoidance and into action. I’ve used these with coaching clients and organizations for more than a decade, and they’ve always helped to elicit the feelings we need to experience to begin a task we’re dreading or reignite momentum for a change we’ve alreadyContinueContinue reading “Not Feeling Motivated? Use These 5 Questions to Fuel Your Drive”

Conditioning: The Hidden Key to Change Management Success

One of the most overlooked drivers of successful change is conditioning – the process by which people learn to associate their actions with cues and outcomes. Understanding how conditioning works can dramatically improve how you design and deliver change programs, helping employees embrace new behaviors more quickly and sustainably. How Conditioning Shapes Behavior Conditioning happensContinueContinue reading “Conditioning: The Hidden Key to Change Management Success”

How Bad Bosses Drain Energy — And What Great Leaders Do Instead

In my work with organizations across industries, I’ve witnessed a common, costly dynamic: employees spending more energy protecting themselves than contributing their best ideas and efforts. When leaders create emotionally unsafe environments, they unwittingly shift employees’ focus away from meaningful work toward constant vigilance – scanning for threats to their reputation, security, or well-being. AsContinueContinue reading “How Bad Bosses Drain Energy — And What Great Leaders Do Instead”

How to Leverage Listening for Smoother Relationships

Bottom Line Up Front: Listening only happens when others feel heard, and how well we listen is based on our intention while the other person is talking. Many of us often enter conversations with the intention of multi-tasking or judging what we hear. I call these Distracted Listening and Defensive Listening, and neither are helpfulContinueContinue reading “How to Leverage Listening for Smoother Relationships”

Overwhelmed? Use Your Values to Tame Your To-Do List

While the pandemic lockdown helped many of us recalibrate our life priorities and gave us a new perspective on how we should spend our time, some of us are finding ourselves sliding back into the old familiar grind of high-pressure hustling to tackle the ever-expanding to-do list. The root cause? Prioritization. When too many thingsContinueContinue reading “Overwhelmed? Use Your Values to Tame Your To-Do List”

Defining “Trust” at Work

It’s one of the core elements of emotionally healthy relationships and productive businesses, but our definition of “trust” gets cloudy and confusing. Trust is the level of confidence someone has in your willingness and ability to protect them. That definition works with many of your stakeholder groups, including the employees you lead as well asContinueContinue reading “Defining “Trust” at Work”

How Change Comm Can Strengthen Relationships

Our brains tend to automatically classify transitions as “high-risk” because of the likelihood that we might lose something as a result. However, these high-stakes situations present the ideal opportunity to lift engagement by strengthening relationships between employees and leaders. Using change communication to create an emotionally healthy environment allows employees to focus more of theirContinueContinue reading “How Change Comm Can Strengthen Relationships”

5 Expectations of Today’s High-Impact Employees

As life priorities continue to recalibrate in the wake of the pandemic, today’s employees are looking for work experiences that satisfy five essential human needs: 1 – Achieving GROWTHImproving their skills and making progress in their occupations and careers(Note: this does not always mean promotions) 2 – Having an IMPACTMaking a difference in meaningful waysContinueContinue reading “5 Expectations of Today’s High-Impact Employees”

2 Tips for Pain-Free Performance Reviews

Is your stomach in knots dreading these conversations? Your employees probably feel the same way, but these meetings don’t have to keep anyone up at night. Use these tips to turn traditionally tough conversations into opportunities to strengthen relationships between leaders and employees. Tip #1 for pain-free performance reviews: Give perfect scores to the employeesContinueContinue reading “2 Tips for Pain-Free Performance Reviews”

Should We Be Saying “I Love You” at Work? 

My client swiftly angled her laptop toward me with an urgent command of “read this!”  Just above the email signature block displaying the sender’s name, title, and company logo was the most unexpected sign-off phrase:   “Love you!”  It was an email from an executive at a consulting firm. It was sent to a client weContinueContinue reading “Should We Be Saying “I Love You” at Work? “