When it comes to fixing an unhealthy work culture, the last thing any of us needs is another HR workshop — Imagine this: you are sitting in a classroom or on a video call, listening to someone like me, a corporate trainer or organizational development consultant, reveal the top ten steps to building a healthy workplace culture. You are there because your organization has hired me to hold workshops for supervisors…

Release yourself from the trap of adding new priorities to your life — instead enrich your days by assessing and triaging what works and what doesn’t — We all hit periods in our lives that leave us with a sense of ennui, ‘stuckness’ or boredom. At times, these are passing phases in an otherwise happy life — brief moments of considering if the path we are on remains congruent with our overall goals and concluding it is…

Moving forward when a promotion or a switch to a new company fills you with regret — I’ll go first. After a series of interviews — some friendly and conversational, others more probing and testy — my career as a people leader began. This was in my mid-30s when, as the successful candidate in a lengthy recruiting process, I was invited to take on a leadership role…

Regardless of your role, you can add your voice to a growing movement — “The willingness of talented people to put up with repetitive nonsense is declining.” — Paul Millerd, author of The Pathless Path. It’s not hard to say an emphatic YES! to the above quote, given how resignations, early retirements, quiet quitting, and, more recently, bare-minimum Mondays continue to characterize many global…

When to know you need to make changes, and how to start — You’re scanning email before starting your work day. One message catches your eye, triggering a faint twitch of apprehension. The subject line, Your Assessment Results, lets you know that your leadership competencies as evaluated by your employees, peers and boss have been tabulated, and with one click on the link…

Better to fail at something important than succeed at things that don’t matter — “Failing is a fact of life,” writes Sarah McVanel in her 2019 book, Flipside of Failing. “The appeal,” she adds, “is in the insight from failure, the becoming stronger, the growth you usually only see later, sometimes many years later, when you look back on that crisis point.” Makes sense…

Leaders: You can change this! — Recently, a friend with two teenagers at home sat her husband down to talk about their kids. This conversation was not about what the kids were or were not doing (there had been some minor conflicts about chores and dirty dishes). This time, it was about something else entirely: it…

Struggle is part of the transition into your first leadership role — We go to work to earn a living — and if we are lucky, to do something that matters to us, and build a career, be that in design, programming or production. For some, building that career involves moving up the ranks of management by setting our technical skills aside…

It starts with doing the thing you most resist — Ample advice exists on how to grow your career as a leader: ask for and accept more responsibility; devote time and resources to updating, polishing or expanding your skills; and build relationships across your organization and your profession. These tips are all valid and, to varying degrees, effective. Yet they…