A billion-dollar organization brought me in to work with a leader who had been moved out of a business unit to become Chief Information Officer. He knew the business. The executive team had confidence in him. He was not converting either one into decisions. He gathered information thoroughly and understood each issue completely. Then he kept gathering. Decisions that could have been made on solid but imperfect information sat waiting for information that was never going to ar

Most employee retention strategies switch on at the moment someone resigns. The counteroffer gets drafted, the exit interview gets scheduled, and the search for a replacement begins. By then, the person has usually made up their mind, often months earlier, and the organization is negotiating with a decision that has already been made. For growing companies, losing high-potential people is one of the earliest signs that leadership capacity has not kept pace with growth. And in

David, a client of mine and the chief marketing officer of a large public company, once told me something about cold calls that every sales leader should hear: “When I get a cold call, the chances are one in a thousand that I will have a need or be remotely interested in the caller’s offering. But when someone calls me who is referred by a friend or a business colleague or someone else with whom I have a relationship, I am going to take the call because of my relationship wit

A CFO at a professional services firm was asked to become a more strategic leader. The firm wanted more of his thinking at the enterprise level. Part of that work was about him. In board meetings he often stayed quiet, even when the board wanted his view. The change that created the most value had to do with the person who reported to him. Why leading experienced leaders is a different job Future regional presidents and market sector leaders in engineering firms are often dra

In a growing company, change rarely arrives one piece at a time. A new system goes live in March. A reorganization follows in May. A new executive arrives with new priorities over the summer, and by autumn the quarterly plan has been reshuffled twice. Each change made sense when leadership decided on it. The team never got to experience any of them one at a time. That is where change fatigue in the workplace begins. It is one of the most common and least discussed reasons str

A VP of Finance was promoted into the top finance seat after a high-priced CFO left. She was capable and she worked hard. Her peers saw her as a gatekeeper. Part of the reason was time. She did not have enough of it to help her colleagues work through financial issues. When she did engage, it was mostly to point out problems. The only way to find that time was to get better at delegation. She did hand out work, mostly as end goals. When standards were even remotely at risk, s

Most leadership programs end well. The feedback scores are strong, the final session has real energy, and participants leave with full notebooks and a plan for Monday. Six months later, leaders look at the same manager population and see the same patterns. Feedback still waits for review season. One-on-ones still drift into status updates. The same few people still carry the hard conversations. The usual conclusion is that the program did not work, so the search begins for a

My friend Max, the taxi driver who taught me more about business relationships than any classroom ever did, once told me that the three most powerful words in business are “I don’t know.” I didn’t believe him at first. Most of us were trained to believe the opposite. Somewhere early in our careers we picked up the idea that a sales professional should have an answer for everything, and that any gap in knowledge is a crack in our credibility. Decades of working with client-fac

A VP I coached had a habit that looked like a strength. His executive updates carried everything he knew. He was already one of the strongest performers in his business. The updates were more than the room needed. He kept answering questions nobody had asked. Strong VPs rarely hear about this. The behavior is still producing results, so nobody says anything. Today his updates open with the business issue and what he recommends. Then he stops. The detail is still there for any

It is 6:15 in the evening, and one of your strongest managers is finally starting on her own work. The day went to other people’s questions: a quick one in the hallway, three more in chat, a decision that could not move until she weighed in, and a meeting that ended with everyone looking at her for the answer. She gave good answers all day. That is exactly why she is exhausted. Most growing companies promote their best problem solvers into management, and it makes sense. Thes

Somewhere in your customer's inbox this morning there is an email that begins "thought you'd find this interesting" with an industry report attached. It was not written for them. It went to several hundred people. Everyone who sent one this week believes they added value, and every recipient understood instantly that they had been added to a list. Value-add has become one of the most diligently performed and least effective activities in enterprise sales. The intent behind it

Most leadership transitions look the same across industries. Delegation is delegation. One belongs to consulting engineering firms. Somebody has to own the client. In a product business the product carries much of the relationship. The customer buys something that works. In a consulting engineering firm the client is buying judgment, and judgment comes attached to a person who is usually also delivering the work. Zweig Group found 89 percent of AEC firms run on seller-doers.

Not ready is the most expensive phrase in a succession conversation. It sounds like an assessment. It is a conclusion. Somebody watched a leader for years, formed a judgment and compressed it into two words. The judgment is usually right. It carries no information about what is in the way. That matters because the two words trigger spending. A program gets bought. A coach gets assigned. A stretch role gets invented. Money moves before anyone names the problem. There is a wors

The hardest promotion in any company is the one where everything else stays the same. Same desk, same team, same group at lunch, and from Monday you are accountable for the performance of people who were peers on Friday. Every relationship on that team was built on an assumption of equality, and each one now has to be renegotiated while the work carries on around it. Nobody gets a quiet fortnight to do that. Most organizations leave this to the individual to handle privately.

One of your best reps walks into a customer meeting with a genuinely good idea. She spent the weekend on it. It is specific, it is relevant to that account, and it would save the customer real money. The customer listens politely, thanks her, and never mentions it again. Most sales leaders diagnose that as an execution problem. The business case was thin. The framing was off. The wrong people were in the room. Occasionally that's true. Far more often the idea was fine and the

Your engineering executives define outcomes, study systems and isolate variables for a living. Then we hand them this. Be more strategic. Delegate more. Work on your executive presence. The feedback is accurate and useless. Not because the leader resists it. The ones I work with want a specification and cannot get one. Run the development work the way they run everything else and they engage. Why be more strategic is accurate and unusable The feedback is true. Your senior tea

The recurring one-on-one is the most reliably cancelled meeting in a manager's week. When the quarter gets tight it is the first thing to move, and it moves because of what it has turned into rather than what it was meant to be. In most companies I work with, the one-on-one has drifted into a spoken version of the project tracker. The manager asks where things stand, the report walks through their list, both people confirm what they already knew, and half an hour goes by with

A VP-level executive I coached was told to cut costs by 40 percent. He did it. Headcount and operating expense both came down early in the year. Over the next several months his team more than tripled the number of programs it implemented. Execution metrics held. In places they improved. Most people hear numbers like that and go looking for the systems story. A new platform. A better process. Some automation. What I watched instead was a change in how one executive used his o

Every leader breaks trust with their team at some point. A decision gets reversed. A commitment made in good faith is overtaken by something outside your control. News you did not choose gets delivered by you to people who will forever associate it with you. The part worth noticing is that trust rarely breaks in those visible moments alone. It leaks first, through smaller things that were never explained, and the visible moment is simply where the accumulated damage becomes o

Meetings are as much a part of the fabric of the business day as the coffee on your desk in the morning. We meet to plan meetings, to design future meetings, to discuss meetings we already had, and sometimes because a meeting mysteriously appeared on the calendar. The only problem is that we enjoy the coffee considerably more. If that's true for you, keep in mind it's true for your clients as well. The good news is that meeting preparation is one of the cheapest advantages av