A few months ago, I had a client who was struggling to connect with her manager. This wasn’t a typical scenario of different work styles or communication challenges. This client was not having tough conversations with her manager; she was having no conversation at all. She began to notice on conference calls that she was…
We are now nearing the three-year anniversary of when the pandemic crept in, then quickly overtook, over lives. But we are also at least eighteen months since the rollout of vaccines that immensely lessened the risk of serious illness. In theory, we then began to resume our lives. But even as a good number of…
The idea of offices began nearly three hundred years ago in the UK. One of the first purpose-built office blocks was built in 1729. Even before that, employers often lived above their shops, and sometimes their workers lived there as well (and thus creating a more literal meaning of no escape from the job). Any sort…
As we tick off the last few days of the year, we can’t help but think about our goals for the next twelve months. Most of us do not set official New Year’s resolutions – only forty-one percent of Americans say they make these annual commitments, while a survey of (more realistic?) Britons show that only sixteen percent do…
As we head into the new year, it’s a good time to think about how to face the challenges ahead. While the blunt force trauma of the pandemic has ebbed, we are still facing a lot of uncertainty. The war in Ukraine rages on, markets remain shaky, supply shortages and disruptions are more the norm…
In a few weeks, it will be 2023. However, the conversation continues about whether or not to go back to work, by which I mean returning to actual physical workspaces. While some companies — most notably some of the global financial services firms – have been huge advocates for teams being physically onsite, many are…
When people speak casually about the ego, we often hear things like ‘he’s got such a big ego’, or ‘she has to keep her ego in check’. We equate having an ego with being arrogant or obnoxious. But in psychology, the traditional (and Freudian) definition of ego is one part of your psyche, the other…
There has been a lot written about the value of being a ‘servant leader’. The concept has existed for decades, originally used in the early 1970s in an essay titled The Servant as Leader. But it’s become more popular recently, in the early part of this century. The concept of a servant leader is based…
Unbelievably, it is nearly autumn, which means many companies have begun planning for next year. As leaders begin to think about 2023, they must also factor in all the uncertainty we continue to live with. The macroeconomic environment remains in flux as we live with Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and other related (and unrelated)…
The last few years have forced all of us to assess risk differently, and in ways we had never done before. We suddenly faced risks associated with activities that had previously been mundane: going to the office, taking a holiday, sending children to school. Now we’ve readjusted our lens so that nearly all aspects of…