Superstar Taylor Swift showed both style and substance as a leader when she handed out $197 million in bonuses to the crew and support staff for her record-breaking Eras Tour. Recognition and rewards foster engagement, retention, and excellence. Isn’t that what every leader hopes for?

Swift is smart enough to realize how much of her success — and her fans’ experience — is dependent upon these people. Recognizing and rewarding them is one way that she can express her gratitude and ensure a future as bright as the past two years have been.

Read the full piece on Medium or in my LinkedIn newsletter, Leading Together.

Balancing leading and team autonomy is a complex challenge that requires a keen understanding of personal preferences, the team’s working style, and the demands of the task. While being overly controlling—“riding your people”—can come off as overbearing, a lack of oversight can lead to chaos. Self-determination theory emphasizes that people thrive when they experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness, something that perfectionist, fear-driven perfectionist leadership styles often undermine. Yet holding high standards is important for accountability.

A striking example is Chef Charlie Trotter, whose intense perfectionism made him a culinary icon but came at the cost of strained relationships, health, and, ultimately, his life. In high-stakes environments, such as top-tier restaurants or event planning, attention to detail is paramount. Leaders may feel compelled to maintain strict control to ensure quality, but constant micromanagement can erode team morale and trust.

The key to effective leadership lies in fostering psychological safety, as highlighted by Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School. When team members feel comfortable discussing mistakes without fear of retribution, fewer errors occur, and higher standards are naturally upheld. Leaders must create an environment where everyone understands the non-negotiables and has the freedom to flex in other areas. By cultivating a team that genuinely cares about quality, leaders can avoid policing and instead focus on their broader responsibilities, ensuring that accountability is shared respectfully across the team.

Read the full post here on Medium.

Starbucks’ board and investors are betting on a new CEO to turn the business around. It’s common for companies to look for a savior CEO. It rarely works. However, for this bet to pay off, the new CEO will need to engage workers and customers in articulating problems and crafting solutions. No individual leader has all the answers. Here are five strategies for a new leader to cultivate a community of leaders. Read the full post on Medium.

Words matter. They can clarify or obfuscate. They can motivate or muffle enthusiasm. If you lead, every word and phrase is important because followers (at least those you hope are following) are always listening. What you say shapes what they hear, understand, and ultimately do.

In my latest article for my LinkedIn newsletter, Leading Together, I propose a basic taxonomy:

Leaders are those who lead, not those who occupy a certain position. It is a designation given only by followers, not something that you claim for yourself.

Leading is what leaders do. It is a set of behaviors, decisions, and actions that unite people to accomplish a shared objective.

Leadership is a body of knowledge about the practice of leading. Those who lead, or aspire to lead, study leadership in their pursuit of the mastery of leading.

At a practical level, this simple framework can help you develop yourself, build a strong team, and boost your self-confidence. It is a guide for thinking and reflecting, the essential inner work of becoming a leader. A side benefit is that it aids in navigating the dozen or so books (and scores of articles, podcasts, etc.) about leadership that are published each month.

Leading requires courage and discipline as well as aptitude. It is something at which no one ever achieves perfection. The journey toward mastery offers continual opportunities to learn and abundant rewards for the effort.

Study leadership, practice leading, become a leader.

Have you seen my new newletter on LinkedIn, Leading Together? Here’s a snapshot of the first article, Leading with the Human Spirit:

Organizations exist because humans, as a social species, achieve more collectively than individually. However, despite our instinct to collaborate, organizational dysfunction persists. A post by workforce innovator, Emma Garcia Purvis, emphasized that humans are more than mere resources, highlighting the need for HR to evolve beyond compliance and unlock human potential. It inspired my recommendations for HR include championing the human spirit, fostering trust and transparency, and eliminating low-value processes. Yet, expecting HR alone to resolve these challenges is unrealistic; leaders at all levels must prioritize creating conditions that enable individuals to thrive. When you start by creating the conditions for workers and customers to succeed, you achieve true organizational success (and make shareholders happy, too).

Three ways that HR can model the way forward:
– Champion the Human Spirit: Treat individuals as human beings, not merely units of production, to create significant value.
– Foster Trust and Transparency: HR should ensure the organization adheres to its standards and values, promoting social and psychological safety.
– Eliminate Low-Value Processes: Remove practices that waste time and hinder enthusiasm, focusing on meaningful work.

What do we do about bad leaders? I make a distinction between “bad” and “evil.” Bad leaders are those people who are bad at leading. They can be those who are promoted to a senior position based on technical expertise rather than their ability to lead or people promoted based on potential rather than performance, for example. Bad behavior may result from insecurity, inexperience, or low self-awareness.

The corrective actions for bad leaders may include training, coaching, or targeted assignments with structured feedback. The goal is to close the skill gap or fill the toolbox with what the person needs to improve their performance as a leader. These are a lot of the people I encounter in executive education programs and with whom my coaching colleagues work.

Evil leaders, by contrast, are those who lead with selfishness or malevolence. They may be extraordinarily good at the types of things we expect of leaders: vision, motivation, decision-making, accountability, etc. That they are so good is the problem because of their ill intent. I’d like to downgrade those skills, not improve them.

An environment that promotes good leadership will have zero tolerance for toxic behavior (see Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule). Such an environment will use honest mistakes as learning experiences (see Amy Edmonson’s The Fearless Organization). It will be one that develops everyone’s ability to think and act like leaders (see David Marquet’s Turn This Ship Around). The list could go on. The examples in each of these books show that there are performance benefits beyond the intangible rewards of simply being decent.

The point is that there is a roadmap. We are not waiting for a theoretical breakthrough or practice innovation. Why, then, do bad leaders continue to emerge? I cite three principal reasons in my latest piece on Medium. Read the full post here.

I was recently interviewed by Chief.com about common leadership pitfalls resulting in shorter tenures for CEOs. The complexity of the operating environment and the multiplicity of challenges facing today’s executives mean their is less and less room for error. Some of my comments:

Before you reorganize the place or launch a flashy new initiative, you want to know what’s working, who your allies are going to be, and who your adversaries or resistors are likely to be,” McNulty explains. He worked with one turnaround CEO who quickly developed an understanding of what caused the need for a turnaround, and identified the hidden talent that was ready to support change. “It enabled her to both show urgency and build a foundation for the long, hard work of resetting the company,” he recalls.

Being intentional and disciplined is essential in any role–especially at the top. Stakeholders are watching your every move. When you start with relationships rather than tasks, you build allies and mitigate adversaries.

Read the full story here.

I’ve always had an issue with the attempts to “align” large, complex organizations. I recently explored that topic–and how to achieve both coherence and adaptive capacity on Medium: “Organizations are not Legos. Nor are they machines. They are complex, adaptive systems; dynamic entities existing in even more active contexts of markets and communities. Organizations are in a constant state of change, sometimes minor and sometimes major. This is why it is important to understand the benefits of both convergence and divergence.

Convergence, coming together, is essential for organizational cohesion. You need people to know why they are together — their purpose — and how they can achieve shared goals by working together. Convergence around values and core principles is essential.

Divergence, deviating from established norms, is essential for innovation and adaptation. As customers, competitors, and other forces are not static, the organization must evolve to remain relevant and tenable. Divergence through experimentation and individual agency is also essential.”

Read the rest of this article on Medium.

My latest for Medium looks the limits of power in getting people to return to the office. The alternative: a focus on making the best, highest use of everyone’s time–and that includes when and where they are together.

“Forcing employees back to the office is likely to depress engagement. For some, it decreases productivity. It encourages passive resistance and quiet quitting. Or active resistance and actual quitting.

Think instead of pursuing usefulness. If you make time in the office truly useful for people, they are more likely to want to return. When collaboration and mentoring are a reality, the office becomes attractive. When I feel that I do my best work and am supported as a parent, elder caregiver, and lifelong learner because of my time in the office, I want to be there.

This requires a more supportive than authoritarian approach to managing and leading. It doesn’t come naturally to many CEOs. They are used to minimizing their investment per square foot in their real estate or building a temple to satisfy their edifice complex.”

It was an honor to be asked by Shepherd Books to name the three books that I read in 2023. It was tough as I’m constantly reading. I wanted to give a varied selection, and here they are. What books resonated with you over the past year?

The Covenant of Water is so brilliantly written. The Four Factors of Trust presents a useful framework backed by significant data. The Babysitter is a gripping thriller. Whatever your tastes, there’s one for you here.