Category: Power

The Shadow of Psychological Safety

It is prob­a­bly inevitable that when a con­cept achieves broad accep­tance that there will be debate over what it is and what it is not. Sur­vey­ing LinkedIn and oth­er social media sources, it’s appar­ent that the con­cept of psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty devel­oped by Har­vard Busi­ness School’s Amy Edmond­son has both achieved this lev­el of accep­tance and… Con­tin­ue read­ing The Shad­ow of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Safety

The Power of Mea Culpa

As a coach who works with all kinds of lead­ers, it’s inevitable that a cer­tain per­cent­age don’t come vol­un­tar­i­ly. That does­n’t mean they aren’t excit­ed to work with me; it means some­body else has said they need to find some­one to work with — in some cas­es with an implied “or else.” What I find… Con­tin­ue read­ing The Pow­er of Mea Culpa

Ambiguity, Organizational Stress and Leading Well

Back in the late 1980’s when I was doing recon­nais­sance into how well peo­ple were speak­ing up in orga­ni­za­tions, there were two main behav­iors by lead­ers that peo­ple told me caused them to become care­ful about express­ing them­selves. One was abra­sive behav­ior by lead­ers — shout­ing, crit­i­ciz­ing, insult­ing or oth­er­wise under­min­ing peo­ple. The oth­er lead­er­ship… Con­tin­ue read­ing Ambi­gu­i­ty, Orga­ni­za­tion­al Stress and Lead­ing Well

The Mutiny Against Our Conditioning

As adults we come up against facets of our­selves that we wish to change. Uncon­scious big­otry, for exam­ple, or cer­tain aspects of intro­ver­sion or exces­sive guilt, impa­tience or ego­cen­tric­i­ty — our weak­ness­es and the results of our “over-strengths.” Tak­ing on these chal­lenges sounds good and promis­es a desir­able trans­for­ma­tion but in real­i­ty also por­tends the… Con­tin­ue read­ing The Mutiny Against Our Conditioning