Tag: management
-
What Does It Actually Mean to “Make Them Think”?
One of the most common questions I hear from managers is: “How do I get my team to think for themselves?” Maybe it’s an employee who brings you every problem without first thinking through possible solutions. Maybe you’ve had the same conversation with the same person three times. You’ve explained exactly what needs to change.…
-
Great Conversations Don’t Just Engage the Mind
Psychology and neuroscience suggest that much of what drives our thoughts, emotions, and behavior happens below the level of our conscious awareness. We like to believe we’re making deliberate, rational decisions, but in reality, our brains are constantly processing far more information than we’re consciously aware of. I believe one of the biggest limitations of…
-
Running Toward the Burning Building
You are the one people bring their problems to. Someone walks in stuck, and before they have even finished the sentence, you can see the way out. You feel that familiar pull. Jump in. Fix it. Be the one who makes it better. That pull has a name. Save-the-day energy. It is the instinct to…
-
The Same Stories Show Up Everywhere
After nearly two decades of working with high-achieving people from all walks of life, I’ve learned that the same stories show up everywhere. The perfectionism that delays a project also slows progress on a passion. The fear of judgment that keeps someone quiet in meetings also keeps them from expressing their creativity. The inner voice…
-
The Reason You’re Still Solving Everyone’s Problems
I work with leaders every day who are frustrated because they keep asking or telling members of their team to do the same things over and over, and they’re not seeing any substantive change. They’re exhausted from being the ones who have to solve everyone’s problems all the time, only to have the same people…
-
Is This Person Coachable Right Now?
“This person is amazing, BUT…” I call this the big “BUT.” It comes up so often in conversations with leaders that I could finish the sentence for them. The BUT is a list of behaviors they want changed in someone on their team. The ones I hear most often: micromanaging, talking over people in meetings,…
-
The Patience Game
I wrote Make Them Think for leaders of all kinds whose job, by trade or by nature, is to help people learn, grow and change their lives for the better. What a lot of people don’t know about the book is that it was born out of a corporate training I used to give for…
-
The Most Natural Question in the World (And Why it’s the Wrong One)
A reader named Layne, a CMO with 20+ years in startup tech, wrote something in her review that I keep coming back to: “I thought good coaching meant having better answers. This book showed me it means asking better questions.” That one sentence is the whole paradigm shift. Most of us were trained, implicitly or…
