Strength is a word that’s come up for a lot of my clients recently: “I want the strength to lead with impact during this challenging time.” “Strength looks like me having that hard conversation with my father while there’s still time.” “I want my team to be stronger leaders who hold their staff accountable.” Strength is often the word that gets used in our conversations at work and home, but I think it is not …
In work (and life), adversity is a given. Perhaps our most important responsibility when leading through hardship is to communicate effectively. Here are three crisis communication tips that will move your team and stakeholders toward a positive outcome, growth, and resilience. 1. Address the brutal facts as they become clear. 🔎 Brutal honesty is necessary during any catastrophe. It ensures you maintain trust with your team and stakeholders so you can rally them forward. Be sure …
Last month at one of my Harvard classes, we got into an intense debate about whether virtual work was here to stay or if we’d quickly revert to the in-person setting typical of pre-pandemic times. While many of my fellow students and I believe there are benefits to virtual and hybrid work options, especially when it comes to personal productivity or recruiting and retaining younger generations and parents who appreciate the flexibility that remote work offers, some …
I learned what a poor listener I was in 2009 in the middle of a yoga teacher training. I realized that most of the time when I thought I was listening, I wasn’t actually listening to the person in front of me. Instead, I was crafting my response in my head, thinking about how to make myself sound good, or telling myself how right I was and how wrong they were. Not to mention the …
When my first son was a toddler, I was stressed out nearly every time I was in public with him. Whether at Target or a friend’s house or in our front yard, I felt like his every move, word choice, and behavior was being judged and a reflection of me and my parenting skills (or lack thereof). If he threw a tantrum or cried or wasn’t grateful about a gift he had been given or …