Leadership Feeds

EXCELLENCE is not a destination. It is the way we move in the world. It’s the direction we grow towards. In The Way of Excellence, author Brad Stulberg defines excellence as “An ongoing process of growth and becoming that imbues life with meaning and vigor. It emerges from involved engagement in something worthwhile that supports your values and goals. Excellence combines mastery and mattering. It is not something that is out of reach, but rather it is your birthright, a core part of your nature.” Stulberg also notes that excellence is not perfectionism or obsession. It is becoming a better version of yourself—seeing the future. “When it comes to the pursuit of excellence, we are often faced with the comfort, pleasure, or ease of short-term decisions that contradict our values and long-term goals.” Denying our present to secure a better future. We have to be able to distinguish between what is significant and what is not. To be excellent, you have to care about what you do. “If you want to have a rich and meaningful life, then you have to expose yourself. You have to make yourself vulnerable.” Goals add to the richness of life not for their achievement but because of what you become in the pursuit of the goal. You remember most not getting to the peak but what happened on the climb. Excellence comes from consistency. “Staying consistent often requires demonstrating a bit of restraint today so that you can pick up where you left…

The self-sufficient are doomed. Everyone needs help. But, chronic dependency turns daily responsibilities into requests for help. Chronic help-seekers transfer ownership to supporters. Don’t reward those who choose assistance over empowerment. The goal of help is more than comfort. It’s capability. Click to learn how.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Mark Pincus on doing something great: “Being truly ambitious and committed to winning means: 1. Maintaining ruthless objectivity about your ideas. 2. Being willing to kill them often. 3. Losing any emotional attachment to specific implementations. 4. Testing multiple variants quickly rather than going all in on one. “When you’re trying to build products, good is worse than bad. B+ ideas are good enough to get funding, get customers, attract talent, and keep hope alive. But they’re never good enough to be great. You can avoid good and get to great by asking questions: Would your smartest friends invest their own money? Are you pursuing this idea out of desperation?” Source: Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! II. Anne-Laure Le Cunff on experimentation: “No matter how good your tool or deliberative your thought process, one thing never changes: There is no right choice. If you’re used to zero-sum thinking, that point of view may frustrate you. But it’s almost impossible to fail when you see everything as an experiment. In a life of experimentation, there is no wrong choice, either. A pact isn’t a destination. It’s a path you walk to discover more about yourself and the world. Success and failure are fluid constructs, not fixed labels. If you simply keep going as is, it means you found an ideal…

Jack was a normal boy before he climbed the beanstalk. Alice was a normal girl before she went down the rabbit hole. Dorothy was an ordinary Kansas girl until she went to Oz. Modern stories often feature extraordinary heroes. But ordinary heroes give us hope. How to find extraordinary people?

Wanting approval is normal. Depending on it limits leadership. Psychologist Harriet Braiker says the disease to please is compulsively saying “yes” when you want to say “no.” Leaders do things others don’t like. You can’t please all the people even some of the time. How to overcome people-pleasing…

The hardest situation is the one you don’t see coming. You prepare for trains you see coming. Scheduled meetings. Client appointments. Performance issues. The Blindside Express turns a manageable issue into a crisis. Determine how to show up when the inevitable happens. Here’s how…

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE was a genuine breakthrough. When Daniel Goleman introduced it to mainstream leadership culture in the mid-1990s, it arrived as a necessary corrective to a field that had spent decades treating human beings like information-processing machines. The argument was simple and overdue—self-awareness, empathy, and the capacity to regulate one’s own emotional reactions are not soft skills. They are core leadership competencies. That argument was right. Thirty years later, it is also incomplete. The limitation is not in what emotional intelligence describes. It is in what it assumes. EI is a management framework. It presupposes a stable internal baseline and trains leaders to recognize and regulate what arises from it. What it does not address, what no mainstream leadership framework currently addresses, is the quality of that baseline itself. And the baseline is where the real work lives. The framework that we need to manage is inside. A Distinctive Difference The clinical reality is that two leaders can score identically on every validated emotional intelligence assessment and produce categorically different outcomes for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. This is not because one is more self-aware, or more empathetic, or more skillful at managing their reactions. It is because one is managing those reactions from a baseline of genuine coherence, and the other is managing from a baseline of chronic physiological stress. This is not a subtle distinction. A nervous system operating under chronic stress, even a well-managed, high-functioning one, is a nervous system in sustained activation. The prefrontal…

Fear doesn’t say, “Be a coward.” It says, “Be careful.” You need more information. The timing isn’t right. People might disapprove. Fear says save yourself. Courage is action when fear invites retreat. Courage isn’t feeling brave. It’s answering the call while fear is on the line.

A colleague once approached me to discuss a difficult career decision. He had been asked by a very senior person in his organization to consider a new role. Based on his description, it was only marginally better than his current one — somewhere between a lateral move and a promotion. The career paths didn’t seem stronger, and it required a relocation he was reluctant to make. He didn’t want to accept the offer. But he was uncomfortable with the risk of saying no to a senior leader. The key question on his mind was: how could he decline the offer and avoid damaging his career or his relationship? We worked together on talking points, potential questions, and avenues the conversation could take. But after all that preparation, I sensed he was still worried. So I asked him directly: how confident did he feel about the conversation he was about to have? To his credit, he openly acknowledged his concerns. We agreed that in addition to the right talking points, he would also have to prepare himself psychologically — to engage with his senior leader on equal terms, not from a position of trepidation. A few weeks later, I followed up. The conversation had gone really well. He had declined the offer, and the senior leader had praised him for the way he had done so. This experience stayed with me because it illustrates something leaders encounter constantly: our preparation may be top-notch, but we are unable to put the…

Take the 5:1 challenge. Every negative comment requires five positives. Don’t ignore problems. Make encouragement your default. Make as many negative comments as you like. The challenge isn’t restraint. Find balance by saying 5 positives for every negative. Gain insight here…

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Cate Hall on being authentic: “I was allowed to get away with being blunt and matter-of-fact when it came to people who managed me, but as I moved into positions of power myself, this way of operating began to incur costs. Being a good manager, it turns out, requires more than demanding excellence; it also entails showing that you recognize it in others. “Moreover, I finally admitted to myself that my cloud of aversion around learning to be warmer was a defensive mechanism. When I told myself I was ‘being authentic’ by remaining aloof, I was also avoiding having to look at some free-floating shame about my social awkwardness. When you spot an inner defense like this—a reaction of “I can’t do that, it wouldn’t be authentic”—it’s a yellow flag that you’ve noticed a possible area of improvement that you’re avoiding because it’s threatening to your ego.” Source: You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life II. Mike Grossman on keeping it together: “Focus on input rather than outcome. This is inherently challenging because we live in a world obsessed with outcomes. But the outcome isn’t controllable. Consequently, worrying about the outcome, while sometimes unavoidable, isn’t helpful in the slightest. It’s a waste of time, a waste of energy, and a significant distraction. And it’s emotionally draining.”…

HERE’S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in July 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month. The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand to Build a Successful Startup (and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong) by Rob Snyder Rob Snyder followed all the traditional advice for launching a startup—he did his research, ran experiments, raised millions in venture capital—but his company struggled to get off the ground. In The Power of Pull, Snyder strips entrepreneurship down to one counterintuitive principle: Customer demand is all that matters. When entrepreneurs find real demand, they stop pushing their product onto an indifferent market, and instead customers pull the product out of the entrepreneur’s hands. Yet most founders misunderstand what demand is and how it works. With examples from early-stage founders, this book shows how to find real demand and create a fast-growing business. All the Difference. Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value by Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman, and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Leslie C. Smith Look around your team. You see people with different communication styles, perspectives, cultural norms, and capabilities. These differences are expressed in all kinds of ways—a casual gesture in a meeting, a colleague’s opinion on a current event, an intense work style—and can often lead to friction, even conflict. You try to manage around them, but what if these differences…

Here is a selection of Posts from June 2026 that you will want to check out: Greatness and the Machine by @Brendan_McCord 9 Ways Great Leaders Communicate by @charlesstone How Often Does Your Team Laugh? by @PhilCooke The seven operating truths of AI-native companies via @McKinsey Your model isn’t the bottleneck—accessing your tribal knowledge is Becoming Irreplaceable by @neuranne Your entire life will change when you realize you need more action, not information by @Tim_Denning 9 Habits of Highly Successful Thought Leaders by @BriankDodd How To Get Unstuck: 6 Secrets From Philosophy by Eric Barker @bakadesuyo Eric Barker The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Organization May Be the One Small Infestation You’re Ignoring by @BrianKDodd What if Consumers Hate AI Content? by @sophiebakalar Graduating Problems by @iamthezack We are, every one of us, the descendants of people whose problems graduated. What was Theodore Roosevelt’s "Tennis Cabinet"? Historian Michael Patrick Cullinane joins @jamesstrock to discuss the informal circle that helped shape Roosevelt’s presidency—and what it reveals about leadership, power, and governing today Accountability Must Be Chosen, Not Mandated via @HarvardBiz See more on Twitter. * * * Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.  …

IT is not unusual to label yourself as an extrovert or an introvert—two terms that Carl Jung introduced in 1921. We do have proclivities one way or the other. But there are times when we need to be an extrovert, and there are times when we need to be an introvert. Effective leaders are flexible enough to balance the two extremes as needed. They become ambiverts. Ambiverts are those who can behave like introverts or extroverts depending on the situation they find themselves in. In We Are All Ambiverts Now, authors Karl Moore and Gabriel Mehl state that in today’s world, successful leaders are those who can be both. We live in a world where the loudest voice usually comes out on top. The extrovert’s readiness to engage socially and their “go-getter” approach fits with our preconceived notions of take-charge people. “Extroverts exude confidence and tend to stand out in a crowd. Our world has been constructed for extrovert leadership precisely because they seem competent and reliable at handling crises—they are loud, they are confident, and they let everyone know that they have a plan to fix the issue.” At the same time, extrovert leaders tend to dominate instead of listening and as a result often lack situational awareness. “The extrovert who lacks awareness will not seriously consider the opinions, sentiments, or needs of others. These qualities may harm the group chemistry and energy dynamics that this extrovert worked so hard to establish.” Introverts typically aim, then shoot. “We…

FOR as long as I can remember, marketers have pursued awareness. The assumption was simple: if enough people knew your brand, more would buy from you. Today, while awareness is easier than ever to build, many well-known brands struggle to move beyond being known to being preferred. The gap between awareness and loyalty is relevance. Customers don’t become loyal simply because they know you exist. They become loyal because you matter to them. The logic behind customer awareness used to be straightforward: the more people knew your brand, the more they would buy from you. As marketers, we were taught “share of mind” (think of you), “top of mind” (think of you first), and even “share of wallet” (capture more business than your competitors). For a long time, that approach worked. Today, however, awareness has become easier to achieve and, in itself, far less meaningful. Consumers are exposed to thousands of messages daily. Social media, search engines, influencers, digital advertising, retail media networks, and artificial intelligence have enabled brands of all sizes to reach vast audiences. Today, brands that focus exclusively on visibility often end up competing on price, promotions, and convenience. Brands that focus on meaning and earning trust, however, achieve something far more powerful: an emotional connection. The Difference Between Being Recognized and Being Remembered Being known is no longer enough. Customers may recognize your name, but name recognition alone doesn’t lead them to choose you. It doesn’t create loyalty, generate trust, or build belief. The brands…

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz on bad habits: “The impulses for all of our bad habits travel along the same path – a straight shot to immediate gratification through what I call the lower channel… Lower channel functioning is a disaster. When the pleasure is over, we’re left with nothing. Every time you restrain your impulses, you close off the lower channel… And in this higher channel, the energy accrues. Every act of restraint puts more in the piggy bank.” Source: Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You II. Nir Eyal on rumination: “Attention doesn’t just observer reality, it shapes it. It amplifies that we focus on while diminishing what we ignore. Rumination (repeatedly focusing on negative thoughts) strengthens neural pathways that keep us stuck. Recognize that your current problems may be partly created by where you’re directing your attention.” Source: Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results * * * Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. * * * Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.  …

IN today’s landscape, complete with change, disruption, ambiguity and uncertainty, it’s more important than ever that leaders are effective, not just efficient. Talent management must shift from being reactive to being strategic, intentional and aligned to outcomes. How do we move from “putting out fires” and reading smoke signals to building the “house”, or environment, to better account for potential business impacts? The answer is simple. Business strategies must also become talent strategies. Too often, organizations develop business goals and outcomes first, then call talent leaders in later to operationalize them. The deeper opportunity includes inviting talent leaders into the room during the design phase. This enables organizations to become proactive versus reactive. Across industries, leaders are balancing higher expectations with fewer resources. Employees are navigating uncertainty, financial stress and constant change. The challenge is not simply improving productivity. The challenge is designing workplaces where people feel seen, valued and connected to both their purpose and the organization’s goals. In my book, Joyful Workplaces, I introduce what I call the Joyful Workplace Design, a practical approach for building workplaces where people feel seen, valued, connected to their purpose and aligned to organizational goals. A joyful workplace is “the natural outcome of an effective, high-performing environment.” Some leaders may believe that hosting social activities, happy hours, get-togethers and fun offsites build community, show people they are valued and create connection. And, at the surface level, this is true. These moments can create shared experiences and bring people together. I also…

RESEARCH shows that nearly 95% of employees do not fully understand their organization’s strategy, and even more concerning, many leaders overestimate how clearly they are communicating it. This disconnect is not just an operational issue—it is a leadership risk, often driven by blind spots at the executive level. High-performing leaders are often celebrated for their decisiveness, resilience, and ability to deliver results under pressure. They rise quickly, earn trust, and are entrusted with increasingly complex responsibilities. Yet the very traits that fuel their success can also obscure a critical vulnerability: blind spots. Executive blind spots are not simply weaknesses or skill gaps. They are the unseen patterns, biases, and behaviors that leaders cannot readily identify in themselves, but that others experience regularly. Left unaddressed, these blind spots quietly erode trust, distort decision-making, and create misalignment across teams and organizations. In many cases, organizations do not fail because of a lack of intelligence or capability at the top. They fail because leaders are unaware of how their behaviors are impacting the people responsible for executing their strategy. The Paradox of High Performance The higher leaders rise, the less likely they are to receive unfiltered feedback. Success creates distance. Titles create insulation. And over time, leaders can become surrounded by individuals who are reluctant to challenge their thinking or question their decisions. This dynamic creates a dangerous paradox: the more successful a leader becomes, the less visibility they often have into their own limitations. High-performing executives are particularly susceptible to this…

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on success: “‘People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,’ he later said. ‘Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.’ And character, in his view, can only be the result of overcoming setbacks and adversity. To Jensen, the struggle to persevere in the face of bad, and often over-whelming, odds is simply what work is. It is why, whenever someone asks him for advice on how to achieve success, his answer has been consistent over the years: ‘I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.’” Source: The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim II. Brad Stulberg on rugged flexibility: “The goal is not to be stable and therefore never change. Nor is the goal to sacrifice all sense of stability, passively surrendering yourself to the whims of life. Rather, the goal is to marry these qualities to cultivate what I call rugged flexibility. To be rugged is to be tough, determined, and durable. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking. Put those together and the result is a gritty endurance, an anti-fragility that not only withstands change, but thrives in its midst.” Source: Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything…

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: I. Sebastian Wernicke on automating insight: “Machine learning is not equally suitable for all tasks. It performs best when applied to frequent, repetitive decisions or tasks of manageable complexity. At the same time, the limits of machine learning when it comes to tacit understanding ensure that humans will be anything but redundant for the foreseeable future. For any situation requiring careful, nuanced consideration, developing and deploying a useful algorithm often costs more time and effort than it saves. And even when an algorithm eventually performs an operational activity, humans must still plan and manage it, requiring organizations to cultivate the necessary skills to guide the models and set appropriate guardrails.” Source: Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation II. Mike Grossman on scope creep: “No matter how excited and optimistic you are about the business, putting all your eggs in one basket is unsettling. As a result, it’s very tempting to look for ways to diversify. The result is scope creep. It’s also easy to be fooled into thinking that opportunities adjacent to your primary area of focus are natural extensions of your strategy. But that usually isn’t the case. It may seem counterintuitive, but less really is more. If you want to build a great business, it’s crucial to resist the temptation to spread yourself and the company too thin….

IT’S a well-worn saying that the only constant in life is change, and that’s doubly true of the business world. If you’re successful, you need to constantly check your rearview mirror because there are always competitors right behind you. Earlier in my career, I became CEO of a company, Equity Marketing (which became EMAK Worldwide). My thinking at the time was: “Okay, you’re the boss, so you need to come up with all the important strategic and visionary ideas because that’s what your job is and that’s what you’re expected to do.” But I ultimately concluded that’s actually not the job. The job as CEO is to make sure the company has a unique, compelling, and defensible advantage — whether you develop that strategy by yourself, or you curate it from your team. Defensible in this context means that a competitor can’t easily remove you from your perch in the marketplace because you have a unique process, or unique technology, or unique talent with a unique culture, or unique client relationships. Whatever it is, you own something that makes it hard for a competitor to dislodge you from your position. The ultimate hallmark of a defensible strategy is that it’s adaptable to the inevitability of change. So, if nepotism is your strategy and you got into Yale or Harvard despite your mediocre high school GPA because you’re a legacy, that’s not going to be sustainable when you get out into the world and your circumstances change. When you graduate…

Botanists will tell you to have a vision for how you want a plant to look before you start pruning it. The same is true for your life and your business. Whether you’re talking about programs, processes, personal commitments, or even people – over time, they all tend to accumulate. You simply end up with more of everything. However, overgrowth impedes your ability to scale yourself and your business. In order to grow, you’re going to have to prune. Continue reading The Pruning Principle at Full Focus.

It’s that time of year again. The weather is changing, leaves are falling off the trees, and your favorite leadership podcast is talking about Strategic Planning again. If there’s one thing that humans do well, it’s imagining the future. (We can do it badly, too, of course.) But the important thing is that we can create better outcomes for ourselves and our businesses when we do it intentionally. That’s where Strategic Planning comes in. Continue reading 6 Essential Ingredients for Effective Strategic Planning at Full Focus.

“Quiet quitting” seems to be the hot topic of conversation in business and leadership circles right now. But what exactly is “quiet quitting”? How can you figure out if your employees are doing it? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you create an organizational culture where your team members will feel empowered in their job?   Continue reading How to Avoid Quiet Quitting in Your Business at Full Focus.

You spend your days managing details, scheduling meetings, and replying to emails — by the time you start on the “real work,” the workday is half over. This ends up cutting into your personal life as you try to make up for lost time. It all leads to you feeling more tired, more stressed, and less productive at work and at home. If you heed our advice, you can minimize this pain. The advice is simple: hire an executive assistant! Continue reading 5 Mistakes Business Owners Make When Hiring an Assistant at Full Focus.

Last week we talked about the importance of a thriving company culture. Hopefully, Michael and Megan made the case that a company culture is both important and the responsibility of the leader. We’re going to continue that conversation by talking about how businesses can actually cultivate a thriving company culture – no matter where they’re starting from.   Continue reading 4 Ingredients for a Thriving Company Culture at Full Focus.

Anywhere you find a group of people, you’ll find a culture. That’s true for families, churches, cities, neighborhoods, and anything else you can think of that includes more than one person. This idea is especially true for businesses. Leaders need to have a vision for how they want their culture to look and feel. If they don’t, they could find themselves surrounded by a toxic culture that not only hurts business but makes everyone miserable. Continue reading Why a Thriving Culture Is Essential at Full Focus.

Your business is probably the largest single asset in your portfolio. You’ve invested time and money, and, one day, you may want to see a healthy return on those investments. If you want to maximize the value of your business, then you should start making plans today. Continue reading How to Maximize the Market Value of Your Business in 8 Steps at Full Focus.

There is no denying that you will get further, faster with a good coach. But what about a great coach? How much further could you get with amazing coaching? Today’s episode tackles that question by talking with LeeAnn Moody, Director of Performance Coaching for Full Focus. LeeAnn and Michael break down the four characteristics of great coaching and help you identify what you might need to be successful for your organization. Continue reading What Makes Good Coaching Great at Full Focus.

During the height of the pandemic, everyone was forced to go remote. But, now that offices have opened back up, leaders and staff are confronted with some challenging questions around a seemingly basic concept: Where should work happen? Continue reading What Elon Musk Gets Wrong About Remote Work at Full Focus.

What if you could grow your business and only do about 20% of the work you’re currently doing? If that were true, you would do almost anything to find out how to do it, right? Continue reading The 10/80/10 Principle: Grow Your Business with 20% of the Work at Full Focus.