Leadership Feeds

Here is a selection of Posts from July 2026 that you will want to check out: Organizational Complacency Statistics: USA 2026 by @Mark_Sanborn It turns out, resistance to your change initiative is (mostly) a good sign by @artpetty Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future by @tferriss The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I’d bet on it. A Field Guide to Information Overload: How to navigate an environment built to distract us by Hana Lee Goldin Theodore Roosevelt and Nationalism by @jamesstrock Moral courage is a leadership competency by Ena Inesi via @LBS What the Room Knows by @Julie_WG World Cup Showcases Positive Nationalism by @jamesstrock Let’s Build on This. Surrendering My Thinking to Claude by @davidburkus How to Stay Focused When Everyone Else Has an Urgent Request via @LetsGrowLeaders When AI Makes Answers Cheap, What Are Business Schools For? by @jacobides The best institutions won’t just teach AI. They will redefine their own value and develop managers with the crucial skills for the AI age 3 Words That Separate Elite Leaders from Everyone Else by @BrianKDodd To Him Who Restores by @donhornsby Founder Energy by @jamesstrock Unity Is Our Strength. The Myth of Suffering for Greatness by @BStulberg The Cost of Convenience via @LBBOnline We Don’t Control Time—But We Do Control Our Decisions by @AlanSteinJr 7 Leadership Lessons…

If everyone likes you, you’ve lost yourself. Meaningful decisions disappoint someone. Agendas collide. Values conflict. The courage to lead includes the courage to be disliked. Click for more…

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. Chris Hodges on growth: “Growth is rarely impressive in the moment. Most days it looks ordinary. Quiet. Unnoticed. It’s choosing to learn when it would be easier to coast. Choosing to reflect when reacting feels faster. Choosing to stretch when settling feels comfortable. I’ve had to make those choices more times than I can count. Start where you are. Use what you have. You don’t need to see the whole path or have everything figured out. You just need the humility to stay teachable and the courage to take the next step.” Source: Legacy Letters: Timeless Principles I Learned, Lived, and Leave Behind II. Ron Friedman on feedback: “When feedback is tied to a formal review, the conversation shifts from growth to judgment. That shift triggers anxiety and defensiveness, two emotions that make it almost impossible to learn. Busy managers often assume that no feedback communicates that everything is fine. But employees tend to interpret silence differently. A lack of feedback makes them feel invisible. Feedback is therefore About more than just guidance. It’s a signal that we’re valued, respected, and seen.” Source: Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams * * * 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…

“If you believe it, you can achieve it” is nonsense. Reality always wins. Belief’s power shows up in what it does to you. Beliefs shape: What you see. What you feel. What you do. Successful leaders shape belief.

The simplest form of leadership is telling people what to do. Being bossy is good sometimes. The problem isn’t being a bossy boss. The problem is being bossy all the time. A good bossy boss creates clarity. Learn the 3D Adaptive Leadership Model. When to be a bossy boss?

Technology trains us to crave distraction. If you aren’t distracted now, you’re anticipating your next distraction. Distraction delivers ankle-deep impact. Learn 10 practical ways to regain control.

PERSONAL agency is the ability to see choices and the belief in your ability to act on them. Agentic people take ownership of their own lives. You Can Just Do Things author Cate Hall believes that personal agency is learnable. And while agency may not matter on an average day, “agency really matters when you’re faced with an opportunity that could change your life completely. A little moment when choosing to deviate from your routine could have outrageous results.” You Can Just Do Things provides valuable insights into growing our agency and living an intentional life. Hall says that most people are selectively agentic. That is, they don’t apply the same can-do approach and resourcefulness equally in all areas of their life. If you divide life into three areas: work, relations of all types, and self-relationship, which includes health, mindset, and spirituality, then you might be high-agency in one but not the others. “The exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.” You may think that you’re really struggling to deal with problems in the other areas of your life. “But struggling is not evidence that you’ve tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly engineered life.” I’ve talked with people who don’t think they have a choice. They just take has been handed to them. “The human default is to voluntarily accept constraints, convincing ourselves that they…

I heard a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say something shocking. “The question I wish people would have asked me is, ‘How do you feel?’” On another occasion I heard a CIO ask his CEO, “How do you feel about that?” Learn to ask the unasked question.

I’VE SPENT 45 years in the pest control industry: 30 in corporate leadership and 15 building my own company, Pied Piper Pest & Lawn, from the ground up. In that time, I’ve seen just about every kind of infestation imaginable. But some of the worst ones never required a spray wand. Early in my management career, I started noticing something strange: the same thought processes I used to assess and control pest infestations worked just as well for diagnosing problems with employees, clients, and suppliers. The behaviors were almost identical. The strategies for dealing with them? Surprisingly similar. Whether you’re managing a cockroach or a coworker who helps themselves to whatever they want, understanding their behavior is the key. Once you know what motivates them, what they’re scared of, and what their kryptonite is, you can manage your environment and make your business a place where good people actually want to stay. Here are four field-tested principles I use to keep both kinds of pests from taking over. 1. Know your pest before you decide how to control it. In pest control, the biggest mistake an amateur makes is the shotgun approach: buy whatever’s on the shelf, apply it everywhere, and hope for the best. It rarely works. That’s because different pests require completely different treatment methods. What eliminates a flea infestation will do nothing for termites. The same logic applies to managing difficult people. In my book Infested, I break workplace pests into four categories: Bloodsuckers (those who…

“Do what makes you happy” is bad advice. “Life is not about you. It’s about what you do for others.” Tom Rath The saying, “Life is too short to be unhappy” overlooks the value of meaningful discomfort. Don’t do what makes you happy. Do what makes a difference. More…

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. Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig on managing emotions: “Stress, anger, and anxiety can cause narrow-mindedness and the fight-flee-or-freeze syndrome. It’s not at all helpful when you need to engage in critical thinkIng, problem solving, innovative thinking outside the box, or designing experiments to learn. Positive emotions, on the other hand, have been scientifically linked not just to higher health and well-being but also to broader attention, open-mindedness, deeper focus, and more flexible thinking, all of which underlie creativity and innovative thinking.” Source: Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age II. Walter Lippmann on getting the questions right: “The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully. Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer. It was to this that our people and the world responded, preferring him instinctively to those who did not know what the real questions were.” Source: Roosevelt Is Gone, Today and Tomorrow, April 14, 1945 * * * Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. * * * Follow us on…

ORGANIZATIONS often believe they’re selecting the best candidate when in reality they’re selecting the person who best matches familiar credentials, patterns, or assumptions. That distinction matters. As the 2011 movie Moneyball demonstrated through baseball recruiting how success improves dramatically when talent is evaluated against the factors that actually predict performance — not the ones people traditionally favor. The same lesson applies in hiring. If companies want to identify exceptional talent before competitors do, they need a clearer, more disciplined way to define what success in a role truly requires. What Baseball Got Right About Talent Billy Beane of “Moneyball” fame inherited one of the smallest budgets for any MLB team player salaries in 2002. Frustrated with his inability to outbid other teams for talented players, he took a different approach. He called Paul DePodesta, a Harvard alum and professional sports executive interested in data analysis. They combed through decades of data on hundreds of individual players to devise a better strategy for recruiting players. They discovered scouts were overlooking statistics that could better predict a player’s performance versus relying on subjective things like attitude or whom they’d played for in the past. In short, scouts were asking the wrong questions to assess talent. The scouting process failed to include individual components that made up a player’s performance and match that to what the baseball team needed — much like hiring managers looking at academic qualifications or years of experience as a proxy for the responsibilities the individual needs to…

SOME things never change. When it comes to human behavior, some things stay the same. And those behaviors can make the future more knowable even as so much is changing all around us. Throughout history, circumstances change, but human nature does not. You may not know specifics of the change, but you can know how people will respond. And that can help to explain how we got where we are. In Same as Ever, Morgan Housel presents us with 23 things that never change. He asks, “What would be true in every imaginable version of your life, not just this one? Those universal truths are obviously the most important things to focus on, because they don’t rely on chance, luck, or accident.” Every current event-big or small-has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings, and cousins. Ignoring that family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened, how long they might last, and under what circumstances they might occur again. Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation of their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty. Let’s look at six of the twenty-three timeless truths Housel presents. Risk is What You Don’t See Risk is what you are not prepared for. “As financial advisor Carl Richards says, ‘Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.’” It’s what you don’t see coming. If you knew what was coming, you would be prepared for it….

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. Eric Ries on the incoherent organization: “An incoherent organization is one where what gets rewarded contradicts what gets proclaimed. Where the values on the wall are betrayed by daily reality. Some such companies claim they value innovation but ostracize those whose experiments fail. Others promise work-life balance while ensuring only workaholics are invited to strategy meetings. Still others swear they put customers first but praise employees who engage in deceptive sales practices. Departments clash due to opposing cultures-product aspires to be Apple, but finance aspires to be Goldman Sachs. The result is a company at war with itself. And like a human body suffering from an autoimmune disease, it becomes increasingly weak and vulnerable.” Source: Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great II. Walter Lippmann on the forgotten foundation of democracy: “What separates us from the totalitarian regimes is our belief that man does not belong to the state. This is true. But if we are to be clear about what that really means, we must say also what it is that man does belong to. There are, perhaps, many different ways of saying it. But there is no better way of saying it than to say it as the authors of our liberties were accustomed to say it. They said that man belonged to his Creator, and that…

WE can be too close, too present in a situation, to look at it constructively. Good decision-making occurs when we can step back and look at the situation from a broader, more objective perspective. We respond differently when we see differently. Authors L. David Marquet and Michael Gillespie warn us in Distancing, “When excited, stressed, or threatened, we are pushed further into a state of self-immersion, a closed-in feeling of me-here-and-now, which narrows, filters, and distorts what we see, reinforcing our previously held beliefs.” There are three ways we can step back and get some distance: We can be someone else We can be somewhere else We can be sometime else Be Someone Else Being someone else is about learning to become your own coach. If you can see yourself as a coach might see you, you can uncover answers that you already have inside. It is distanced self-talk. This distanced self-talk “helps red helps reduce stress because it removes some of the emotional baggage that tends to cloud thinking, decreasing performance.” A coach helps you to see your future self. Who do you want to be? How do you want to talk about this episode of your life? When we imagine ourselves as someone else, we access the strengths of that alter ego and break out of any self-consciousness and attachments to our prior decisions. Be Somewhere Else Often referred to as going to the balcony, be somewhere else takes you out of the moment. Be a fly…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.