The Mental Cost of Secrets
Your sponsor seems to do it with some regularity. He shoots the messenger. Now you have a message to deliver, and it isn’t good news. Some significant risks have arisen [...]
Why Take a Walk?
Sometimes the day-to-day work of a change practitioner can feel very routine. But especially as you take on more responsibility supporting major change initiatives, those times become fewer and fewer. [...]
Earning the Right to Influence: Two Strategies
No matter what role you play in change, the ability to influence others is essential to your success. Influence is something that is earned over time—it’s rare to walk into [...]
Change and Emotion
As a profession, why do we approach major change rationally? We create the “case for change,” articulating all of the reasons that maintaining the status quo is not viable, and [...]
Transformation Comes in Many Flavors
If you are a change practitioner, transformation is a word that most likely permeates more and more of your conversations, more and more of your assignments, and more and more [...]
A Change Lesson from Game of Thrones
Carmine Gallo knows a lot about communication. Among other things, he is the author of Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great and Talk Like TED, [...]
Learning from Failure. Really!
There is no doubt that we, and the leaders that we serve, will make mistakes. As change practitioners, learning these lessons from Google can serve us well.
Are You Ready to Leave Your Plateau?
Research has shown that for most people, performance plateaus after a couple of years. This is true whether you are looking at job performance, performance as a parent or partner, [...]
Three Steps to Avoid Working Harder Than Your Sponsor
One of the first pieces of advice I heard as a change agent was “don’t work harder than your sponsor.” Whenever I’ve shared this, the main responses I get are [...]
Present Better; Influence More
As change practitioners, we are constantly in the position of having to influence others. Among other things, we are recommending that the leaders we support take unpopular actions; we are [...]
