Twenty-five years ago this week I started my leadership advisory practice. I was twenty-seven years old with no formal training. Curiosity, naivety, and unfounded confidence were my greatest assets. “You’re a little light on experience” an early client commented, “but I like your energy.” He kept me around for a year. So did others. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m glad they did.

Eventually I got a degree in organizational leadership. Of course, book smarts don’t count for much in this field. The majority of my education has come from standing shoulder-to-shoulder with clients, looking out over their challenges and together finding paths forward. Doing that a few thousand times clarifies things. Patterns emerge, signals become clear, and beliefs take hold.

Below are ten beliefs about organizational leadership, born from battle scars, that inform my practice today…

1. Mediocrity is easily institutionalized. Excellence is not. Institutionalized mediocrity is effortless; all it needs is the absence of clear standards and high bars. It seeps into an organization and drags behavior down to a low mean. Institutionalized excellence by contrast takes everything you have: daily commitment, daily effort, and daily renewal. And it requires scaling that expectation. The far end of the bell curve is thinly populated for good reason.

2. Best practices are fool’s gold. The process of discovering best practices is the real gold. Crisp models, frameworks, formulas, recipes, roadmaps, and playbooks from “experts” are good for making consultants money. They’re bad at sustainably impacting a client’s business. More often than not, someone else’s best practices lull clients into thinking they have a solution to a problem they don’t fully understand yet. More often than not, someone else’s best practices leave a wake of failed projects and cynicism.

3. A group of strong leaders ≠ a strong top team. Star players sitting around a table aren’t a team. Teams must be intentionally built over time. They need to align on reality and a reason for being. They need to understand and own the full enterprise. They need to build an operating rhythm and collective norms. They need to strengthen their muscles for productive disagreement. And they need to get out in the organization and visibly lead change together. None of this happens naturally without focused effort.

4. Full transparency is a delusion. For myriad reasons full transparency doesn’t exist in organizations. And that’s OK. The best that leaders can do is slowly get better at opening up. It takes role modeling from the top and comes in degrees. With each improvement people go a little further. Total psychological safety is never possible. However, all organizations have room to improve and doing so has a materially positive impact.

5. Momentum is more important than speed. Businesses are complex organisms. They don’t change overnight. Trying to transform them too quickly backfires. Leaders need a bias for action, but must be careful not to rush or force issues. Set up experiments. Test. Learn. Repeat. Build capabilities. Bring people along. Transformations fail because castles are hastily built in the sky without the organizational foundation to support them.

6. Bad behavior is always knocking at the door. An unfortunate truth of organizational life is that antisocial behavior can be financially expedient in the short team. Our quarterly-return, keep-the-stock-price-high culture exacerbates the risk. If you’re in leadership long enough this truth will test you. It’s wise to get crystal clear on your boundaries and build a culture that’s clear on its boundaries with known repercussions for crossing them. Once the antisocial camel’s nose is under the tent it’s hard to keep the body out.

7. Giving a damn is a differentiator. The waiter who gives a damn brightens customers. The teacher who gives a damn opens minds. The doctor who gives a damn treats the whole person. The CEO who gives a damn builds a culture that inspires. Giving a damn is distinctly human. For all the wonderful things technology and machines do, the one thing they can’t do is give a damn. Get clear on what you give a damn about and follow it.

8. Love is an underrated leadership tool. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” —James Baldwin. In an era of scientific and technological progress our moral imaginations have atrophied. Love connects us and reminds us of our humanity. It re-fires our motivation to find new and powerful paths for doing the right thing. Love is not weak. Love is not soft. It is, as Mahatma Gandhi said, “the prerogative of the brave.”

9. The best businesses are living works of art. They are immensely creative endeavors. They arise from inspiration and don’t follow formulas. They develop a clear point of view and get off the fence. They take a stand and risk. They deliver something compelling, inventive, and bold. They connect with people, sustain them, and allow them to dream. They leave society better. When a business gets boxed into a narrow frame of being little more than a profit seeking machine to maximize financial returns it sucks people’s souls and loses its way.

10. Organizational life is absurd. Find the humor. Any time you get a bunch of people together to do anything, some degree of absurdity ensues. That absurdity delivers highs and lows. You’ll feel ease and adversity; confidence and doubt; acceptance and rejection; joy and sadness; and hope and resignation; With luck, you’ll feel more of the good than the bad. But being human you’ll feel all of it. An irony of organizational life is that the tougher it is for you to roll with punches the more of them you’ll get. Don’t take yourself too seriously and remember to laugh.

Thank you to all of my clients who have trusted me on the path so far. It’s been fun and rewarding work. I look forward to partnering with existing and new clients in the years ahead!

Much love, Doug

I have a lot of thoughts about the state of our nation and its leaders. I mostly keep them to myself. I recently jotted down 25 of them. I found myself concerned to share this list. Which alarmed me. And is why I’m sharing it.

1. I think Donald Trump is a master showman and salesman. He has killer political instincts for appealing to base impulses.

2. I think he understands how to get to the heart of an emotional issue quickly.

3. I think he’s a terrible leader.

4. I think his might-makes-right retributive style feels good to some in the short term, but will do long-term domestic and international damage.

5. I think his values and character make him unfit for the presidency.

6. I don’t think he cares about the the working class beyond how he can use them for his own money and power ends.

7. I do think he should be President as he was duly elected.

8. I think the Democrats’ fingerprints are all over Trump’s electoral successes.

9. I think the Democrats spent the better part of 30 years cozying up to a technocratic elite, hollowing out support from working people. It finally came home to roost.

10. I find it absolutely offensive that the professional managerial class from both parties hollowed out the US middle class by shipping jobs overseas and then have had the gall to look down on working people for years. (Cue the flyover states jokes coming out of Hollywood.)

11. I think the Democrats look more hypocritical re #10 as they had historically backed Labor.

12. I think Democrats became the party of red tape and finger wagging and forgot how to use power to get things done.

13. I think far too many current members of Congress are spineless wimps and posers.

14. How the f*ck do Renee Good and Alex Pretti get murdered with almost no outrage from the “Don’t Tread on Me” party?

15. I think there is moral rot in parts of the Republican party right now. I am stunned that more sitting Republicans aren’t standing up to it.

16. I do think we do need tighter and clearer immigration policies. I do think we need to get violent criminals off the street.

17. But in no way do I think going to schools and ripping families apart is appropriate. It’s inhumane. It cannot be who we become as a country.

18. I think the current DHS approach is a made-for-TV spectacle decoupled from serious immigration problems or solutions.

19. I think January 6th was a wakeup call. And yet we are inexplicably still asleep in the nightmare.

20. I think we can find a productive path forward as a nation.

21. In my more optimistic moments I think the current administration is useful. Like a 2x4 across the face.

22. Both parties as we knew them pre-2016 are gone.

23. I hope we can learn the lessons we need to learn here.

24. I hope leaders emerge with character, vision, guts, and the political skill to win in our divisive time.

25. I don’t see many, yet…

Originally published May 6, 2025 on Forbes

Over 25 years working with CEOs I’ve found a few things distinguish the best from the rest. These aren’t fads or fancy frameworks, but rather daily spadework that cultivates a culture of collaborative excellence. There’s no formulaic way to strengthen these behaviors and no CEO is great at them out of the gates. These behaviors require experimentation, practice, and humility. And they require a willingness to move past clichéd, oversimplified conceptualizations of leadership to understand what it really takes to get the best from an organization.

They’re masters at separating signals from noise

CEOs are inundated with countless places to put their energy. A critical few are signals; most are noise. Separating the two is an artform because signals tend to be wrapped in layers of noise. Decoupling them is as much a political exercise as a technical one. The best CEOs move quickly to develop a working thesis of signals vs noise. They socialize the thesis with relevant players, deepening understanding and building alignment. They listen intently to understand opportunities, concerns, and anxieties. They combat complexity with clear messaging and stories to help stakeholders make sense of the organization's focus and potential. Throughout the process they manage a tricky balance: move too quickly and people push back; move too slowly and people lose confidence.

They don’t meddle in too many decisions

CEOs tend to be confident people. As such, they can stick their noses in a lot of places. It’s an understandable urge, but the meddling creates more problems than it solves. First, CEOs risk burning out as they get pulled in too many directions. Second, they limit their ability to move fast and grow as they become an inevitable bottleneck. Lastly, they create a dependency that undermines the development of leaders below them. The best CEOs take the reins on big strategic decisions, then largely remove themselves. They create clear expectations for how decisions should be made, then push decision making down in the organization. They expect executives under them to do the same. It’s the only way a business scales.

They look for learning everywhere

The best CEOs drop the pretense that they know everything. They stay constantly curious, looking for learning everywhere. They get out of their office and spend time with employees. They get out of the building and spend time with customers. They sit down with partners, investors, and board members. With each group it's the same three questions: What’s working? What isn’t? And how can we do better? They probe answers and dig for insight. They understand that the most important signals for navigating the road ahead won’t show up as bright lights and loud bells, but rather faint flashes and low whispers that are easily missed. So they build a culture where everyone keeps their eyes, ears, and minds open. It’s the only way an organization survives and thrives in change.

They stay centered when storms hit

Being a CEO is a physical, mental, and emotional roller coaster. The best CEOs stay centered amidst the inevitable ups and downs. It starts with the physical. They eat well, exercise, and get adequate sleep. Without this foundation, the mental and emotional rigors become impossible to manage. They’re also clear on their values. They know the CEO role is a never-ending test of boundaries in which they will lose their footing if they don’t stick to what they believe in. Finally, the best CEOs get to know their triggers and spot them early. They learn what makes them frustrated, impatient, anxious, and annoyed, developing strategies to address the triggers before they hijack their emotional state. Don’t Bite The Hook is a good resource for getting better at working with triggers.

They make the people around them better

The most telling indicator of an effective CEO is the behavior of the people around them. Are they making good decisions, continuously improving, and staying centered in the storm? This stuff can’t be faked. If the CEO isn’t embodying the above behaviors no one else will either. Bringing out the best in people isn’t complicated, its just hard. It takes role modeling desired behavior, believing others can do it, supporting them, and then holding them accountable. The best CEOs don’t create easy places to work or even comfortable ones, but rather places where people are clear on what excellence looks like and rise to the occasion to deliver it.

Nothing in this article is easy to do and no CEO nails this stuff all the time. It’s a ton of experimentation filled with a lot of mistakes. The best CEOs are those who have the courage to screw up more often than others. If you’re a senior executive and feel stuck on a decision, trust your instincts. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, try something else. Make your experimentation visible. Share both successes and failures. Nothing builds a culture of learning like seeing the CEO leading the charge. We live in a business world where people are addicted to looking good all the time. It’s boring. It’s bulls**t. And it never gets the best results. Don’t underestimate how refreshing, inspiring, and motivating it is for people to see a real person in the top job.

In our collective 50 years working with leaders, we’ve designed and facilitated executive team offsites for more than 100 organizations, across almost every industry, from high-growth privately held companies to large public ones. In that time, we’ve learned a great deal about what does and doesn’t work.

The biggest lesson we've learned is that there's no formulaic way to run a successful executive team offsite. What works well in one situation can bomb in the next, even if the meeting objectives are ostensibly similar.

The reason there’s no “perfect offsite” formula, of course, is people. Executive teams are complex constellations of personalities, styles, strengths, weaknesses, goals, fears, hopes, and dreams. The best offsites accommodate all of these things without being dominated by any one of them. That means the best offsites have to be collaboratively conceived, flexibly designed, and dynamically facilitated.

Here are seven reasons why executive team offsites fail and how to address each:

1. CEO or top leader doesn’t own the meeting

An offsite is a critical tool to align a team with the leader’s agenda. While elements of meeting planning will inevitably be delegated, the team leader must take direct ownership for the entire experience. That lead executive should work closely with the designer/facilitator to define the objectives, pressure-test the agenda, and explicitly design the meeting to achieve the desired outcomes. During the offsite, the chief executive should collaborate closely with the facilitators to make sure the meeting stays on track and achieves its goals. The best offsites aren’t rote performances of an agenda; they’re thoughtful improvisations, like a jazz performance.

2. The purpose of the meeting is not clear

Every executive walking into an offsite should be clear on the intended outcomes of the meetings and the strategy for achieving them. “Build trust” or “clarify strategy” are not clear outcomes; they’re too vague and cliche to be useful. Meeting leaders need to be crystal clear about why the meeting is being held. Meetings without clear objectives invariably fail, even if the participants don’t realize it at the time. When well-intentioned leaders ask their teams to submit agenda items, the outcome is inevitably a dog’s breakfast. Every meeting should have a clear purpose and set of objectives, not just a list of topics masquerading as an agenda. The meeting objectives should be meaningful and attainable, and the group should not waste time debating or reporting on anything unrelated to these objectives.

3. Design is rushed or poorly planned

Most ineffective offsites fail in the design phase, before anyone even steps foot into the room. Short lead time is the most common cause. We receive frequent requests to design and facilitate offsites with just two or three weeks lead time. This is a glaring red flag that the work to be done is not high-priority. If the offsite is strategically significant, we recommend at least 8-12 weeks of lead time, especially for C-suite teams. As facilitators, we use this lead time to form clear objectives with the chief executive, interview all the offsite participants, and develop a current state assessment report that informs a tight design. If facilitators don’t prepare at this level, they can’t facilitate strategically.

4. Over-indexing on team dynamics to the detriment of strategy

Team dynamics play a role in effective execution, but the work of the team is to drive results, not merely act like a happy team. As many business writers have observed, artificial harmony can mask much dysfunction. The best facilitators weave strategy, execution, team dynamics, and honest assessment of the current state into the work of the offsite, all while modeling and inviting the trust and open discussion that’s essential to guiding the team through the process of making difficult strategic decisions together. Make sure your facilitator is someone the team respects as a business strategist, not just a curator of fun exercises.

5. Too many talking heads and not enough dialogue

In-person executive team time is precious. It shouldn’t be wasted on overwrought PowerPoint decks or things that don’t require a meeting. Use pre-work to get informational content on the table instead of burning through offsite time reporting out to get everyone up to speed. Set the expectation that presentations, spreadsheets, and reports will be reviewed in advance. Reserve the offsite itself for tough topics that require dialogue and debate. A skilled facilitator will manage the extroverts so they don’t take over, draw valuable input from introverts, bring the challenging questions to the fore, and help drive from insight to impact, including: “What are we going to do post-offsite to see real benefit and results?”

6. Unwillingness to change course mid-meeting if needed

Good facilitators create space for difficult conversations, which can raise issues that have previously been left unaddressed or even outright avoided. Sometimes it makes sense to table these issues and revisit them later. However, sometimes it makes more sense to dig deeper in the moment. When that happens, facilitators need to move with courage and confidence to shift the meeting plan and make room for that work immediately. Facilitators and leaders in the room should be willing to ask themselves and each other, what’s the most important thing for us to discuss right now? When the answer to that question changes during a meeting, don’t hesitate to redesign the time together right then.

7. One-and-done mentality

No single offsite should carry the burden of overcoming all the challenges that an executive team is facing. Unfortunately, we see executives approach offsites with this mentality all the time: they somehow expect that gnarly challenges created over months or years can somehow get sorted in a couple days and, presto, high-performing team. It doesn’t happen. Just like high-performing sports teams don’t declare themselves in top form after one training camp, high-performing executive teams shouldn’t do so after one offsite. Work at the offsite should be brought back onsite, advanced, and serve as the foundation for subsequent time together. A succession of well-designed meetings and offsites over time are key to a teams growth and success. The best offsites are the ones where the work, mindset, and collaboration follow the team back to the office and become the work that the team is most focused on.

Avoiding these pitfalls is essential to delivering executive team offsites that accomplish strategic objectives, clarify the path forward, and energize the team for the work ahead. When leaders partner with their offsite designers and facilitators to create a forum for real work, not just a fun get-away truly excellent things can happen.

Boards at their best elevate a company’s performance providing guidance and guardrails to help management succeed. CEOs at their best leverage the board’s expertise and perspective to improve decision making and strengthen execution. Of course, getting the best from either side, given the inevitable personalities, power, and politics at play, is an artform.

Inarguably, the first and most important step is hiring the right CEO. When a board gets that wrong, a lot of other things go wrong. However, even when they get that right, things can still go wrong. Our current business environment is so complex and fast-moving that even the best CEOs have blind spots. One of the biggest mistakes a board can make is taking a hands-off approach to governance because they feel they have a strong CEO at the helm. Today, successful organizational leadership requires all hands on deck from both the board and executive team, each member playing their part as they navigate tricky waters together. Following are four key elements needed to for them to bring out the best in each other

A rock-solid relationship between board chair and CEO

There are places in organizations where mediocre relationships are passable. The board chair and CEO is not one of them. Cracks in communication and trust between these two reverberate everywhere. Spencer Stuart conducted a survey last year identifying key moments that make or break this relationship: compensation negotiations, annual evaluations, transparency regarding executive sessions of the board, board composition, and support during times of adversity. The obvious thread that runs through this list is the importance of addressing uncomfortable topics head on. Rather than viewing conflict negatively or avoiding it, the best board chairs and CEOs use it as an opportunity to strengthen their relationship and the organization.

The right people on the board

All boards run the risk of becoming clubby over time. Some members are more interested in prestige or social benefits than getting real work done. Board chairs need to stay cognizant of this natural tendency and facilitate the process of introducing new blood as needed. The right board members are genuinely interested in the organization and show up well-prepared to energetically engage. Everyone on a board should be there for two reasons: their functional value-add and their ability to think systemically. The first relates to a unique and useful expertise or perspective (finance, operations, technology, talent, or ownership etc). The second is the ability to see how these pieces should come together for the enterprise. The first without the second risks turning the board into a gab session of conceptual ideas that never gain traction.

Well-prepped and well-run board meetings

Meetings are a board’s primary tool for value creation. When they’re well-prepped and well-run they create clarity and momentum. When they’re not, they create confusion and frustration. A well-prepped meeting means effective materials are circulated well in advance; the agenda prioritizes the highest-value use of in-person time; and known risks for derailing the meeting (people or topics) are headed off prior to getting into the room. (This isn’t always possible, but it should be a goal). A well-run meeting means the board chair allows for robust dialogue while keeping the group from meandering down rat holes; all voices are drawn out, not just the loudest few; and concrete decisions are made and communicated clearly to relevant stakeholders after the meeting. A common and legitimate frustration from CEOs is that prepping for board meetings can divert too much time from running the company. The best way to address this is having fewer board meetings. Four to six well-run meetings a year should suffice for most organizations. When circumstances warrant more frequent meetings, the board should stay mindful of the workload this places on the executive team.

A mentality of learning and continuous improvement

The most productive boards and CEOs approach their work together in the spirit of experimentation and continuous improvement. That means objectives, goals, and KPIs are collaboratively set and reviewed. The board holds management accountable for performance, not pulling punches or treating them with kid gloves, but does so supportively with an eye towards growth. Both sides recognize that no one person has all the answers and they need many sharp minds working together to solve the problems they face. The military model of debriefing provides a useful framework for how boards and management can interact with each other. Leaving their “stripes at the door,” boards and management review objectives; develop a clear-eyed assessment of what has and hasn’t worked; identify root causes of each; and clarify implications for the path forward. The more they do this work together, the stronger they get at having real and challenging conversations in the service of organizational success.

A strong board and CEO relationship doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and energy using every interaction to strengthen trust and increase clarity. But the payoff for the effort is huge: It creates a robust decision making culture at the top that cascades down through the organization and becomes a tough-to-replicate competitive advantage.

Originally published Jan 18, 2025 on Forbes

The implicit promise of best practices is understandably alluring: Turn someone else's blood, sweat and tears into your advantage. The problem is nothing in life works that way. Someone else's time in the gym doesn't get you into shape. Someone else's time on the slopes doesn't make you an expert skier. Someone else's calloused fingers don’t make you a great guitar player. It doesn't matter how much they share about what they’ve learned, you can’t recreate excellence without your own blood, sweat, and tears. Trying to do so always ends in mediocrity.

We all know this inherently.

So, if it doesn’t work anywhere else in life, why do we delude ourselves into thinking it will work in organizations? Why do we believe we can adopt someone else’s journey of learned excellence and make it our own? This delusion is why strategy execution is the butt of so many organizational jokes. It’s why the proverbial consulting binders gather dust on a shelf. Getting instructions on what to do and actually doing it are worlds apart.

One of the culprits of this dynamic is the conflation of knowledge and wisdom. Best practices are knowledge. The ability to bring them to life requires wisdom. The former can be captured in a book or document. The latter requires trial, error, risk, experimentation, failure, and learning. Knowledge can be communicated and transferred, but wisdom cannot. And collective wisdom is what separates good organizations from great ones. Members are on the ground together continually trying and perfecting. They develop muscle memory that can’t be put into words.

Best practices, at their best, are directional maps. They are knowledge of the territory but not the wisdom to navigate it. Best practices, at their worst, are mistaken for wisdom. Cursory knowledge masquerading as wisdom in an organization never turns out well.

Successful, high-performing organizations see themselves as wisdom creating machines. Everything, whether success or failure, becomes critical fodder for the road ahead. They treat internally generated wisdom as gold. They generate it through continual experiments together and tell the stories of it relentlessly. They embed the expectation of risk-taking, failing, and learning as core to their culture of excellence.

High performing organizations also realize that best practices are, by definition, backwards looking. They can only explain success in retrospect. They can't account for the myriad variables moving forward in your situation. Friedrich Nietzsche captured this well when he wrote, “When one has finished building one's house one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way, before one began.” Home building best practices are well known, but until you do it yourself you don't really understand what it entails to do it successfully.

The lion's share of an organization’s competitive advantage comes from its capabilities. The bad news is that there is no shortcut to building those capabilities. The good news is that once you build them, they’re hard to replicate.

In 1835 while traveling around the United States to write Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.” It's easy to draw a straight line from that observation to our obsession with best practices today. They seem like a shortcut to success. The irony is that they are often the opposite. Attempts to adopt best practices without risk-taking and struggle backfire. They lead to poor execution and increased cynicism.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of best practices is that they lull people into a false sense of confidence. Assuming the practices hold the answer to a problem, people stop doing the hard work of trying to discover the answers themselves. In so doing, they miss a critical point: The practices never hold the real value. The work to discover them does.

Originally published Nov 7, 2024 on Forbes

Transformations need smart game plans to succeed. But game plans don’t drive success; they’re mere table stakes. The business landscape is littered with smart transformation plans that fell apart in execution. The biggest difference between transformations that succeed and those that fail is the behavior of the top team.

Top teams are rarely prepared to lead transformations at their outset. They have to learn how to do it together. They tend to underestimate how deeply their behavior must change to make it happen. They can’t simply set goals and step away, delegating the work of transformation. They have to stay intimately involved from the start, modeling new behaviors and new ways of working while relentlessly focusing on building momentum for something that is constantly at risk of derailing. 

Effective top teams do three things to drive successful transformation: (1) create an unequivocal sense of shared ownership, (2) build strong internal team practices, and (3) embody visible and engaged leadership in the organization.

1. Create an unequivocal sense of shared ownership

Early in a transformation we ask members of a top team a simple question: What are you individually responsible for? The usual response is a subset of initiatives. The question is a trap. The right answer is the full transformation, even if they’re nominally responsible for certain workstreams. An organization can’t achieve sustainable success with a siloed sense of ownership at the top. Here’s a simple analogy: Imagine four leaders are on a boat that springs four leaks. They divide up to repair them. Asked what they felt responsible for, it’s unlikely any of them would say a single leak. They’d say doing whatever it took to keep the boat afloat. Division of labor is necessary in complex situations, but if it devolves into division of ownership it creates blind spots and gaps that significantly increase the risk of failure. The top team is responsible for the seaworthiness of the boat, not just fixing individual leaks.  

Own the vision of success. A top team should be on the same page on key questions and have the data to back it up. Where are we now? Where are we headed? Why are we going there? How will we know when we get there? How should we prioritize and sequence efforts? And what things should we stop doing so we can focus on what matters most? These are hard choices that can only be made by the top team working together. Answers to the questions above should form a clear and compelling story that every member of the top team tells with insight and enthusiasm. 

Own execution. A top team can’t hand off execution to teams below them or external consultants. While internal and external teams can play critical roles in a transformation, they can’t be the ultimate owners. They don’t have the right incentives, positional power, or insight into the politics of the organization. A top team has to stay sleeves-rolled-up involved, have their finger on the pulse of progress, and show up to solve problems and remove roadblocks.

Own talent. A transformation is a unique, not-to-be-wasted opportunity to develop talent. It provides a context within which to stretch and showcase people at every level who have the capability to take the organization forward. It allows the top team to visibly demonstrate and celebrate “what good looks like in the transformed organization,” rewarding the talented people who deliver it.

2. Build strong internal team practices 

Much has been written on effective top team practices. We won't rehash it here, but do want to point out a few pieces of advice we've found to be particularly important in building a strong top team operating rhythm to drive successful transformation. 

See the top team as your first team. It's common for an executive to see their divisional or functional team as their first team and the top team merely as a group that shares information. The underlying assumption is that the real work of the organization happens on the team they lead, not the team at the top. During a transformation, nothing could be further from the truth. The top team has to do the challenging cross-enterprise work of debating paths forward, building the story, allocating resources, monitoring progress, and shifting course as needed. 

A telltale sign that a top team is acting like a first team is that members engage in work outside of their immediate “lanes.” They aren’t afraid to ask probing questions without waiting for the CEO or someone else to do so. We saw a great example of this in a recent meeting. A Chief Digital Officer was discussing technical investments to improve operational efficiency. The Chief Marketing Officer raised questions about the sequencing. The CMO could have easily said nothing. But the CMO saw something that both the CDO and COO had missed. The question opened a series of conversations that shifted the investment schedule. Her value didn’t come from technical expertise, but rather being a fresh pair of eyes with a systemic mindset focused on a bigger goal than the success of her silo.   

Build a dashboard and let it lead you. A transformation is a set of strategic, operational, and behavioral shifts across an organization. The work is inherently complex. If a team isn’t careful they can get pulled into whatever fire is raging. We recommend building a dashboard of key measures to continually bring the team back to the full story. They should use it to revisit three core questions: Are we allocating appropriate resources to the work? Is the work sequenced optimally? And are we moving at the right pace?

A global life sciences company took their dashboard a step further and created a dedicated transformation space—a command center or control room of sorts—that became a magnet for meetings. The story of the transformation including current indicators of progress covered the walls. Teams across the organization used it for work sessions. The CEO used it for executive meetings and even board meetings. Working in the room, the company’s transformation journey inevitably became part of the conversation, whatever the agenda.

Expect members to bring challenges to the team and learn together. Overly positive progress reports are an early signal that a transformation will derail. Transformations are inherently messy and confusing. The idea that everything is on track never rings true. Green boxes everywhere is success theater. Strong teams expect red flags and support members in raising them. 

We facilitated a meeting where this dynamic explicitly came to light. The top team was gathering to discuss progress on five workstreams. Four of them were filled with green boxes. One was seventy percent red. We asked the sponsor with the predominantly red report to explain his thought process. “Red is good,” he replied. “I find it more useful than green. It gets stuff on the table and forces real conversations.” “Red is good” became the mantra for subsequent team meetings and helped shift the culture to more honest dialogues.

No meetings after the meeting. Top teams must find a way to have the tough conversations together in the room. They can’t shy away from conflict. Change doesn’t happen without tension. Too often the real debate takes place outside of the room and with the wrong set of people. Whole cultures are built this way. Venting about issues with team members who can’t do anything about it is one of the fastest paths to dysfunction. It also undermines the work of the top team. Meet this challenge head on, acknowledge the tendency, develop the muscle to get good at hard conversations, and create an open environment to raise dissenting views on tough topics. 

We worked with a CEO who tried a novel and effective strategy for disrupting this dynamic. With ten minutes left in a meeting he would ask everyone to privately jot down what “meeting after the meeting” was at risk of occuring. If it involved complaining he suggested they find a more productive strategy to deal with it. One day he took a risk, sharing what he wrote with the full team. It forced an uncomfortable but productive conversation. As trust on the team strengthened, others followed his lead in subsequent meetings to useful (and sometimes humorous) effect. 

3. Embody visible and engaged leadership in the organization 

People in an organization take cues from the top team. Does the top team have an aligned story or disjointed perspectives? Are they committed to the transformation or going through the motions? Are they “on the ground” and intimately aware of the work being done or removed and disconnected from progress and challenges? A top team’s level of engagement has a direct impact on an organization’s engagement and ultimately the transformation’s chances of hitting its objectives. Following are some suggestions on how to strengthen a top team’s visibility and engagement in the organization.

Show up together. It’s common for employees to work in an organization for years and never see the top team together, especially if the organization has a strong silo mentality. It’s important to shift this during a transformation, presenting a united presence, both in person and virtually. Doing so sends a powerful message that the work of the transformation is important and requires everyone involved. People should see the full team together as often as possible, but at least two to four times a year. To take it a step further, the CEO in one organization required each member of his team to lead presentations on a workstream they didn’t directly sponsor. This required them to pay attention and come equipped with relevant and compelling stories demonstrating collective effort at the top. It also helped shine a spotlight on which executives had more of a knack for enterprise leadership, a useful input for succession planning.

Stay involved and actively troubleshoot with teams below. One of the more significant risks to a successful transformation is top team leaders losing touch with the actual work. They look for progress updates on it, but spend little time with the teams executing it. They don’t spot problems early and so can’t troubleshoot them early. They don’t dedicate enough resources to the work. This slows progress, increases costs, and adds to frustration. But it’s more problematic than that. Distant leadership creates a cultural challenge. When teams see those above them “checked out” they lose motivation, performance slips, and teams stop learning. When teams stop learning it further entrenches the very behaviors the transformation is targeting to change. This is why every organizational change philosophy over the past forty years has at its core an imperative for leaders to spend considerable time “at the coalface,” strengthening relationships and gaining a greater understanding of what’s really going on. 

Over communicate every aspect of the transformation. Members of a top team often fall victim to what we call the communication blind spot. Once something becomes clear to them, they quickly forget that it’s not clear to those below them. They fail to repeat key messages often enough to deepen understanding and have them stick. In survey after survey of teams and organizations involved in transformation, poor communication is the number one frustration. Start with the assumption that communication probably stinks and plan accordingly. 

Transformations have a spotty track record to put it mildly. An oft quoted statistic suggests seventy percent of them fail. We don’t know if that’s accurate, but it’s likely not far off. Why so much failure? We’d argue the answer lies in how failure is framed. Transformations don’t fail. Top teams fail to deliver transformation. They fail when teams don’t create shared ownership. They fail when teams aren’t aligned. They fail when teams don’t stay actively engaged in the work. They fail when teams sweep uncomfortable situations under the rug. Ultimately, they fail because teams leave failure on the table as an option.

Everything listed above is hard work. The best teams expect it to be difficult but don’t let that stop them. They fight through the messy middle together and use it to make them stronger. Teams who figure out how to succeed despite the challenges deliver something more valuable than a transformed organization. They deliver a transformed top team who's ready for anything.

Building a stellar team is one of the toughest things to do in business. It can’t be reduced to neat checklists and transactional steps. It requires finding the right people and believing in them, supporting them to grow and deliver, and then holding them accountable. It also requires the team leader to grow as they navigate people dynamics and politics. But for all the effort, the payoff is huge. Not only does building a stellar team improve the chances of business success, it also provides long-term satisfaction for those involved. When we ask retiring clients what they’re most proud of looking back on their careers, building a strong team is invariably at the top of the list.

So, if your team is not stellar yet where do you start? With yourself. Ask your team three questions: Where do you feel we’re strong; Where do you feel we need to be stronger; How do you feel I can best support our effectiveness? It's a fast way to get good data, strengthen trust, and signal that you’re willing to change your own behavior in the process. You should share back what you learn with the team. If you're not comfortable leading this process on our own, hire a coach/consultant to help.

In parallel, ensure you have the right people on the team. No amount of fancy team building will help you build a great team with the wrong people. This step can be tricky. Maybe you've inherited team members that you can't let go of for some reason. Maybe the job market is tight, and candidates are tough to find. Or perhaps you feel the disruption involved with removing someone isn’t worth the risk. These are legitimate concerns to be taken seriously. The important point is that these are active judgement calls that must be made. Foot dragging regarding changing critical leadership positions creates myriad problems down through the organization. Find internal and external sounding boards to test your thinking.

Once you have your team in place, be clear with them why you believe in them. Don’t share platitudes; be specific. This strengthens relationships and builds trust. Also don’t assume someone is so senior that they don’t need to hear it. Everyone likes to hear positive, specific feedback. We all get too little of it. For example, if you’re a CEO and you deeply appreciate the strategic view your CFO takes, tell them that. If you think your COO is the critical glue bridging your old and new business models, let them know. Be clear about why they are so important, and what you, the team, and the organization need from them moving forward.

Of course, believing in a team isn’t enough. A team leader’s greatest responsibility is creating the conditions for the team to deliver excellence. At a foundational level this entails ensuring the team has needed resources including tools, staff, and professional development. Sometimes it entails removing roadblocks or going to bat for things that have been put on the chopping block. While these can be tough battles, this is often the easy part. The tougher part is managing the team’s growth and performance. To be truly valuable, it can’t be relegated to a corporate process that occurs 1-2x yearly. It must be built into the day-to-day conversations and work. If you see something excellent, say something. If you see something problematic, say something. It should be direct, supportive and honest. We recommend using a simple structure like a debrief to force these conversations at least twice monthly. Debriefs can be done with a full team or individuals.

Finally, stellar teams are accountable. They’re accountable to the team leader, but also to each other. That means that everyone on the team is aware of what other members are doing and no one is afraid to speak up if they see an issue. The debrief process linked above is a useful context within which to ensure this happens. What stellar teams understand, in their bones, is that delivering excellent siloed work is inadequate for delivering excellent organizational results. They feel responsible for the integrated whole. And that shift in mindset transforms accountability conversations.

Building a stellar team isn’t complicated, it’s just hard. Teams are cultures inside of cultures and the team leader sets the tone. If a team leader makes themselves vulnerable, others will too. If they balance the need to both drive results and be empathetic, others will too. If they supportively engage in tough conversations, others will too. There is no silver bullet to building a stellar team. There's just a messy journey of holding on to a vision, driving towards it, staying open, learning together and improving along the way. The reward for doing these things is the ability to look back on your career with immense pride for what a committed group of people were able to create together.

Originally published on Forbes August 14, 2024

Originally published in Forbes, December 12, 2023

How Patagonia Became The Most Reputable Brand In The United States

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought he should be doing. He had an irrepressible sense of adventure, a tireless curiosity to find a better way, an unwavering moral conviction to do what was right, and a selfless humility that made the whole package work.

As Patagonia celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, ranking as the most reputable brand in the US, Chouinard and Vincent Stanley, the company’s Director of Philosophy, have written a new book, The Future of the Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years. It’s an update to the book they wrote on the fortieth anniversary incorporating dramatic shifts that have taken place in the world and at Patagonia over the past ten years.

One significant change was a 2018 rewrite of their purpose, making it unequivocal: We’re in business to save our home planet. A second was Chouinard and his family putting their money where their mouth is. Rather than take the company public, they gifted 100% of their $3B fortune to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and Holdfast Collective to fund their deep commitment to the planet in perpetuity.

I didn’t know the details of Patagonia’s history until I read this book. It led me to read several other books about the company. As someone who studies and consults on leadership, and has written on the topic of making stakeholder capitalism a reality, the reading left me deeply inspired. We need more leaders with Chouinard’s guts and more companies with Patagonia’s constancy of purpose. The following are some of the stories and insights I found most compelling from the readings and a recent conversation with Vincent Stanley.

Climbing Clean

Yvon Chouinard’s first test of environmental stewardship came years before he founded Patagonia. An avid rock climber, he was unhappy with current pitons on the market (iron spikes used to secure rope), so he bought a forge from a junkyard in 1957 and learned how to make his own. His chrome-molybdenum steel pitons were stiffer and stronger than their European counterparts and better suited for removal and reuse. The climbing community loved them. A few years later Chouinard Equipment was born in a shed in Burbank, CA. By 1970 it was the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States. However, that same year, Chouinard realized he had a problem. On an ascent up the Nose route of El Capitan he noticed the increasing damage pitons were doing to the rock as climbing gained popularity. Disgusted, he needed to find an alternative to pitons, yet at 70% of his business they were keeping him afloat.

Chouinard and his business partner, Tom Frost, made what would become a legendary decision to shift away from pitons. It foreshadowed many other decisions Chouinard would make over the next fifty years, each with a similar pattern: Come to grips with damage you’re doing, set bright lines about how you’ll shift your business to reduce that damage, then force yourself to innovate inside new constraints. In this case, the innovation was newly designed aluminum chocks that left the rock unaltered or “clean”. Crude versions of chocks had been around for years but were less known and trusted than pitons. To build trust in his new chocks, Chouinard used them to successfully climb the Nose route of El Capitan again. By 1972 the chock business was booming, pitons sales had become marginal, and he had redefined modern climbing.

Launching Patagonia

In the early 1970s Chouinard started selling climbing clothing for purely practical reasons. In those years climbers were still wearing sweats, cutoff chinos, and dress shirts, none of which were durable. On a trip to Scotland, he found corduroy fabric which made excellent abrasion-resistant pants, so he ordered some of it. He also found rugby shirts that were tough and had collars that kept his gear from cutting his neck, so he ordered some of those too. He soon opened a retail store in an abandoned meatpacking plant next to his office selling a variety of items he discovered on his travels. This gave Chouinard an idea: The higher-margin clothing business could support the lower-margin equipment business, which at the time was only earning a 1% profit. In 1973 this idea became Patagonia.

The textile industry in 2023 is recognized as one of the worst polluters on the planet, but in the early 1970s this problem wasn’t as clear as it is now. Back then environmental issues were largely considered the government’s responsibility. As long as businesses stuck to regulations, they didn’t think too much about the impact of their operations. While Patagonia did fight for environmental causes for the first fifteen years of its existence, it paid little attention to its own environmental footprint. That changed in 1988 when a faulty ventilation system in their Boston store forever transformed how they viewed their responsibility as a business.

The Cotton Lesson

Unbeknownst to the company, formaldehyde was being added to their cotton fabric at the mill to prevent shrinkage and wrinkling. The faulty ventilation system spread the off-gassed formaldehyde into the store, poisoning employees. The easy solution would have been to fix the ventilation, but Patagonia chose to see the incident as a larger wakeup call. Like the earlier shift away from pitons, they followed the same protocol: Come to grips with the damage, change your business, and innovate inside new constraints.

Stanley refers to this as “The Cotton Lesson.” Beyond the formaldehyde, Patagonia realized it knew little about where its products came from and how they were made, which was a problem. They decided to put their employees on a bus, 40 at a time, to see the conventional cotton fields in California’s Central Valley.

“The moment our bus pulled off Highway 99 you could smell the organophosphates,” Stanley recalled in a recent conversation, “which was a nerve gas developed in WWII, used in cotton fields to kill all living organisms. It smelled awful. There were no worms or other life in the soil.” The field trips left a stomach-churning, unforgettable impression on the employees. A company-commissioned study found that cotton wasn’t much more natural than nylon due to the heavy use of chemicals in its production.

At that point, there were no regulations against using conventional cotton and no customers asking for organic cotton. Patagonia didn’t care. They made the decision to stop using conventional cotton. It was another bright line they wouldn’t cross. That decision made the business more difficult for a for a few years as organic cotton was harder to source and tougher to spin. Margins shrank and growth slowed. Working with suppliers, they eventually innovated around those challenges. Now, decades later, they are moving to regenerative organic cotton which, beyond avoiding chemicals, decreases water use and tillage. This has created additional constraints that Patagonia is currently innovating to get around.

Freedom Inside Constraints

“In many ways the magic of Patagonia comes from the constraints we place on ourselves which are grounded in our deep sense of responsibility to do right by the environment and society,” Stanley told me. “We can't go to the Fashion Institute of Technology library and choose from 5,000 fabrics for the spring line. We have a couple hundred we can choose from. And we can't go to 1,000 factories to find the best price. We have less than a hundred that can deal with the problems we raise. We get to know these limited options very well. The constraints make us more resourceful.”

Ironically, the constraints also create a sense of freedom. With boundaries and rules set, Patagonia gives employees latitude to be creative on how to play the game and improve performance. “We have a deep middle management culture,” Stanley reflected. “Yvon didn’t like running the business day-to-day and was away for six months of the year anyway. People got used to figuring things out on their own. That sense of agency remains all these years later. People speak up and find a way to do what’s right. It goes beyond our product teams and touches all corners of the company.”

Stanley shared a recent example. In 2018 a finance team was looking for a new warehouse site on the East Coast. After visiting a variety of undeveloped plots of land, the team decided they couldn’t take any of them. Virgin development didn’t fit with the ethos of Patagonia. They ended up finding an abandoned coal mine in Wilkes Barre, PA and made a deal to use that land with an NGO that was reclaiming it. While the deal was more complex than developing virgin land, it fit with the company’s values. “No one told the finance team they had to do that,” Stanley said. “They never even spoke to the tree huggers in the company about it. It was just built into our culture. They knew no one would complain about the several month construction delay because it was the right decision.” The new warehouse now sits on 22 levels of abandoned mine shafts.

Patagonia’s Most Important Product

Reading Stanley and Chouinard’s book makes you realize Patagonia’s most important product isn’t a piton or pullover, it’s an unflinching sense of purpose they’ve stuck to for decades. Much of its success can be traced back to Chouinard’s uncompromising leadership since Day One. Whereas many companies espouse a set of values only to sacrifice them under the pressure of quarterly returns, Patagonia has religiously stuck to theirs for the last half century, come what may. Quality, integrity, sustainability, and justice were never negotiable.

Stanley and Chouinard will be the first to tell you Patagonia isn’t perfect. Despite making tremendous progress, there’s a lot more work to do. Many of the mills they use are still fired by coal. Thirteen percent of the clothes they sell are still produced in non-Fair-Trade factories, and their fleece microfibers still end up in our water supply. Patagonia has no interest in greenwashing their efforts to make the company look good. They just want to continue finding ways to responsibly support our planet and its communities within a capitalistic system that has too often neglected both.

It stands to reason US consumers see them as the most reputable brand in the country.

Originally published March 13, 2024 on Forbes

Strong senior leadership teams (SLTs) are the heart of successful organizations.  In competitive and fast-paced environments they collectively sense the future and drive performance. 

For a variety of reasons SLTs are difficult to develop. They’re frequently filled with strong personalities and complicated politics. Increasingly, they’re geographically dispersed. Their work together is often long-term, complex, and ill-defined. All of which leads members to gravitate toward the more familiar and immediate work of running their own organizations over the work of the SLT. Despite the potential value of SLTs, they commonly end up defaulting into loosely-connected info-sharing groups rather than cohesive direction-setting teams. 

While there are no simple solutions to strengthening an SLT, there is a roadmap. Drawing on 25-plus years of experience advising SLTs we’ve codified twelve integrated characteristics across four areas most indicative of strong SLTs. We call it the Leadership Operating System (LOS). It provides a systemic view of team effectiveness and a high-level guide to improving performance. The more clear “yeses,” the stronger the team.

Leadership Operating System (LOS)

Purpose

1. We need to be a real team

2. We have a shared view of the future

3. We’re aligned on the work we must do together

People

4. We have the right skills and experience

5. We have an effective mix of perspectives       

6. We have strong trust 

Process

7. We have a disciplined operating rhythm to accomplish our work together

8. We have clear rules of engagement 

9. We measure and monitor a well-defined set of performance metrics 

Performance

10. We productively surface and resolve tough issues 

11. We’re effective at making difficult decisions together

12. We’re deliberate about learning and growing as a team

The LOS targets a perennial challenge we find in building SLTs: Narrowly focused on solving their most pressing problems, they often fail to perceive and tackle the wider dynamics creating them. The tool’s usefulness lies in its simultaneous breadth and brevity. It can be a discussion starter, checklist, high-level assessment, or planning framework.

Fostering LOS development

A strong LOS doesn’t materialize on its own. Nor can the work of building one be delegated. To credibly happen, a CEO must foster it. That doesn't mean the CEO is solely responsible for it, but they must take the lead. While building a strong LOS requires significant time and energy, it’s a worthy investment as the tone of an SLT sets the tone for an entire organization. Success depends on a CEO envisioning the potential of the team, role modeling needed behavior, and coaching the team collectively and individually. 

Given the pervasiveness of dysfunction on SLTs, members frequently have low expectations for their own team. A CEO must raise these standards, seeing the team’s potential before others might. The LOS is a useful tool for framing this potential and building buy-in. The CEO should have a strong hand in guiding the process but the vision for the SLT shouldn’t be theirs alone. If it isn’t formed with collective commitment from the team it will fall apart. 

Advancing an LOS also demands that a CEO role model key behaviors. The most important behaviors are candor, vulnerability, learning, and problem-solving. If a CEO doesn’t personally open up around tough topics, admit mistakes, experiment with new paths forward, and solve problems no one else will either. Without these behaviors a CEO can’t build trust. And without trust they can’t build anything else. This often means a CEO must engage in personal development, strengthening self-awareness in parallel with SLT development. 

Finally, a CEO must coach the team. As an SLT develops its LOS, challenges will invariably arise. Metrics might get missed, rules of engagement broken, or tough conversations swept under the rug. CEOs must get good at noticing, naming and guiding the team through these challenges as they occur. At times this coaching should happen with the full team present so they can collectively understand what behavior will or won’t work. The CEO’s personal vulnerability is crucial to his or her effectiveness.

In the spirit of learning and growth for all, coaching should be two-way. Not only should a CEO share what more or different they need from the team, but the team should also share what more or different they need from the CEO. Given power dynamics, the CEO should proactively elicit the latter. Two-way coaching creates an environment of mutual personal development that further supports LOS development.

Developing an LOS is a journey

Developing a strong LOS takes time, often a few years. Trying to evolve a team too quickly backfires because it fails to respect the inherent complexity involved. Smart CEOs understand this. They go slow and stay focused. They’re motivated by forward progress, not speed or perfection. They know every step in a team’s growth brings renewed commitment and energy for tackling subsequent challenges. 

The core of LOS development is continuous improvement: gathering data, identifying gaps, experimenting with new behaviors, keeping what works, and starting again. The process can be frustrating and often humbling. Fortunately, when it pays off, it's incredibly powerful. A team is better at surfacing and solving problems. They’re more effective at changing and transforming a business. They’re better at strengthening the teams below them, in turn strengthening culture. All of this translates to a tough-to-replicate executive development system that supports future growth and succession.

As an added benefit, developing a strong LOS is also incredibly fulfilling. Clients regularly share that few things are more rewarding than building and being on an SLT that overcomes obstacles, drives organizational performance, and creates something extraordinary together.

This article was written in collaboration with Caryn Kaftal

One mindset separates great leaders from good ones. You won’t find it in leadership assessments. It’s never articulated in job descriptions. And it isn’t measured in performance management systems. Seldom demanded or expected, no one finds fault in a leader for not embodying it. However, when they do, they can move mountains.

The mindset is this: A sense of personal responsibility for the current reality in which they find themselves regardless of how they got there. A willingness to embrace and own the difficult, messy, and seemingly-unsolvable problems they encounter even if they had no hand in creating them. Great leaders hold this mindset without hesitation. With calm and grace.

Good leadership is the ability to have vision, integrity, and empathy; to be a strong connector, communicator, and delegator; to understand people and how to motivate them.

Great leadership is the ability to stay put when the sh*t hits the fan; to find workable paths forward when you’re at a dead end; to engage and inspire others when you could justifiably throw up your hands or walk away.

On March 9, 1933, five days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn into his first term, he stemmed a potentially disastrous banking crisis left by Herbert Hoover. He did so by pushing through the Emergency Banking Act to shore up financial institutions then reassuring the public that banks were safe through a nationwide fireside chat. California Senator Hiram Johnson met him in the White House four days later and noted in his diary, “The remarkable thing about [FDR] to me was his readiness to assume responsibility and his taking that responsibility with a smile.”

On September 29, 1982, two people died near Chicago from cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. Over the next several days five more people died. On October 6, James Burke, CEO of Jonhson & Johnson (maker of Tylenol) decided to remove all 31 million bottles of the capsules from American store shelves at cost of $100M; a decision the FBI and FDA considered an overreaction and didn’t support. “I listened and was sympathetic,” Burke said, “But I was still very concerned this was not the right solution, either from the point of view of the public, or from the point of view of my company’s business.” Over forty years later, Burke’s actions, driven by a strong sense of responsibility, remain a legendary example of great crisis management and leadership.

Sooner or later every good leader is presented with an opportunity to be a great one. We never really know how we’ll react until it happens. Good leadership is the product of training and experience: It can be learned. Great leadership is the product of circumstance: It has to be risen to.

That said, the muscles we build on a daily basis can improve our chances of successfully making the leap when we’re called. We can recognize when we’re shifting blame and instead consider how we may have contributed to a situation. We can notice when we get stuck looking backwards in frustration and instead look forward with possibility. We can catch ourselves when we complain and instead consider how we can change things.

All leaders who make the leap from good to great confront the same challenge: People—sometimes a lot of them—will advise you you’re making the wrong call. They will present rational and defensible options that are “easier” to pursue. They will question your judgment. The art of great leadership is figuring out when to heed their advice and when to ignore it.

Great leadership is difficult and lonely. The only thing that makes it bearable is the conviction that what you’re doing is right. And a sense of responsibility for making that conviction a reality.

Originally published in Forbes, April 13, 2023