Traditional expertise is becoming decentralized – and accelerated by AI, meaning leaders can no longer rely on sheer authority to add value.  Successful leaders today are facilitators of a collective process in which they can tap into expertise across the organization.  They follow as much as they lead.

Recent research reported in Harvard Business Review tells us more about this.  Strikingly, meta-analyses reveal that the exact traits that make someone a competent follower—such as emotional stability, curiosity, kindness, and learning ability—are identical to those that predict leadership success to today’s environment.

Following are the five key capabilities of exemplary Follower-Leaders:

• Active Listening: Listen to truly understand reality and reduce blind spots, rather than filtering information to protect your ego or validate existing beliefs.
• Prioritizing Purpose Over Credit: Focus on what works best for the collective mission, eliminating performative theatrics and the hunger for individual applause.
• Reliable Execution: Ground your high-level strategy in reality by maintaining a firsthand understanding of how work actually gets done and the constraints your frontline faces.
• Critical Dissent: Welcome constructive pushback and flag risks early, protecting the organization from the dangerous echo chambers of unchallenged authority.
• Coachability: Actively seek feedback to continuously adapt, avoiding the complacency and obsolescence that often accompany a senior title.

Ultimately, outstanding leadership isn’t about commanding from an isolated peak. It is about listening relentlessly, learning constantly, and knowing when to step back to rely on someone else’s specialized knowledge. By learning to follow well, you naturally build the trust and credibility required to lead.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Chamorro-Premuzic, T. & Edmondson, A.  “The Best Leaders Are Great Followers” Harvard Business Review online, January 14, 2026.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review provides some helpful insights into this challenge.  Here are some things we can all do to be empathetic while still driving high performance and holding people accountable.  The authors call this mastering “wise empathy.”  It includes making core shifts to your daily leadership routine:

1.  Sincerely Check-in with Others.  During your regular one-on-one meetings, don’t start out with a casual “Hey, how are you doing?” – to which we all mechanically say “Good.”  Take your time and sincerely ask something like “Good to see you, Chris.  I know you have tons going on here at work and I am sure there are many things going on in your personal life as well.  How are you?  How’s it going?”  You may be surprised how much you can learn if you ask and listen sincerely.

2.  Regulate Your Response, Focus on the Other.  If the other person shares good news, great!  Celebrate with them!  “My partner just got a big promotion!”  If they share something negative that is seriously bothering them, then respond compassionately.  However, don’t get caught up in the negative emotion yourself.  Focus on cognitive empathy (understanding their perspective). versus emotional empathy (feeling someone else’s pain).

3.  Move from Commiseration to Compassion.  Commiserating feels supportive in the moment, but it often leaves both parties stuck in a loop of shared frustration. Wise empathy requires a deliberate pivot from simply validating a negative emotion to actively asking, “How can we best support you?  What do you need right now to move forward?”   This shifts the dynamic from a passive emotional echo chamber to a constructive, forward-looking dialogue.

4. Establish Firm Operational Boundaries. Empathy does not mean lowering performance standards or taking on extra workloads to shield your team from accountability. True wise empathy means recognizing when an individual’s challenges require structural adjustments, clear prioritization, or HR support, rather than a manager trying to play the role of an unqualified therapist.  Encourage them to consider talking with a mental health professional if the issue seems to warrant it.

Leadership is no longer just about managing tasks; it is about managing human energy. By upgrading raw emotional instincts into wise empathy, you can protect your own mental bandwidth while building a resilient, psychologically safe culture where your team truly feels supported.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Hobson, N. & Depow, G. J. “How Leaders Can Practice Wise Empathy,” Harvard Business Review online, January 14, 2026.

For example:

“What’s the culture really like?”

“What are do’s and don’ts around the Big Bosses?”

“What do I need to do to get promoted?”

These are the kinds of questions that a good mentor can help you answer.  Unfortunately, mentoring is a huge blind spot for most organizations.  While I always encourage students to do their best to seek out a mentor in their first jobs after college, it is a much better process when mentoring is sponsored by the organization.

Following are some ideas from a recent article in Harvard Business Review on how you can create a mentoring culture in your organization:

• Normalize “Opt-Out” Access: Shift from an opt-in model to a default “mentoring-for-all” approach where everyone is automatically assigned a mentor unless they explicitly choose to decline. This means integrating peer and reverse mentoring directly into standard onboarding.
• Integrate with Daily Management: Mentoring shouldn’t sit in an HR silo. Line managers must be trained to identify development gaps that mentoring conversations can solve and weave these reflections directly into regular performance check-ins.
• Cross-Pollinate Teams: To maintain objectivity and psychological safety, mentors should always sit outside an employee’s direct line of command. Imagine an operations leader mentoring a rising marketing star, or a finance administrator reverse-mentoring the CEO.
• Track the Macro ROI: Look beyond immediate individual goals. Connect the data from your mentoring engagement directly to high-level organizational health metrics like employee retention, internal mobility, and overall well-being.

When mentoring becomes a fundamental habit rather than a selective perk, companies build a far more resilient leadership pipeline. By keeping support accessible to everyone, you ensure your top talent never has to navigate the organization in the dark.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Lopata, A.  “Weave Mentorship into the Fabric of Your Organization,” Harvard Business Review online, January 9, 2026.

“Is Execution Where Strategy Goes to Die?”

The article goes on to say: “Execution is an odd word. On the one hand, it means ‘the carrying out of a plan or course of action.’ On the other, it means, ‘the carrying out of a death sentence.’”  Execution is indeed where strategy often goes to die.

But it does not have to be like that!

In a more recent article in Harvard Business Review, the author points out that the breakdown between Strategy and Execution falls into three predictable areas. Here is how to spot them—and get your team back in lockstep:

1. The Arrogance Problem.  Sometimes, strategic vision simply outruns actual human capacity. When senior leaders lack full visibility into daily workflows, they project ambitious roadmaps that overwhelm the team, causing burnout and turnover. Ambitious goals are one thing, but goals that are completely detached from reality are non-starters.  Try involving front line workers in strategy development.

2. The Skills Problem.  When strategies shift, the required skills often shift too. If people are placed in roles that don’t match the demands of the new strategy, execution bogs down and output fails to meet professional standards. Build in time for training that is necessary for the team to deliver on the new strategy.

3. The Information Sharing Problem.  Middle managers are responsible for interpreting strategy and guiding teams. However, if they lack executive visibility into long-term priorities, they get paralyzed. Unsure of what can be safely dropped or delegated, they hold onto everything, which quickly slows down the entire system.  Involve them at the highest levels.

To mend these disconnects, you need more transparency and communication between different levels in the hierarchy.  You must create a trust-based communication loop. When teams feel safe offering clarity upward, operational concerns are treated as valuable data to improve the work rather than as active resistance.

Leadership isn’t just about setting direction or driving results – it’s about strengthening the link between the two. By investing in clearer meaning and deeper trust, you can ensure your organization moves with perfect alignment and purpose.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: McCray, F.  “When Strategy and Execution Fall Out of Sync,” Harvard Business Review online, January 22, 2026.

*Meet Regularly.  You should have developmental conversations with this employee – and every employee – twice a year.

*Show Them the Path.  Once you get the inkling that you have a future “star” on your hands, tell them this.  Outline the knowledge and skills that they will need to develop to ascend to the next level.  Support their development.  Make sure your bosses know early on that you have a developing star.

*Be Proactive.  As the development process moves forward, be proactive with your bosses.  If there are not going to be any promotions available in due time with the current org chart, are there roles you can create that provide additional responsibility, compensation, and a new title?

*Be Honest with Your Star.  Tell your star what you are able to do and what you cannot do.  Try to maximize additional compensation, training, and job responsibility – even if you cannot provide a title change.

*Support Them If They Decide to Leave.  Encourage them to be honest with you.  If they decide they need to look around, encourage them and offer to support them in every way possible.

*The Door Swings Both Ways.  If they leave, make sure that it is on the best of terms.  Keep them in mind when you have future job openings.  If they are a real hotshot, this person could end up being your future boss!

There is no substitute for treating people right.  If you build the kind of culture in which you treat your star this way, word will spread.  Future stars will be attracted to your organization.  You can’t keep them all, but if you attract enough of them – it won’t matter.

A new challenge and a new opportunity.

Regardless of the quality of the relationship you had with your former boss, you are best off assuming that there will be changes – and remaining open-minded about those.

If your new boss is an insider, then maybe you already have a relationship that you can build on.

But a new boss from the outside is a special situation.  While a boss transition brings undeniable disruption, it also delivers a rare gift: a completely clean slate. Here are some ideas from a recent article in Harvard Business Review on how to grab the steering wheel and make the transition work for you:

1. Your First Impression.  A new manager has no history with your past mistakes, old patterns, or previous workplace struggles. Because people form lasting judgments within seconds—a psychological phenomenon known as “thin-slicing” – you must be intentional about your visible behaviors from day one. Decide what you want to be known for moving forward.

2. Provide an Executive Briefing.  Your new boss is likely drinking from a firehose, navigating enormous complexity while trying to evaluate their new team. Help them orient faster by sending a concise, well-crafted briefing before your first meeting.

3. Decode Their Working Style Fast.  Don’t wait for your new boss to volunteer their operating preferences. Proactively initiate a conversation early on to align your workflows. Ask targeted questions to clear up any ambiguity:

• What are your top priorities in the short and medium term?
• How often do you want to meet and what would you like me to prepare for each meeting?
• How would you like us to communicate – email, text, phone, Slack?

4. Choose Cohesion Over Competition.  Leadership transitions often trigger a survival instinct among colleagues, leading to political jockeying for position and resources. Resist this pull. Reach out to your peers proactively to resolve overlapping responsibilities before your manager walks into them. Standing out as a unifying, mature team player builds immediate executive trust.

Taking a passive “wait-and-see” approach during a transition is a major risk. By actively managing up, you can successfully turn leadership uncertainty into a powerful launchpad for your career.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Smith, D. D.  “The Keys to Succeeding Under a New Manager,” Harvard Business Review online, May 18, 2026.

In fact, high performing teams are subject to overwhelm even more than an “average” team since they have such high aspirations.

Even the best teams need to pace themselves.

Overwhelm can sneak up on us and be hidden.  One team member who was interviewed for a recent article in Harvard Business Review said:

“I was holding it together on the outside, yet inside, I felt like I was screaming.  I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate, and even small tasks felt impossible.  I was overwhelmed.”

As a leader, it is hard to see when things have gone too far.  Some stress is stimulating and good.  But it can go too far and produce burnout: “Burnout is an outcome of unmanaged chronic stress that develops over time. (Meister & Dael, 2025, p. 2).”

Identifying overwhelm can be difficult to spot.  It emerges when the three core pillars sustaining employee productivity fracture:

• Lack of Predictability: Overwhelm surges when people feel powerless to influence their environment or cannot see what challenges are coming next, reducing their sense of agency.
• Changes in Work Standards and Expectations: Employees feel crushed by unrealistic external demands or toxic, self-imposed perfectionism. This triggers a harsh inner dialogue where they assume they are “not good enough” because they are struggling.
• No Time for Recovery: The system breaks down when employees lack time, staffing, or support. Over one-third of participants cited severe time pressure as their central trigger.

Because we – as leaders – are often part of the problem, we must actively redesign the conditions of work to become the solution. The HBR article outlines five specific actions leaders can take:

1. Spot Both the Silence and the Strain: Do not assume a quiet employee is a thriving one. Look for subtle behavioral shifts such as decision paralysis, withdrawal, or frantic, break-less working.
2. Engineer Micro-Control: While leaders cannot remove macro corporate uncertainty, they can help teams break overwhelming backlogs down into small, clear priorities.
3. Recalibrate Performance Standards: Actively disrupt perfectionist cultures by explicitly defining what “good enough” looks like.
4. Create Psychological Permission to Say “I’m at Capacity”: Establish a social environment where setting boundaries carries no professional stigma or risk of reprisal: “What would you need to adjust to make this task manageable?”
5. Design Work for Recovery, Not Endurance: Normalize micro-breaks, mental detachment after hours, and rest as legitimate performance practices.

In the modern workplace, overwhelm is no longer an occasional hurdle – it is a defining feature of work life. By recognizing the subtle warning signs early and fostering cultures that value recovery alongside results, leaders can transform operational strain into long-term, sustainable performance.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Meister, A. & Dael, N. “Do You Know If Your Team Is Overwhelmed?,” Harvard Business Review online, December 8, 2025.

A slow but steady shift has taken place in organizations over the past several years.  The result is that managers are leading larger teams than ever, often with significantly less administrative or organizational support.

Responsibilities continue to multiply, but the resources do not.

If you find yourself trapped in a daily cycle of firefighting rather than thinking strategically, you are experiencing a common modern plight: your team has simply grown too big for traditional management models.

While you may not have the power to change your company’s organizational chart, you can change how your team operates. Based on insights from research reported in Harvard Business Review, here are four strategies to regain control when your span of control feels unmanageable:

1.  Shift from Individuals to Small Groups.  Running traditional one-on-one meetings with a large team will completely devour your calendar. Instead, cluster your employees into small groups of three or four based on project alignment or operational specialty. Meet with these small cohorts collectively to facilitate collaborative problem-solving.  Hold one-on-one meetings much less frequently.

2.  Learn to Say No to Good Ideas.  Knowledge work accumulation is notoriously invisible, making it easy to say yes to “just one more thing” until the team is completely buried. Highly competent teams naturally generate a steady stream of great initiatives, but as a leader, you must ruthlessly prioritize and say no to good ideas to protect execution capacity.

3.  Flip Your Meetings.  Many leaders use communication channels backward: they use face-to-face meetings for simple project updates and turn to Slack or email for complex problem-solving. This fills your inbox with exhausting threads of clarifying questions. Flip this dynamic by handling routine status updates via text or email and dedicating valuable synchronous meeting time exclusively to real-time problem-solving.

4.  Protect Your Calendar and Be Transparent.  Stop attending every meeting. Trust your instincts on where your presence is mandatory, and view skipping non-essential sessions as a development opportunity to send a direct report in your place. Concurrently, be entirely transparent with your team about your bandwidth constraints. Explicitly invite them to follow up or “bug” you if an email slips through the cracks, removing the guesswork from their workflow.

You need to protect your time so that you use your work time effectively and have a life outside of work.  Leading a large team requires abandoning the desire to do everything yourself. By restructuring your communication and establishing firm boundaries, you can lead effectively without burning out.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Knight, R. “When Managing Your Team Becomes Too Much,” Harvard Business Review online, October 3, 2025.

Every now and then it helps to follow the KISS Principle: Keep It Super Simple.

As someone who has written a book about strategy, and teaches both corporate strategy and nonprofit strategy at University of Maryland, I can definitely complicate strategic planning.  But let’s keep it simple.

The first thing I ever learned about strategy is that it answers three questions:

Who are we?

Where are we going?

How are we going to get there?

Let’s apply KISS to these questions:

Who are we?  What is your mission and purpose?  What are your values; what do you stand for?

Where are we going?  What is your vision for the future?  What are the 3-5 most important Strategic Goals you want to accomplish in the next three years?

How are we going to get there?  As you make your plans for the goals, you can look at your SWOTs.  What Strengths do you have that will allow you to seize Opportunities to accomplish your goals. What Weaknesses do you need to improve upon in order to achieve your goals. What Threats do you need to watch out for?

As you answer these questions, it will be wise to gather input from stakeholders, e.g., employees, alumni, customers, clients, donors.

You don’t have to overcomplicate it.  Following this Strategy KISS approach will give you focus, direction and acceleration to make even more of a Mission Impact.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the [person] who points out how the strong [person] stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the [person] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spend [themselves] in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if [they] fail, at least fails while daring greatly, so that [their] place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

One of my Board members was giving me a pep talk once and told me: “No one ever built a statue to a critic.”  How true!

Many of you reading this – regardless of your level of responsibility in your organization – are “The Person in the Arena.”  Have courage!  Have faith in your mission and vision!  There are many of us cheering you on as you “dare greatly!”