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.

*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.

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.

Maybe not.

We often view team harmony as the ultimate goal. We celebrate a lack of ego and a culture of collaboration.

Yet many professional groups fall into a subtle but dangerous trap: they mistake collegiality for alignment. When respect and trust are replaced by a mere avoidance of conflict, the result isn’t a better team—it’s delayed decisions, superficial consensus, and a lack of accountability.

Mistaking politeness for progress is more than a cultural quirk; it is a competitive crisis hiding in plain sight. Research recently reported in Harvard Business Review suggests that governance failures and a lack of probing questions can cause organizations to underperform their sectors by as much as 35% in the following year.

To determine if your team is tipping too far into comfort, watch for these five red flags:

• Avoidance of Accountability: Sensitive topics are consistently pushed to the end of meetings or deferred entirely to avoid discomfort.
• Superficial Consensus: The group moves quickly to agreement without exploring alternatives or risks, often resulting in unspoken concerns.
• Social Comfort Over Candor: Tension is defused with jokes or side-stepped to preserve “good feelings,” even when the actual path forward remains unclear.
• Unequal Voice Participation: Newer or quieter members hold back out of deference, depriving the group of fresh perspectives and relevant expertise.
• Shadow Governance: Key concerns are raised in private “offline” conversations with individuals rather than being debated by the full group.

 High-performing groups don’t just “get along”; they challenge each other’s assumptions with intellectual curiosity. You can shift your team’s dynamic with a few intentional structural changes:

1. Tackle the Tough Stuff First: Reserve the first 20 minutes of your meeting for the most uncomfortable topic when cognitive energy is highest.
2. Assign a “Chief Skeptic”: Rotate a role at each meeting for someone tasked specifically with finding flaws and proposing alternatives. Charge them with “The three potential downsides of this approach are . . . ”
3. Mandatory Round-Robin Input: Before a major decision, require every member to contribute a distinct concern or alternative approach instead of just agreeing with previous points.
4. The “Raise It in the Room” Norm: Require members to disclose any meaningful side conversations they’ve had about team matters since the last meeting.

True leadership requires distinguishing between genuine alignment and the dangerous comfort of surface-level agreement. When collegiality coexists with candor, it becomes a powerful driver of sharper decisions and stronger performance.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Cozma, I. & Rodighiero, E.  “Is Your Board Too Collegial,” Harvard Business Review online, September 17, 2025.

Following are ideas you can use to influence your team or organization culture to make it more productive.  These are based on a recent article in Harvard Business Review.

When we talk about the “culture” of your team, we are talking about “the way we do things around here.”  When you take a collective look at the structures, procedures, systems, policies, & processes your team uses, as well as the behaviors you exhibit, this is your culture.  If you want to change the culture, then you need to change these things.  Once you change “the way you do things,” the result will be a change in culture.

Step 1: Identify the structures, procedures, systems, policies, processes, and behaviors you would like to see change and why – list the benefits of the change.

Step 2: Recruit a small group of people who you think will support your ideas.  Update your list based on their input.

Step 3: Reach out to the rest of your team and suggest that you set up a meeting to write a Team Charter.  A Team Charter is essentially a document that lists the structures, procedures, systems, policies, processes, and behaviors your team commits to following.  Read more at this link from the Center for Creative Leadership.

Step 4: Review and update your Team Charter.  Challenge your team to live up to the ideals you created in the charter.  Update it as you come up with better ideas.

A Team Charter can be used at the team or even the organization level.  It can be an excellent document to use during interviews: “this is our culture; this is the kind of team you would be joining.”  And it can be further reinforced during onboarding.

Of course, what is written on a piece of paper does not matter nearly as much as the role modeling of the culture by leaders.  If you really want your culture to be a powerful driver of performance, make sure that all leaders exemplify it.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Chilazi, S. & Bohnet, I.  “To Make Your Workplace Fairer, Take Charge of It’s Norms,” Harvard Business Review online, May 2, 2025.

With this in mind, when I have hired people in the past, I think about their individual merit and what they will contribute to the collective.

Last semester, I provided students in one of my classes with the following scenario and questions:

The Board of Directors of a public company has ten people – all white men.  There are two openings to add to this Board.  The Search Committee brings five candidates to the Board.  They are all different, but all meet the qualifications to serve on the Board.  None of them provide a skill the board is lacking.  The only real difference between them is their gender, race, and therefore – of course – their lived experiences.  There are two white men, one White woman, one African American woman, and one Hispanic man.

What might be some upsides and downsides of selecting one or two of the white men?

What might be some upsides and downsides of selecting one or two of the non-white men?

The students were not asked who they would choose, nor did I tell them what I would do.  We discussed the tradeoffs.  The students were clear that the benefits of selecting the non-white men – given that their “individual merit” was equivalent – included that shareholders, employees, and customers who were women and people of color might feel that their perspectives would be better represented.  Students also thought that the lived experiences of the people of color and women could lead to better decision-making by the Board.

Perhaps “Collective Merit” is what President Ronald Reagan had in mind when he appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981.  She was the first woman appointed to the Court.  Many white men objected and said that they were more qualified than she was.  But many women said they appreciated having a woman’s view represented there.

Since that time, Presidents of both political parties have appointed non-white men to the Court.  I’m sure that there were always white men who felt they were more qualified.  And while many people may not like some of the Court’s decisions from time to time, you would have to agree that the Court looks a lot more like America than it did in 1965 when it was all white men.

Much is being said these days about the elimination of DEI: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.  Regardless of what you call it, organizations will continue to do hiring, promotions, compensation, and professional development.  They will need to build teams who feel connected with one another and are committed to the mission.  And they will want teams that are staffed for high performance.  Hiring for a combination of individual merit and “Collective Merit” would be a wise thing for organizations to keep in mind.

. . . but it can go too far.

Here are signs – from a recent article in Harvard Business Review – that your boss or someone you know, may be entering the Toxic Positivity zone.

*They surround themselves with “Yes People.”  If you have people around you who are unwilling to share a potential downside then you are going to make some mistakes.  I once asked a friend who was pursuing a risky goal, “What are your back-up plans if this does not work out?”  His response: “Failure is not an option.” But it turns out he did fail and his team was stressed as they frantically tried to figure out what to do.

*They provide excessive praise.  “You are superwoman!”  Maybe you are, but this statement just before a bunch of extra work is dumped on you is not appreciated.  “I know this team can pull this off.”  It’s nice to be encouraging, but this kind of comment when they team has just lost a couple of key people and the deadline has been shifted to make the assignment very challenging – is not the way to go.  Instead, get them additional resources and renegotiate the deadline.

*They expect people to be happy – no matter the circumstances.  “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is a fun song, but leaders need to have enough emotional intelligence to know when people have real concerns you need to acknowledge.  A wise person once told me that there is a big difference between a chocolate covered “cow pie” and a chocolate covered donut.  If you are dealing with a “cow pie,” then it is better to name it rather than make believe it does not exist.

Lots of great research has been done on the value of optimism (read more here), but Dr. Martin Seligman who pioneered the idea of Learned Optimism, points out its limitations.  Seligman recommends using “flexible optimism” in which you are willing to ask your resident pessimists about the downsides and seriously consider them before moving forward with a plan.

Negative thinking can definitely wreck the spirit of a team or organization, but being overly positive can do the same.  Find some balance as you pursue your Mission Impact.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Mallick, M.  “Does Your Boss Practice Toxic Positivity,” Harvard Business Review online, May 24, 2024.

It’s a culture of overwork – and it exists in many organizations.  Even worse – many leaders wear it as a badge of honor.

And while Overwork was an issue pre-pandemic, it has grown as a concern as the “always-on” expectation of many organizations has spread.

Research reported in a recent article in Harvard Business Review shows two disturbing trends that began during Covid: 1.) We became much more likely to work in the evenings, usually just before bedtime, and 2.) The number of work messages sent and received during the weekends increased by 200%.  These patterns have now become normalized.

Overwork – or “Workaholism” is the inability to disconnect from work.  This is bad for our mental health, erodes the quality of our work effort, and lowers personal as well as organizational, resilience.

If you are a leader who wants to break your Overwork Culture, here are some important steps you can take.  IMPORTANT: If Leadership is not on board with this then any change will probably not stick.  So begin there first. Then . . .

1.)  Start with an assessment.  Conduct some surveys and focus groups to find out how significant a problem you have and what attitudes exist among various employees – at different levels – about this.

2.)  Identify Incremental Change Opportunities based on what you learn in your assessment.  Put together a task force of people who are well placed in the organization and are committed to the effort.  Ask them to review the data of your assessment and identify changes that need to be made.  Look for places to start that you think will be successful.  You can’t set a new “no emails over the weekend” policy overnight.

3.)  Pilot Changes, Learn, and Expand.  Institute some small changes in a few places in the organization and learn how it goes.  Expand these efforts based on what you learn.  Changing habits takes time.  Begin rolling out small changes.  Start with changes that are relatively easy to build momentum.

You can count on resistance which is why leadership is vital to your success.  Stay persistent, reward those who get on board, and continue to build your momentum.  This will strengthen your team and lead to improved Mission Impact over time.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Clark, M.  “How To Fix Your Company’s Culture of Overwork,” Harvard Business Review online, March 18, 2024.

“Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast.”

We all know the power of culture.

A strong culture with a sound strategy and an effective leadership that embraces both can lead an organization to high performance for many years.

And a culture is a very challenging thing to change.  But what if you see the obvious need to change your culture?  Perhaps it does not fit your new strategy and you are convinced that the strategy is right.  Or what if the culture is simply toxic?

First, culture – itself – is not something that you change directly.  Please consider this quote from a Harvard Business Review article, “Change is Not the Culprit” (Lorsch & McTague, April 2016):

“ . . . culture isn’t something you ‘fix.’  Rather, . . . culture is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place to tackle tough business challenges like reworking an outdated strategy or business model.”

In consulting work I have done with executives who want to change the culture, we begin by describing the new kind of culture that they want:

*What new behaviors do we want employees to exhibit?

*What new systems, structures, and policies do we need?

*What new standard operating procedures should we establish?

*What obstacles that will get in the way do we need to remove?

Like anything, making these changes requires exceptional leadership.  Leaders need to role model the new behaviors, reward others who do so, and hold people accountable.

Once you have the new behaviors, systems, structures, etc. place – then you will have a new culture.

The Kotter eight stage model of leading organization change is a classic and can be a very helpful guide in this process.  It starts with establishing a sense of urgency and building a team that will lead the change.  Learn more about it here.

More than fifty percent of change efforts fail – and this is largely due to the power of culture.  But if you can tame that dragon and get it moving in the right direction, your organization can soar.  Obviously, it does not happen overnight.  You better get started now.

Research reported recently in Harvard Business Review shows that inclusive organizations are 73% more likely to reap innovation revenue and 70% more likely to capture new markets – among other advantages.

Becoming a more inclusive leader is a key competency in today’s economy.  Here are some ideas from that same HBR article on what you can do to be more inclusive:

*Strive for Authenticity Rather than Presence.  Rather than trying to be “seen as a leader,” focus on sincerely caring for people and creating space where people feel safe.  Role model this with humility.

*Redefine the Rules, Rather than Unquestionably Following Them.  Be ready to question “it’s the way we do things here” mentality that may exist in your organization.  Maybe the culture needs to change in order for people to feel more included.  Be prepared to step up and lead change.

*Embrace Active Learning and Consistent Implementation.  Bring a commitment to your own continuous learning about others who are different than you are to your daily work.  Make sure others know that you are constantly evolving to understand others and make the workplace more inclusive.  You are a work in progress.

*Ensure Equal Opportunity and Equitable Outcomes.  There is often bias embedded in various organization systems, procedures, and especially culture – which blocks true equal opportunity.  Be on the lookout for these.  Encourage others to identify ways in which processes can be more fair.

*View Inclusive Leadership As Everyone’s Job.  Organization-wide inclusivity is not HR’s job – everyone must play a role.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion needs to be a part of the organization’s values.  Leaders must role model this and hold others accountable.

For additional ideas on being the most effective inclusive leader you can be, check out this blog.  We never really “arrive” as an inclusive leader, but these ideas can help us all to move further along in the journey.

Inclusion can bring your organization many advantages.  More importantly, it is the right thing to do.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Zheng, W., Kim, J., Kark, R., & Mascolo, L.  “What Makes An Inclusive Leader?” Harvard Business Review online, September 27, 2023.