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.

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.

“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!”

But it’s not Happy for everyone.

Many of us are very fortunate to take part in a lot of extra celebratory activities during the holidays.  There are parties and gifts and family gatherings.  Very fun!

But it’s not Fun for everyone.

There are many different reasons why people may be “blue” at the holidays.

• The loss of a loved one in recent years is always more pronounced around the holidays
• If someone is lonely, they are often even more lonely at this time of year
• Financial stress is amplified during these gift giving times
• Festive TV specials and commercials can make people feel even more left out than usual

It is easy for the fortunate ones among us to get very busy at this time of the year and overlook friends and co-workers who are having a tough time.

*Slow down and pay extra special attention to everyone you regularly interact with.

*Turn up the volume on your empathy awareness – if you see something, say something: “Hey, how’s it going?  Want to get together for a coffee?”

*Treat everyone with an extra portion of care.  It is very easy for people to disguise what they are going through.

Of course, the shorter days and colder weather in most of the US does not help.  Some churches even have special “Longest Night” services on Winter Solstice to provide hopeful, caring spaces for people.

It is great to celebrate the holidays.  But let’s do our best to bring everyone along with us.

Following are some ideas on how we can create strategic harmony and integration with these various life goals, based on new research reported in Harvard Business Review.

One of the first things we need to do to create Goal Harmony is to change our mindset from “either/or” thinking to an “and/both” approach.  Research shows that this mindset is a habit that can be developed over time – so give it a try and keep working at it.

Creating Goal Harmony begins by listing all of our major life goals and the essential activities associated with them.  Then we want to look for connections between them.  For example:

• Taking care of your health – working out, eating right, getting your rest – will make you more productive at work and feel better about yourself.
• Invite work colleagues to go with you to your favorite sporting event. You will enjoy the game and deepen relationships with colleagues.
• Take your kids with you to community volunteer activities. You all “do good,” they learn the importance of contributing to community and you build your relationship with them. They “might” even stay off their phones for a while.
• You can also create Goal Harmony for sub-goals within the same broad goal, such as health. The less alcohol you drink and earlier you go to bed, the better sleep you get, and the better chance you have of getting up in time to work out the next morning.

Creating Goal Harmony can provide us with more fulfillment from the achievement of our various goals.  No longer do we need to feel “guilty” about sacrificing one goal for another.  Harmony among our goals also increases the chances that we will really stick to a goal commitment.

Not paying attention to an area of our life that is important to us is like losing a part of ourselves.  We don’t need to do that.  We can create strategic harmony that integrates our life goals and truly gives us a full, thriving life.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Wang, J. & Fischbach, A.   “How to Create Harmony Between Your Personal and Professional Goals,” Harvard Business Review online, September 19, 2025.

Will the annual audit ever be critical of you for not trying to seize that new opportunity that you decided was too risky?  No.

Audits are critical of acts of “commission” vs “omission.”  You don’t want the financial report to show a big expense on a project that did not work out.  But the audit will never fault you for missing that investment in a new idea.

Just ask Kodak.  Remember them?  They once had 90% share of the film market in the US.  When the idea of digital photography came along, they said “pass.”  They only realized many years too late that this new technology – which they invented – was the future.

Sometimes we become so successful that the idea of taking a risk and failing is unthinkable.  And yet, that risk could lead to even more success.

How do we overcome our fear of failure?  Here are some ideas from an article in Harvard Business Review.

1. Redefine Failure. Fear of failure often stems from a fear of looking foolish or not meeting expectations. Instead of viewing failure as a sign of personal inadequacy, reframe it as a learning opportunity. Successful professionals are not those who avoid mistakes, but those who learn from them and move forward. Entrepreneurs like to say: “Fail fast and fail forward.”
2. Acknowledge the Fear. Rather than pretending the fear isn’t there, take a moment to acknowledge it. Giving your fear a voice can lessen its power over you. Respond to the fear by saying: “This is a calculated risk that I am willing to take. The potential upside is worth this risk.”  Keep a picture of success at the forefront of your mind.
3. Test Your Assumptions. Our fears are often based on worst-case scenarios that are unlikely to happen. Test your fear by asking yourself, “What is the worst that can happen if I fail?” Often, the answer is not as dire as we imagine. In the professional world, setbacks can lead to new opportunities, new skills, and even new professional relationships.
4. Get Comfortable with Discomfort. Feeling fearful is a normal part of stepping outside of your comfort zone. If you don’t feel a little apprehension, it might be a sign that you aren’t challenging yourself enough to grow and achieve your most important goals.

You will absolutely fail sometimes.  Fine.  Own it.  Learn.  And be proud you were willing to take a risk on something you believed in.  The alternative is that you would never know if you could have been successful.  Use these four steps so you can start to see fear not as an obstacle, but as a guide that helps you move forward and achieve your full potential.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Peppercorn, S.  “How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2022, pp. 135-139.

Career expectations have shifted dramatically in recent times.

Once upon a time, people joined an organization and planned to spend many years there with successive promotions.

These days we need to be much more nimble.  It is healthy to prepare for multiple career “pivots” over time.  The disruption of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace makes building our career resilience even more important.

As highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article, building true career resilience involves proactively preparing for the unexpected and staying grounded through change.

So, how can you cultivate this essential resilience in your career?

1. Cultivate a Diverse Network: Your professional connections are a vital safety net. Connect with people across various industries, roles, and levels, both within and outside your current organization. This isn’t just for job hunting; it’s about learning, sharing insights, and building genuine relationships that can offer support and opportunities when you least expect it. Prioritize nurturing these connections, even when your career feels stable.
2. Develop a Growth Mindset: Embrace learning as a continuous process. The world is constantly changing, and so should your skills and knowledge. Be open to new challenges, seek out diverse experiences, and view setbacks as opportunities for growth rather than failures. This adaptability is crucial for pivoting effectively when circumstances demand it.
3. Prioritize Your Well-being: Resilience isn’t just about professional acumen; it’s deeply tied to your personal well-being. High-achieving professionals often sacrifice self-care in pursuit of success, but neglecting your physical and mental health can hinder your ability to cope with stress and change. Schedule time for activities that recharge you, ensure adequate rest, and seek support when needed.
4. Plan for Uncertainty: While you can’t predict the future, you can prepare for various scenarios. This includes building a financial cushion, maintaining an up-to-date résumé and professional brand, and continuously exploring potential pathways for your career. As the HBR article suggests, “Apply before you need to” – exploring options early reduces stress and increases control when making a move.
5. Reframe Your Expectations: A shift in plans isn’t a failure; it’s an opportunity for agility. Your next career move might look different than anticipated, but it could lead you further than you imagined.  Trust in your ability to navigate uncertainty and avoid burning out by trying to outrun it.

Building career resilience means being strategic and intentional with yourself and others.  It’s about trusting your capacity to adapt, grow, and thrive, no matter what challenges come your way.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Auger-Domínguez, D.  “How to Build Career Resilience in Uncertain Times,” Harvard Business Review online, March 25, 2025.

Big question!

Researchers have found that we need to feel three things regularly for a satisfying life:

• Achievement (recognition; sense of accomplishment)
• Meaningfulness (connection to something larger than ourselves)
• Joy in the moment (happiness; positive emotion)

Many successful working professionals report that they do pretty well on these first two areas, but it is Joy that seems to be experienced less often.  Why is this?

Time is a challenge for many.

Research from Harvard Business School, based on a study of 1,500 alumni with full-time careers and families, sheds light on the challenge of time.  These working professionals reported just over three hours a day for discretionary activities.  While joy was more prevalent in free time than at work, the study found that life satisfaction is higher when free time is spent joyfully – regardless of how much free time one has.

The good news is that it’s possible to find more sparks of Joy in the limited leisure time you already have. Here are five research-backed strategies to help you make the most of your free moments:

1. Engage with Others.  Strong, meaningful relationships are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction.  The study found that shared experiences amplified joy.  Engaging in any free-time activity with others almost always felt more enjoyable than doing it alone – even just watching TV together.
2. Avoid Passive Pursuits.  After a long day, it’s tempting to collapse onto the couch, but passive leisure like watching TV or scrolling social media can be a disservice.  Research shows that active pursuits such as exercising, exploring hobbies, and volunteering bring more joy than passive ones.
3. Follow Your Passion.  Joy in free time comes when we let it remain free from obligations and societal expectations.  Autonomy—making choices aligned with your personal values—is crucial for well-being.  Pursuits that you find personally rewarding will boost your life satisfaction significantly.
4. Diversify Your Activities.  While following your passion is key, dedicating too much time to a single leisure pursuit can actually diminish its benefit.  Variety, not depth, boosts happiness by preventing monotony and keeping experiences fresh.
5. Protect the Time.  Work often bleeds into free time, but overworking is linked to increased health problems and reduced well-being. Psychological detachment from work during off-hours improves well-being and job engagement.  The study found that for every additional hour devoted to work, joy in life decreased, while using that hour for leisure increased happiness.

You don’t need to find more hours in the day to create a more satisfying life. By prioritizing variety, seeking social and active experiences, and protecting your personal passions, you can find more sparks of joy in the limited leisure time you already have.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Perlow, L., Menster, S., & Affinito, S. J.  “How the Busiest Find Joy,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2025.

One study on professional services firms found that the majority of respondents said their jobs were“highly demanding, exhausting, and chaotic.”

If that sounds like you – or if you are heading that direction – you may end up with “hurry sickness.”  This malady was first identified more than fifty years ago by two cardiologists who saw the damaging effects of “hurrying” on their patients’ health.  The anxiety and stress from constant “hurry” can result in high blood pressure, insomnia, and headaches.  It increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.

That all sounds pretty bad.  But, the good news is that you can do something about it.  Following are some suggestions based on a recent article from Harvard Business Review.

First, you need to cut down your volume of work:

• Delegate More. You will never advance in your career if you do not practice effective delegation.  Check out this blog for more details on how to do this.
• Say No More Frequently. Create a new standard response to requests – which is “Tell me more about the expectations.”  And then “Thanks – I will get back to you tomorrow.”  Take the time to assess if this is something you can reasonably do.  Stop making “Yes” your default.
• Negotiate Deadlines. People always want something “yesterday.”  And actually, their requests are not all that urgent.  After considering requests for 24 hours, suggest a different deadline if you are going to take on the project at all.

Once your workload is reduced:

• Block Time for Your Work. Don’t make yourself constantly available for meetings.  Make sure you have time on your calendar to do your work.
• Become Selective About Performance Standards. Not everything needs to be perfect.  You know this, but you need to actually work this way.  Some things can just be “good enough.”
• Relentlessly Prioritize. Make sure that you and your boss are clear on your priorities and communicate clearly if some things are not going to get done.
• Practice Mindfulness. You will still be left with a full plate even after taking all these suggestions.  Try to take a few minutes a day – even if it is just for some quiet time with deep breathing – to slow down.

We all know that rushing from one project to another is a bad idea.  Take the time to slow down, prioritize, and work at a more reasonable pace.  The quality of your mental and physical health will improve, as well as the quality of your work.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Wiens, K.  “The Insidious Effects of Hurrying,” Harvard Business Review online, January 13, 2025.