Leading with vision is not something we’re taught in manager basics.

Why wait until you’re a Director, VP, or in the C-suite to begin honing these skills?  The answer is you shouldn’t.

I have a guided exercise to challenge and inspire you. The key with vision is it has to start with you.

What are you seeing, believing, and working towards achieving?

What if we didn’t fake it til we made it?

How many of us received that advice in our early management career? The intent was to boost our confidence in the face of our imposter syndrome.

The byproduct? A huge missed opportunity to hone our vulnerability skills - one of the most important qualities of a fantastic leader.

Explore the advice we should share instead.

Goals matter. They give us clarity, purpose, confidence, achievement, and personal growth.

AND we’re not always terribly great with goals - personally and professionally.

Today I share my recent experience with goals and then some thoughts to challenge and support your own pursuit of goals as a human, a leader, and someone who wants to have an impact.

Are your meetings managing you or are you managing your meetings?

Do you find yourself in back to back to back meetings with very little strategic thinking and planning time?

Use these 5 tactical strategies to shift from being managed by your calendar to you managing and driving your own time.

When did executive presence become the catchall for leadership development conversations?

You know it when you see it, but how does that help our future leaders? How are we helping them develop this critical, intangible skill if we’re treating it as a catchall?

So this performance review cycle, what if we got more specific?

What elements of executive presence are you wanting to see in your people?

We stereotypically think of feedback as high stakes and low frequency.

What if we shifted that?

What about making feedback low stakes and high frequency?

I’ve found the key to enabling this shift is two fold: build the relationship and master your transition.

There’s energy around The Great Resignation, and it’s an incomplete conversation without talking about Burnout.

The last 15+ months have awakened us in countless ways, one important way is having a lower tolerance for BS. A lower tolerance for unfilling work. A lower tolerance for our work and the demand outpacing our reward and the benefit.

Where are you on your burnout? Is it putting you into the camp of folks looking to make a career change this year?

We get to choose what voices we listen to. We get to choose the perspective we hold.

This posting is a recap of a race I recently competed and the mental chatter that made it all possible.

We all have different endurance events we’re facing in our own lives, notice your chatter, notice your perspective, and choose what will serve you.

What works at one level of leadership is likely to run into serious limitations at the next level.

Said another way, what got you here, won’t get you there.

How long should a leader stay in the weeds with their people? Where are you most effective?

A leader setting the tone starts with the ability to lead self.

Leading yourself to what you’re needing. Leading yourself to understand your own “why.” Leading your own growth and development. Leading yourself to create and maintain boundaries. Leading your own well being with rest and exercise.

“If we are not at home within ourselves, it is difficult to make grounded, conscious choices.”

The question isn’t if you’re a leader. The question is what dimension of leadership are you in at this moment?

The root of all leadership starts within you. It’s your self-acceptance and self-authority. What are you stepping into to lead in your life and career?

What do marching bands, wheels of a car, and leadership teams all have in common?

The need for alignment.

Strategic leaders are able to Anticipate the needs of their people and the business, Challenge the status quo to surface all options, Interpret all available information, Decide what should be done, Align their stakeholders, and Learn from both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.

Of these, Alignment can be the most nuanced and can have the greatest impact on a leader’s effectiveness and the organization’s success.

Strategic leaders create and lead with vision.

Y’all already know this to be true, and yet, it’s a critical component of strong leadership that falls to the bottom of the totem pole when things get busy - when YOU get busy.

Explore a few actions to strengthen the way you lead with vision this year.

The most effective and scaled leaders develop and grow the capacity and capabilities of their team. A developed team is empowered, has strong decision making skills, is capable, and the leader is not a bottleneck and is positioned for strategic visioning and execution.

How do you stack up against the 5 conscious leadership competencies? How about the 3 reactive tendencies that can reduce a leader’s impact? Dive in and explore your opportunities to lead more strategically in 2021.

The effectiveness of an organization's leaders will determine whether or not that organization can grow. What works at one level will run into serious limitations at the next level.

Leaders are required to scale. How often do you think about your own scalability? We think about scalable solutions for products, customer experiences, and more, but what about our own leadership scalability?

You are 1 decision and 1 action away from the leadership, career, and life you want. When you envision life 12 months from now, who will you be? Where will you be? What will you be?

What will you do today to make your future self proud?

What are your values and how do you honor them in your work, your leadership, your job search, and your life?

Values are ways of being and beliefs that you hold most important.

Dive in to explore your values and how you can bring them forward in your life.

Legacy has always felt intimidating. It has felt lofty. It has felt beyond my capability, like something that truly remarkable people leave behind when they’ve passed on.

Over the last few weeks, it’s clear that we all need to be thinking about our legacy. We need to be doing better, being better, leaving things better than how we found them. Bequeathing values that will make a difference in the lives of those that follow.

Yesterday was hands down the hardest day of my career.

My Learning & Development team was deeply impacted by layoffs. They cried. I cried. We cried. The emotions were real and it was really hard.

As difficult as the day was, I wake up today with a renewed commitment to the power and importance of leading with care and vulnerability.

What, how, and when leaders communicate always needs to be mindful and strategic. Explore four examples where changing one word changes how your message is received.