Higher Ups Lose Leadership Capacity

I had a wonderful conversation with a client and friend last week – Jane.  She attention a session in the Northeast with David Rock. He had shared the notion that as the higher-up working professional progress in their career, the lesser their leadership capacity becomes. This seems very counter-intuitive at first pass.

[NEW VIDEO] Emotional Safety

Anonymous Mentoring

Formal learning, or institutional learning, which is the idea of learning formally from a designated, certified teacher in some kind of a structured format (e.g., schools, conferences, workshops, speakers, webinars, etc.) is a relatively new concept of learning. It’s only about 150-200 years old. Prior to that and since the advent of time, the oldest and quite possibly the most effective way of learning we human beings have used, has been mentoring. Hundreds of years ago, for example, if one wanted to be a carpenter, one would find someone in their town/village or someplace nearby and learn from them. In most cases, these apprenticeship models had no time frame … it was not limited to a semester or year or four years.

Mental Coaching vs. Emotional Coaching

I have the great privilege of working with many individual athletes and sports teams. Last week, I spent time with one such team and their coaching staff. The head coach is a remarkable former athlete whose success was, in large part, because of his work ethic, grit, and tenacity. He is, without doubt, an overachiever. He is as passionate about coaching the sport as he was playing it.  However, he has had some issues transferring his vast knowledge and experience to his players. He becomes frustrated when his players don’t perform, and seemingly, don’t try to perform as hard as he did.

Victim vs. Victimized

This past weekend I spoke at an event. Fellow people of color were in the audience. That got me thinking… many of us were at some point or another victimized by others because of the color of our skin. Some of us in the room were the first people to endure such prejudice decades ago. What prejudicial actions other people chose or choose to do to us, whether you’re a person of color, a minority, or just a human being with some different outward characteristic, is what I call victimization — and we truly have no control over it. Not any more than having control over the weather.