Leadership

Today I’m wrapping up a three part mini-series that looks at how you can improve hard conversations by understanding the hierarchical difference between you and the person you’re talking with. I’ve already talked about hard conversions with peers, and hard conversations with people in power. So logic

Hey there! I don’t have a new "hard conversations" article ready this week but I do have something pretty awesome for you. I just read Jade Rubick’s post on how he implemented a way to deliver small improvements while keeping bigger projects moving. He calls it

One obstacle to approaching hard conversations with altruism is other people. Other people make us grumpy. They’re not good at their jobs. They have it out for us. They have secret agendas. They’re stuck in their ways. They will never admit if their team is wrong. All those

I believe that to be great at hard conversations you have to start with altruism. To do this, you have you to take a good look in the mirror, be honest with yourself about what’s in your head and heart, then discard what doesn't align with your

People tell me that one of my superpowers is my ability to productively have hard conversations. In other words I can get and keep people engaged in a conversation about a difficult topic, navigate the conversation to satisfactory (or at least clear) outcomes, and keep or improve relationships in the

Last week I talked about Manager Bugs, which are the commonplace mistakes managers or leaders make. This week I’m talking about Leadership Incidents—the bigger failures that hurt more and are harder to recover from. In software engineering we talk about bugs, which are when something isn’t working

Last week a Dot Release reader and former coworker hit reply to the "Brag Lunch Leader Edition" article and said, “Do owning your failures as a leader next.” What a great idea! I knew I wanted to write about this, but he was quite right that talking about