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by Kelly Goldsmith and Marshall Goldsmith

Source: Chief Executive

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by Brenda Steinberg and Michael D. Watkins

After participating in a good leadership development program, you’ll no doubt feel inspired to transform yourself, your team, and your organization. That’s why companies spend more than $46 billion per year on such training. They want their employees, from high potentials to top executives, to gain energy and purpose by learning and envisioning the future with others.

However, many program participants find it challenging to sustain momentum and achieve durable post-program results. As an executive who recently graduated from one of ours told us: “I left incredibly motivated. I had a clear plan for how I needed to lead and restructure my area. Three weeks later, I was extremely frustrated. It felt like nothing had changed.”

Most often, leaders are making progress — just not at the speed they had hoped. Success requires determined effort combined with care about pacing and adjustment. Here are some practical strategies to help you navigate the crucial post-program “reentry” phase and maximize the impact of your experience.

Anticipate reactions.

When you return from your program, colleagues will be curious about it. When they ask you how it went, don’t overwhelm them with too much information or gloss over your answer. Instead, have ready a few 60-second elevator pitches – each highlighting a key takeaway, its strategic implications, why it’s important to you, and how it will shape your thinking in the future.

You will likely need different pitches for different stakeholders. For example, your pitch to your direct reports might be about what you learned about empowering the team. At the same time, the one to your boss might be targeted to executing the strategy or achieving business results.  A well-crafted reentry pitch will engage the heads and the hearts of listeners and signal potential changes.

Recognize others’ contributions.

Take the time to recognize the people who made it possible for you to attend the program. Tell reports how much you appreciate their hard work ensuring operations ran well when you were away.

Also, explore what they learned and how they developed during your absence and any impact it’s had on their future goals and aspirations. Any post-program change agenda will require the support of your team, and this is an opportunity to both create goodwill and explore how you might free up time by shifting responsibilities.

Make sure to thank your boss, peers, and others, too, emphasizing how they might benefit from your new insights and ideas. By demonstrating your gratitude and connecting your experience to group and organizational success, you reinforce your commitment to others.

Embrace the opportunity.

Leaders often worry that their newly acquired behaviors or visions will be met with skepticism and jokes about just returning from a course. “Who kidnapped the real you and substituted this alien?” is a common refrain. But don’t let this fear hold you back. You will be more disappointed in the long run if you fail to make any changes or if others fail to recognize your growth.

Remember that this is an opportunity. Acknowledge that while you are committed to continuous, long-term personal and team development, the course was indeed a catalyst for new thinking. Emphasize that you are dedicated to working with others to drive meaningful change.

Communicate your intentions.

To gain support for your change ideas, it’s essential to be candid about your intentions and the challenges you anticipate. The idea isn’t just to inform them and eliminate any preconceived notions they might have; it’s also to involve them in specific areas of transformation.

Be mindful that you have been thinking about this evolution for longer than they have, though, and allow them time to process, reflect, and adapt. Ultimately, the goal is to create a shared understanding and facilitate a smoother transition.

Pace yourself.

You may return to your professional life inspired and impatient to fix things right away. But pace and prioritization are paramount.

Of course, if the program has prompted you to realize that you have been procrastinating on a critical change and have the authority to make it, do so immediately. Be courageous, communicate clearly, and take action.

However, most changes will benefit from a more gradual approach. Introduce new ideas incrementally, respecting others’ adaptation process. Small, consistent individual and team shifts are better accepted and less disruptive. Allow time for practice and refinement to solidify changes.

Build a support network.

You’ll want a support network both inside and outside your team. Stay in touch with people you met in your development program to share advice and hold one another accountable. You might consider creating a group on platforms like WhatsApp or establishing a buddy system whereby partners check in every four to six weeks. Within your organization, identify individuals in the best position to discuss and advise on your intended changes and enlist them to provide regular feedback and help you work through challenges.

Stay the course.

The only way to achieve change is through consistent effort. Accept that your initial work is unlikely to yield immediate results, that there might be resistance and setbacks, and stay patient. Communicate often and clearly, balancing understanding with determination. Recognize that small steps add up to significant ones and stick with it. With work, your development program experience can lead to long-lasting personal, team, or organizational change.

Source: HBR

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by Heather O’Shea

According to Upwork, around 32.6 million Americans will work remotely in 2025, approximately 22% of the total workforce. Another study by Buffer says that a whopping 98% of people want to work remotely, at least part of the time. When you look at the numbers, it is easy to see that remote work overall—in some shape or form—is on the rise.

This trend is not just a response to recent global circumstances but also reflects the evolving nature of work itself. Advancements in technology that allow us to stay connected, plus a greater emphasis on work/life balance, have made new working models the object of our desire. There are a few workplace golden rules leaders need to remember, no matter what your work model may be.

Maintaining community in remote work models

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of leading teams in various set-ups, from single-location teams to those spread across different geographies and even fully remote teams. In reflecting on these experiences, one constant stands out: The importance of fostering a culture centered around authenticity, empathy and community.

Currently, my team is 100% remote. In this situation, people don’t necessarily get to know each other by walking around a physical location, so messaging platforms like Slack become our “break room” or “water cooler” to build and foster a sense of community. We come up with fun topics to discuss and share photos from our various locations that give everyone a view into our lives. What’s great about being based around the country is that we have such a rich diversity in how we live our lives and the events happening around us, so it’s always fascinating to participate in those discussions.

At my company, “playful” is one of our core values, and we are always coming up with ways to fulfill this value in a virtual workspace. We have a team meeting every week and often have team members give us a presentation on their lives and hobbies so we all get to know each other better and build more playfulness into our everyday interactions. Additionally, we organize birthday parties, games and celebrations regularly. As we do this, we are seeing more team members across the organization connecting more organically and even gathering in person to socialize with those who live in close proximity.

Identifying your own company values and bringing elements into your team’s workday to support those values is essential for fostering a sense of belonging and connection. Encourage open communication, celebrate achievements and prioritize team bonding activities. Whether it’s virtual coffee breaks, online gaming sessions or themed events, find creative ways to infuse fun and camaraderie into your remote work culture.

Remember, building a strong remote team is not just about the work; it’s about cultivating relationships, supporting one another and creating a shared sense of purpose. By embracing remote work and nurturing a positive team culture, you can empower your team to thrive in any environment, regardless of physical distance.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Our business is highly collaborative, and working asynchronously across time zones can be challenging without frequent communication. Consistent, transparent communication is central to remote leadership and helps set the stage for how team members should engage across projects. Since my company went to a completely remote model four years ago, our leadership team will definitely agree that it has certainly been a learning experience—and we haven’t always gotten it right. The good news is that we’ve picked up a few strategies along the way.

We are always seeking feedback on how we are communicating with employees and refining our approach. Mainly, we’re trying to be increasingly thoughtful about the forums in which we communicate. A few examples include: sharing business updates over video conference in our team meetings; taking detailed notes in every meeting so team members can reference back and stay up to speed (even if they aren’t able to attend); collecting end-of-day updates from every project owner with all of the tasks individuals are working on, and scheduling messages to send at appropriate times in order to be thoughtful of people’s working hours and time zones.

While opening communication avenues is critical in a remote work environment, being thoughtful about those avenues is also a big consideration. No one wants to spend their entire day attending meeting after meeting, so finding ways that they can get caught up on their own time can be a big help. Leadership needs to be readily accessible and available to build strong communication channels and relationships.

Building trust and accountability

Leaders have a strong role to play in any work environment, but especially in a remote one. When no one is in the office together, a high level of trust is part of everyday life. Leaders can build trust and accountability among team members by doing just that: trusting them and holding them accountable. This starts with good hires, of course, and finding people who are passionate and take pride in their work. Building a team means finding people who truly want your company to succeed, and that starts with leadership. It’s our role as leaders to invest in our employees, coach them and provide them the opportunities to learn and grow.

For example, we expect all of our team members to have full, robust lives. We hope this is even more possible now that they have more flexibility in planning their day, along with the fact that they no longer have to commute or “scan their badge” at a location simply because it’s a requirement. We have chosen to foster a collaborative community where we rely on and trust each other to produce great results and build an amazing company together. This starts with leaders showing up for their team and setting that example.

As the traditional workplace undergoes a profound transformation, embracing remote work may no longer be a choice. The good news is that, if done right, remote work models can foster productivity and efficiency while promoting inclusivity, sustainability and employee wellbeing.

Source:  HRExecutive

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By Barbara Kellerman

We’ve all worked for bosses who could have been better — in some cases much better — but inexplicably they remain in charge. Barbara Kellerman has been studying that phenomenon for much of her career. A Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, Kellerman has written several books on bad leadership, exploring why it matters, how it’s changed in the digital age and what we can do when we don’t trust the people in charge of our companies or communities. Her latest book, “Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers,” is both a cautionary tale and a call to action. In the excerpt below, she details the early indicators of poor leadership — and why we are obligated to act when we see them.

—Audrey Goodson Kingo

Excerpt from, “Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers.”

When they take power, many leaders, probably most, assure their followers that things will get better. That their lives will somehow improve. After all, that’s how leaders get to be leaders in the first place. By persuading their followers that they have some sort of secret sauce that will enable them to provide what other leaders could not or would not.

What, then, distinguishes leaders who start out bad from leaders who start out good? Questions like these are impossible to answer with precision. We are talking humans, not widgets, and humans don’t lend themselves to criteria or measurements that are exact. But in general we can say that leaders who are good, as in both ethical and effective, tend from the get-go to be more reasonable and realistic than leaders who are bad, as in unethical, ineffective, or both. Good leaders avoid the spectacularly grandiose. They avoid the implication that they and they alone can save us from ourselves. Continue reading →

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by David Burkus

A couple years into your career, you’ll find a few different opportunities to step up and practice your leadership skills. Sometimes it will be preparing and running a team meeting. Other times it may be volunteering for a new task the team requires.

You may find that your first “real” leadership role is managing a newly formed, cross-functional team for a specific and short-term project. Today, cross-functional teams — those with people from different departments who have varied expertise — are becoming more common, as is the rise of project-based work arrangements.

The most common reason for assembling a cross-functional team is speed — speed of information, speed of innovation, or even just the speed required to complete the project. Traditional organizational designs create functional silos, and those silos slow down the flow of information and ideas. Cross-functional teams build bridges that connect once-distant parts of the business and, if done right, allow people to work together better and faster.

But cross-functional teams also face a number of challenges that must be overcome to get off to a great start. Sometimes there are territorial tensions, where members feel accountable to their original functions and are not open to others weighing in on their expertise. Sometimes people have different ways of working, which can make collaboration slower and more difficult. Sometimes teammates are working inside an incentive compensation system that only rewards individual, rather than collective, performance or weights performance in their “normal job” as more important than performance on this project.

While these barriers may be present, they don’t mean your project is doomed. There are a few key actions new leaders can take to get their cross-functional project off to a great start. Continue reading →