Thoughts. Reflections. Intentions.

“The leaders who try and impose order in a complex context will fail, but those who set the stage, step back a bit and allow patterns to emerge and then determine which ones are desirable will succeed. They will discern many opportunities for innovation, creativity, and new business models.” – David Snowden We’ve said before that the capabilities leaders need today are different than the capabilities they needed in the past. And it’s true, because the world we presently live and work in looks so much different than it did ten or even two years ago. But what if we Read more.

The world we live and work in has become so complex. Change is bigger and happening more rapidly. Disruption—both intentional and unintentional—is everywhere. Uncertainty and ambiguity seem to be ever-present. Leaders everywhere have been tasked with navigating these complexities, and it isn’t easy. In fact, many leaders are coping with some of the biggest challenges they’ve ever encountered and discovering that the leadership “truths” they’ve relied on in the past no longer resonate in this new environment. That’s because the capabilities leaders need today are different from those they needed in the past. Now more than ever, leaders need to Read more.

Amid the “Great Resignation,” you’ve probably heard (and maybe said) that we’re all confounded. It seems employers don’t know why employees are leaving. And if you listen to feedback from the millions of people who have exited the workforce, things become even more perplexing. As it turns out, even employees don’t know why they’re leaving. A recent article from McKinsey explored the phenomenon in a new way, not for the sake of myth-busting but rather to apply a different lens to the way we’ve been thinking about it. The authors likened employees’ feelings to the feelings of soldiers returning home Read more.

In November 2021, a record number of people in the U.S. made a major change: According to the Labor Department, 4.5 million (about 3% of the workforce) quit their jobs. That’s nearly 1 million more than were resigning from their roles pre-pandemic. There’s a lot of speculation about what’s at the root of the “Great Resignation.” In our view, it stems from two big things people are grappling with at work: a sense of being stuck and a lack of fulfillment. Time and again, we hear from the professionals we work with that they feel like they’re spinning their wheels. Read more.

I can’t keep up. We hear this from the leaders we work with every day. Organizations are feeling the pressure to fill open roles, to make more widgets, to increase shipments—and more and more often, they’re leaning into technology to help them handle the volume. Technology and artificial intelligence have been creeping into the workforce for years, in ways and at a pace that’s sometimes alarming. At the end of 2020, it was estimated machines performed 30% of all tasks, with humans doing the rest of the work. And that balance was expected to shift to 50/50 by 2025 [1]. Read more.

Across the U.S., our organizations are facing a crisis. The “sansdemic,” as some researchers have termed it, is creating a severe shortage of talent and leaving a lot of leaders in a state of panic. Over the past year and a half, millions of people have left the workforce, and millions of jobs have gone unfilled. Labor force participation is at its lowest levels in nearly 50 years[1], and there doesn’t seem to be an increase on the horizon. Sadly, under intense pressure to fill open roles to drive business results, the great resignation has left many people feeling overwhelmed Read more.

“We are, in effect, engaged in a great venture of exploration, risk, discovery and change without any comprehensive maps for guidance.” – Peter Senge, The Dance of Change, 1999 Just a few months ago, we were hopeful we were emerging from the pandemic We were venturing out and meeting face-to-face. We were getting ready to return to work and eager to welcome our teams back to the office. Then, as the Delta variant reared its head and our organizations surfaced new concerns, our plans were abruptly put on hold. For more than a year, many of us have felt like Read more.

Every time I pass a car in a parking lot and see a dog sitting in the driver’s seat, it makes me smile. Sometimes said dog seems impatient or unnerved. They bark, jump, try to stick their head out of the crack in the window. Other times, said dog is calm, maybe even content. They sit straight up, look ahead, and almost seem to be smiling. I can’t help but think that dog is enjoying being in the driver’s seat (instead of in the back seat) for once! The last time I saw a dog in a car, it occurred Read more.

“The power of one, if fearless and focused, is formidable, but the power of many working together is better.” – Gloria Macapagal Arroyo A new year is often associated with new beginnings. Especially this year, we know many people are eager to put the past behind and get a fresh start. This is just one reason why we’re so excited to embark with our next coaching group on January 23! “Navigating the Journey of a Career Transition” is a new group coaching experience from Transitions Coaching designed to help you discover a personalized, do-able path to finding work you love. Read more.

“A transition always starts with an ending. To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old.”  – William Bridges Time and time again, we hear the professionals we work with say they feel stuck. And the statistics show it, too. According to a study by Forbes, more than half of U.S. workers are unsatisfied in their jobs. And that was before the Read more.