You already know the conversation you need to have. You have known for weeks, maybe months. You can picture the person's face. You can feel the knot in your stomach when you think about sitting down and saying what needs to be said. But you have not done it. And every day you do not, the problem gets a little worse.   You are not alone. Research from the Chartered Management Institute found that 57 percent of people would do almost anything to avoid a difficult conversation.

A reward centred leader is someone who pursues a leadership role primarily for the personal benefits it provides: status, power, compensation, and control. In The Motive, Patrick Lencioni argues that the reason a person becomes a leader is the most important and most overlooked factor in determining their effectiveness. Leaders who are motivated by rewards rather than responsibility create organisations that suffer from the five omissions of a reward centred leader.   Lencion

If your board meetings feel like a formality, you are not alone. But you should be concerned.   Board dysfunction is one of the most common and least confronted problems in organisations today. Whether it is a corporate board, a nonprofit governing body, or a school council, the patterns are remarkably consistent. Meetings that add little value. Decisions that happen before the meeting starts. Directors who show up but do not engage. A chair who dominates. A CEO who manages t

You have talented people on your team. You hired well. They have strong track records, good intentions, and the kind of capability that should be driving results. But something is off. Projects stall. Energy is low. People who should be thriving look exhausted. And despite all the talent in the room, the team consistently underperforms.   The problem might not be your people. It might be where you have put them.   One of the most common and most invisible problems in organisa

Smart is the third virtue in Patrick Lencioni's ideal team player model. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni identifies three essential qualities that every great team member possesses: humble, hungry, and smart. But smart does not mean intellectual intelligence. It refers specifically to interpersonal intelligence, the ability to understand and navigate the dynamics of working with other people. It is what most of us would call people smarts or emotional intelligence in a tea

Your best leaders are not going to tell you they are thinking about leaving. They are going to update their LinkedIn profile, start saying "that is fine" in meetings where they used to push back, and one morning you will get a resignation letter that feels like it came out of nowhere. But it did not come out of nowhere. You just were not paying attention.   Losing a high performer is expensive. Losing a high-performing leader is devastating. These are the people who set cultu