What if you KNEW your unique, authentic leadership style was EXACTLY what your team needed from you? How would you lead then? If you think the real you - the one under the corporatemask - isn't any good at leading, have you ever really given her a fair shot? No one is perfect the first time they...
Dana Theus
4 Leadership Lessons From 3 Women & A Guy
Author Note: I wrote this post for a leadership blog. I think the content stands up along side the best in “leadership literature.” I didn’t point it out in the original article, but I will here, that three of the four interviewees are women. What I learned doing these interviews is that good...
Choice = Power
Personal power tip: know that every choice you make is an act of power. Pay attention to your choices and you InPower yourself. Think the little choices don't matter? Try noticing every choice you make for an entire day. If you get tired, notice that you don't have to choose and that's ok too....
3 Reasons Good Ideas Aren’t Good Enough
There’s a particular skill that middle managers who will become more than middle managers learn, and it’s not something that is taught in business school. It’s one of the reasons that we all benefit from good mentors, who really understand “how things work.” This particular skill is the ability to...
Stuck at 15%: Are Women Doomed to Second Place?
Some athletes are simply not destined to get the gold. Women have a record-breaking presence in the Olympics this year - every nation sporting women on their teams for the first time in history and more women than men on the U.S. team. But when I look at the participation stats across the other...
Be a meeting whisperer: Conflict Management 101
A simple reality of the working world is that meetings dominate our time, and the higher you go in your career, the more pressure there is to spend every waking moment in a meeting somewhere. I think we should cancel most of the meetings we attend, but what about the ones where you need to be...
Gendership: A Guy’s View
When I interviewed Mike Howard, Chief Security Officer at Microsoft, on the subject of leadership, we also had a great conversation about the role he sees gender and diversity playing in modern organizations. I listened to understand Gendership – the partnership of women and men working and...
The Business Case For Gender Balanced Leadership
I have been honored with a regular writing gig at the Smartblog on Leadership - an extention of the Smartbrief empire. This was my first post as a contributing author and it generated a lot of interesting comments (read them here). The comments reminded me that there are plenty of people (men AND...
Change Leadership: Maximizing your ROL (Return on Luck)
Sure, sometimes you’re the lucky recipient of spontaneous innovation, but according to business gurus, consistently good innovators actually have strategies for leveraging luck (the good and the bad) when it trips across their paths. In “Great by Choice” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have...
The Power of Happiness For Business Success
Fortunately, humans love happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Unfortunately, it turns out that plenty of us don’t seem to, based on the way we stick our noses to the grindstone and assume that if we work harder we’ll achieve success and happiness. Fortunately, the relatively new science of...








