So you’ve just gotten that great opportunity you’ve wanted for so long. You got the promotion! Woo hoo! You settle into your new office, put the higher pay in your monthly budget, meet your colleagues, receive the key to the bathroom and put that first board meeting on your calendar. Then the...
Leadership
Leadership Skills Outside Your Comfort Zone
So you’ve just gotten that great opportunity you’ve wanted for so long. You got the promotion! Woo hoo! You settle into your new office, put the higher pay in your monthly budget, meet your colleagues, receive the key to the bathroom and put that first board meeting on your calendar. Then the...
Do Women Need a Mentor to Succeed?
Every young professional hears it: “Get a mentor!” Many companies invest in mentoring programs, especially for women aspiring to advance. But do mentor programs pay off –– for the mentors and the mentees? My clients and I have had positive experiences, but, who knows? Maybe we’re not typical?...
Q-and-A with Mary Davis Holt: The state of women in leadership
By: James daSilva I recently asked Mary Davis Holt about the book she co-authored, “Break Your Own Rules: How to Change the Patterns of Thinking That Block Women’s Paths to Power,” and some of the general themes regarding women and workplace advancement. Holt is a partner at Flynn Heath Holt...
Pitching Your Big Ideas
To advance in your career, you have to have good ideas, but if you can’t get people to pay attention to them, it doesn’t really matter. Research shows that when women speak up and champion themselves and their good ideas, they get ahead. If it’s so simple, why don’t we do it more often? In my...
Pitching Your Big Idea
To get support for your big idea, you have to become adept at pitching every idea. Good leaders know how to pitch. They do it naturally and easily. But this isn’t a skill anyone’s really born with, it takes some personal development. Why invest in becoming good at pitching? You gain more...
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...
Portrait of an InPower Leader
The cohort of leaders who will reclaim leadership to achieve great things in the world won't succeed out of idealism, an extreme sense of perfection or personal heroism. We will succeed because we see ourselves and the world for what is and because we master the ability to motivate groups we lead...
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...
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...








