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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
When you meet Microsoft’s Chief Security Officer for the first time – a man who spent over two decades in super secret intelligence and law enforcement before taking on one of the most challenging commercial assignments on the planet – you don’t get what you expect. You don’t get a tough,...
Women are good for business. Studies have made it clear that women are excellent leaders, creating “The Woman Effect” to produce meaningful, measurable and often dramatically improved results for companies that sustain a relative gender balance in their leadership team. But it’s important to...
The higher you go, the harder it is to advance because you’re in more competitive territory. You have to stand out and offer something unique. Your best leadership asset at the top is your authentic leadership style — the one that gives you energy instead of draining you and the one that makes you...
Today’s business environment can be frustrating because we all live with the widely-accepted cultural myths that “someone” can just make a decision that will clear the path for us to get our job done. And yet, the complexity of modern business often puts us in professional situations where no one...
