Category Archives: Leadership

Goal-Setting That Actually Works

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Goal-setting is one of the most powerful tools a leader has. But most leaders don’t wield it nearly as well as they think. And if we’re honest, many treat it as just another item on the management checklist. You draft goals at the beginning of the year, plug them into your HR system, and then forget about them until the next performance review cycle. That’s not leadership. That’s busywork.

And when goals are vague, misaligned, or constantly shifting, they don’t inspire effort—they create confusion. Your team stops trusting the process. Eventually, they stop trusting you. And when that happens, performance drops, motivation tanks, and the team dynamic starts to unravel.

That’s not the kind of team you want to lead. And it’s definitely not the kind of team you want to be on.

The good news is, goal-setting doesn’t have to go wrong. But before we talk about how to fix it, we need to talk about how most leaders get it wrong in the first place.

The Most Common Goal-Setting Mistakes Leaders Make

There are a few ways leaders unintentionally sabotage themselves—and their teams—when setting goals. And one of the most well-documented comes from a study with a surprisingly catchy title: Goals Gone Wild. Researchers at Harvard found that when leaders set too many goals, or overly aggressive ones, it actually hurt performance.

Instead of building focus and momentum, teams start scrambling to hit numbers without understanding the bigger picture. They cut corners. They burn out. And they start working in silos instead of collaborating. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: metrics aren’t meaning.

And then there’s the issue of stretch goals. They’re great in theory—designed to push the team beyond business-as-usual. But stretch quickly turns into stress when the goals are unrealistic. If your team is standing at the starting line thinking, There’s no way we’ll ever hit that target, the most common reaction isn’t motivation. It’s apathy. Why try if you’re already destined to fail?

Finally, there’s the confusion between learning goals and performance goals. Performance goals are about execution—hitting a number or completing a process. Learning goals are about experimentation—trying new things and embracing occasional failure. Both are valid. But when you try to hit both at the same time, you’re essentially slamming on the gas and the brakes. And teams stall out.

Now that we’ve identified the common traps, let’s talk about how to set goals the right way.

How To Set Goals That Actually Work

Here are four research-backed strategies for goal-setting that will strengthen performance, boost motivation, and build long-term trust with your team.

1. Choose a Clear Focus

Before you start drafting goals, get clear on the kind of work your team is doing right now.

If your team is executing on something known—like running a proven process or scaling an existing strategy—then set performance goals. These should be measurable, time-bound, and tied to operational excellence.

But if your team is exploring something new—developing a prototype, entering a new market, or experimenting with a different process—then it’s time for learning goals. These goals encourage experimentation, reflection, and iteration.

You can shift between learning and performance goals over time. In fact, most innovation cycles require both. But don’t mix them in the same cycle. When everything is both a test and a target, nobody knows what matters most.

Make it clear: are we in learning mode or performance mode?

2. Clarify the Purpose Behind the Goal

Most goals focus on what to do. But few explain why it matters. And that’s a missed opportunity. Because while some people are naturally competitive—motivated by the scoreboard—most people need more than a number to stay engaged. They need meaning.

So instead of saying, “Increase repeat customer business by 15% this quarter,” clarify what that number means. For example: “Increase repeat business by 15% because that shows customers trust us enough to keep coming back—and that we’re delivering value worth repeating.”

It’s not just about the number. It’s about the impact that number represents.

That doesn’t mean you abandon metrics. Specific, measurable goals still matter. But they work best when they’re connected to something deeper. Remember: metrics guide performance. Meaning fuels it.

3. Co-Create Goals and Take Feedback Seriously

Top-down goal-setting kills motivation. If your team has no say in how their goals are defined—or no visibility into how they’re progressing—then those goals won’t inspire action. They’ll be seen as arbitrary mandates. And people disengage.

Great leaders define the “what” but collaborate on the “how.” You can set the targets, milestones, and success metrics. But bring the team in to help design the approach. When people see themselves in the plan, they take ownership. And ownership drives motivation.

That collaboration shouldn’t stop after goals are set. Check in regularly—not to micromanage, but to monitor progress, solve challenges early, and adjust course if needed. Talk about what’s working, what’s not, and what the team is learning. That ongoing feedback loop keeps goals relevant and keeps people engaged.

4. Watch for Signs of Goal Fatigue

Even the best goals can backfire if they come too fast, too often, or without a break. Goal fatigue happens when every project is urgent and every metric is top priority. When your team is always sprinting, it’s only a matter of time before they burn out.

Your job as a leader isn’t just to set goals. It’s to sustain ambition.

That means watching for early signs of fatigue—slipping deadlines, fading creativity, or a drop in team energy. And when you see those signs, don’t push harder. Take a pause.

Ask: “What’s essential right now?” Maybe it’s time to scale back or switch from performance goals to learning goals for a while. Give your team space to recover, reflect, and rebuild their sense of purpose. When motivation returns, performance will follow.

The Real Goal of Goal-Setting

When done right, goal-setting doesn’t just drive results—it builds trust. It clarifies direction, reinforces purpose, and gives people ownership in the outcome. But when done wrong, it becomes just another bureaucratic task. A checkbox. A system no one believes in.

So if your current goal-setting approach isn’t energizing your team, it’s time to change the way you lead it.

Pick a focus. Tie goals to purpose. Build them together. Check in often. And don’t forget to rest.

Because the goal isn’t just to hit a number. The goal is to build a team that’s motivated, focused, and in it for the long haul.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Uncertainty Barometer

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Uncertainty Barometer

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Novelty, or newness, can be a great way to assess the status of things. The level of novelty is a barometer for the level of uncertainty and unpredictability. If you haven’t done it before, it’s novel and you should expect the work to be uncertain and unpredictable. If you’ve done it before, it’s not novel and you should expect the work to go as it did last time. But like the barometer that measures a range of atmospheric pressures and gives an indication of the weather over the next hours, novelty ranges from high to low in small increments and so does the associated weather conditions.

Barometers have a standard scale that measures pressure. When the summer air is clear and there are no clouds, the atmospheric pressure is high and on the rise and you should put on sun screen. When it’s hurricane season and super-low system approaches, the drops to the floor and you should evacuate. The nice thing about barometers is they are objective. On all continents, they can objectively measure the pressure and display it. No judgement, just read the scale. And regardless of the level of pressure and the number of times they measure it, the needle matches the pressure. No Kentucky windage. But novelty isn’t like that.

The only way to predict how things will go based on the level of novelty is to use judgement. There is no universal scale for novelty that works on all projects and all continents. Evaluating the level of novelty and predicting how the projects will go requires good judgement. And the only way to develop good judgment is to use bad judgment until it gets better.

All novelty isn’t created equal. And that’s the trouble. Some novelty has a big impact on the weather and some doesn’t. The trick is to know the difference. And how to tell the difference? If when you make a change in one part of the system (add novelty) and the novelty causes a big change in the function or operation of the system, that novelty is important. The system is telling you to use a light hand on the tiller. If the novelty doesn’t make much difference in system performance, drive on. The trick is to test early and often – simple tests that give thumbs-up or thumbs-down results. And if you try to run a test and you can’t get the test to run at all, there’s a hurricane is on the horizon.

When the work is new, you don’t really know which novelty will bite you. But there’s one rule: all novelty will bite you until proven otherwise. Make a list of the novel elements of the and test them crudely and quickly.

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Do These 3 Things to Tell a Compelling Story

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Do These 3 Things to Tell a Compelling Story

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There’s a great, although perhaps apocryphal, story about Franz Kafka and a little girl. The relatively unknown author—he wouldn’t achieve great fame until after his death—met a young girl who lost her doll. Kafka helped her look for it, but to no avail. The doll was lost forever and the girl was heartbroken.

But then Kafka told her a story. The next day he brought her a letter from the doll. “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world.” Kafka would bring her letters telling her of the doll’s adventures. He eventually bought her another doll and gave it to her with another note that said, “my travels have changed me.”

As the story goes, after Kafka’s death the girl found another letter hidden in the replacement doll that said, “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.” We can’t all write like Kafka, but with a little bit of knowledge and some practice, we can all learn to tell stories that give meaning and purpose to our messages.

1. Create Tension

The first element of any story is its exposition, which is the world you build around the story. It includes the setting, the characters and other background information. That’s where most people start their stories, but it can be a trap, like when your mother starts a story about meeting someone at a drugstore and ten minutes later you’re still hearing about the grandchildren and wondering what the point is.

Master storytellers start with a tension or conflict, like the girl losing her doll in the Kafka story or a James Bond movie when it starts with him hanging from a helicopter and you have no idea why. It’s the tension or conflict that keeps our attention because we want to see it resolved. The Metamorphosis, the only novel Kafka ever finished, began with:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Another element of tension and conflict is the characters themselves. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, points out that we find characters like Darth Vader more interesting than one dimensional characters like Superman because they lack moral clarity. It is that ambiguity that makes them interesting and provokes thought and discussion.

Notice how in the story with the girl, the resolution to the lost doll creates its own tension. What will the letters say? Will she appreciate them, learn from them or see through the ruse? We appreciate the ending of the story not only because the tension was resolved, but in a way that honored the feeling of loss that created it.

2. Manage The Cognitive Budget

Born in the late 13th century, William of Ockham was a giant of his age. As one of the few intellectual lights of medieval times, his commentaries on reason, logic and political theory are studied even today. His ideas about the separation of church and state were literally centuries ahead of their time and formed the basis for our own constitutional principle.

Yet he’s best known for Ockham’s Razor, sometimes known as the “principle of parsimony.” Often, the principle is interpreted as “Keep It Simple Stupid,” but that’s not quite right. Notice how the Kafka story, although it’s short, has a sort of elegant complexity to it. The notion of a doll traveling around the world having adventures certainly isn’t simplistic.

A much more accurate translation would be, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, if something doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be. Everything you include, should be intentional and have a purpose. Even a subplot needs to play a role in the overall narrative. Anything else just distracts from what you’re trying to say.

A useful device I use for applying Ockham’s razor is to imagine my audience, whether that is a reader or a listener, as having an internal “cognitive budget” they are willing to devote to whatever I’m trying to tell them. Then I judge everything I include by the standard of, “is this worth using up my cognitive budget?”

So be cautious and respectful with your audience’s attention. If you have any doubts whether it needs to be there, it probably doesn’t. Take it out and see if anything meaningful is lost. If not, keep it out and don’t look back.

3. Create “Buts” And “Therefores”

Being mindful of your audience’s cognitive budget doesn’t mean stories should be linear. In fact, you want twists and turns. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone call this their But & Therefore Rule. Learning how to master it can dramatically improve the way you tell stories and engage audiences.

The idea is that each element of a story is either a causal connection or a twist. There should never be a simple, “and then” linking two elements together. You can see Parker and Stone explaining the concept in this video:

We can see the concept at work in the Kafka story. Kafka found the girl crying, THEREFORE he helped her look for it BUT they couldn’t find it THEREFORE she was heartbroken. BUT he brought her the letter telling her the doll was going on a trip to see the world. BUT eventually he bought her a new doll. Kafka dies and their relationship ends, BUT he left her one final note.

Each THEREFORE reinforces the element that precedes it and each BUT creates a new twist. Everything has a purpose and nothing is there that doesn’t need to be, which is what makes the story so elegantly compelling.

We All Need To Learn To Leverage The Power Of Story

Some years back I was invited to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Over the years many of the world’s greatest minds have taken up residence there. It was where Einstein, along with other giants like Oppenheimer, von Neumann and Gödel, would reside until his death in 1955. It is a place, for me at least, in which stories permeate from every corner and crevice.

There is a common room in the main building, Fuld Hall, where tea is served every afternoon and, if you know the stories, you can almost hear the din of legends arguing, cajoling and discussing pathbreaking ideas when you enter. That is the power of story. It can imbue even inanimate objects with meaning. Without the stories, Fuld Hall is just a red brick building.

Look at great leaders throughout history, from General George Patton to Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs, and they all used the power of story to anchor an enterprise with a sense of mission and destiny. It was undoubtedly a big part of their success. We need to learn to tell better stories, if we are to give meaning to others and build faith in a common endeavor.

Stories, as Hollywood mogul Peter Guber has put it, provides emotional transport for ideas. Emotions are like little yellow highlighters in our brains, providing markers that tell us, “remember this, it’s important.” It is, of course, crucial to get your facts straight, but if you don’t learn how to tell a story, those facts will be easily forgotten.

Do yourself and those around you a favor. Learn how to tell stories and tell them well. Life’s too short to be boring or to be bored.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Time to Stretch Yourself

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Time to Stretch Yourself

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If the work doesn’t stretch you, choose new work. Don’t go overboard and make all your work stretch you and don’t choose work that will break you. There’s a balance point somewhere between 0% and 100% stretch and that balance point is different for everyone and it changes over time. Point is, seek your balance point.

To find the right balance point, start with an assessment of your stretch level. List the number of projects you have and sum the number of major deliverables you’ve got to deliver. If you have more than three projects, you have too many. And if you think you take on more than three because you’re superhuman, you’re wrong. The data is clear – multitasking is a fallacy. If you have four projects you have too many. And it’s the same with three, but you’d think I was crazy if I suggested you limit your projects to two. The right balance point starts with reducing the number of projects you work on.

Now that you eliminated four or five projects and narrowed the portfolio down to the vital two or three, it’s time to list your major deliverables. Take a piece of paper and write them in a column down the left side of the page. And in a column next to the projects, categorize each of them as: -1 (done it before), 0 (done something similar), 1 (new to me), 2 (new to team), 3 (new to company), 5 (new to industry), 11 (new to world).

For the -1s, teach an entry level person how to do it and make sure they do it well. For the 0s, find someone who deserves a growth opportunity and let them have the work. And check in with them to make sure they do a good job. The idea is to free yourself for the stretch work.

For the 1s, find the best person in the team who has done it before and ask them how to do it. Then, do as they suggest but build on their work and take it to the next level.

For the 2s, find the best person in the company who has done it before and ask them how to do it. Then, build on their approach and make it your own.

For the 3s, do your research and find out who in your industry has done it before. Figure out how they did it and improve on their work.

For the 5s, do your research and figure out who has done similar work in another industry. Adapt their work to your application and twist it into something magical.

And for the 11s, they’re a special project category that live in rarified air and deserve a separate blog post of their own.

Start with where you are – evaluate your existing deliverables, cull them to a reasonable workload and assess your level of stretch. And, where it makes sense, stop doing work you’ve done before and start doing work you haven’t done yet. Stretch yourself, but be reasonable. It’s better to take one bite and swallow than take three and choke.

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The Language of Thought

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The Language of Thought

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Where do thoughts come from? Is there any structure to them before they manifest themselves in language? Is there a universal grammar that underlies every actual grammar?

These questions have been asked many times before. My answers are as follows:

They come from below, not above.
They do have a readily describable structure.
That structure does indeed underly every actual grammar.

The first answer is the most important one. If the language of thought precedes symbolic language, then symbolic language is emergent from it, and the way to study is not through self-examination but rather by observing the behavior of non-language speaking agents. Of these my favorite two are babies and dogs. Both exhibit a myriad of strategic behaviors that imply thought but clearly do not entail language. So, based on observing them, what can we say about the structure of such thinking?

Babies and dogs, I propose, process the following five concepts routinely and effectively:

Agents. They recognize and respond to people and animals that can interact with them, as indicated by their eye contact, their coming and going, and response to commands and gestures.
Objects. They recognize and can discriminate among objects that interest them, both inanimate and animate, including foods, toys, playmates, and parents. They do not distinguish between animate and inanimate objects in any consistent way.
Actions. They initiate and respond to actions in ways that further their interests, be that in feeding, playing, or getting attention. They are inherently attracted to action in any form.
Valence. They discriminate between things they like and things they don’t like, seeking the former and avoiding the latter, as witnessed by their eating and their expressions of mood.
Uncertainty. When uncertain, they hesitate and respond tentatively until they can resolve their uncertainty.

My claim is that these five concepts map directly to the fundamental syntax of every one of the six thousand or so symbolic languages currently in use. Agents and objects both convert to nouns and noun-like entities that serve as subjects and predicate objects in declarative statements. Similarly, actions convert to verbs and verb-like phrases. When we combine nouns with actions, we get predications, or what I like to term claims, which are the fundamental units of symbolic discourse. Valences foreshadow the use of adjectives, adverbs, and other modifiers that add nuances to our claims, and uncertainty is represented by modal verbs expressing possibility, probability, or necessity.

As much ground as all this covers, it is important to understand what the language of thought does not entail. Take the sentence “John is tall.” That thought would never occur to either a baby or a dog. It is inherently symbolic in nature, and until you have a symbolic language, it cannot exist. In The Infinite Staircase, it belongs to the stairstep of analytics, whereas the language of thought can reach no higher than the stairstep of narrative.

It is on the stairstep of narrative that the language of thought passes the baton to symbolic language. We cannot tell stories without symbolic language, but it is clear from the behavior of both toddlers and long-term pets that we want to. The connection that binds the two at this point is a realization of cause and effect. Narrative is how we process cause and effect. The breakthrough of symbolic language is that we can not only be a lot more precise in our communication, increasing its efficacy, but also that we can abstract from one narrative concepts and patterns that can be applied elsewhere. This is the miracle of analytics, and it only comes with symbolic language.

To close, let’s revisit our first question—where exactly do our (symbolic-language-expressed) thoughts originate from? This is not a brain-processing question—that landscape is still under investigation—but rather a question of lived experience. Where does it feel like they come from?

My answer is that they are chemically generated responses that represent fluctuations in our homeostatic balance. Like all organisms, we are compelled to seek this balance all the time. The more we get out of balance, the stronger the chemical signal to respond, the more intense the resultant stream of thoughts will be. This applies to dreams as well as to when we are awake. We are continually processing a stream of thoughts that emerge into consciousness and finding their linguistic expression as they do. We register these thoughts through listening to ourselves and shape them further through talking to ourselves. It is only when we get to the talking that we are fully immersed in symbolic language.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pixabay

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The 8 Best Teamwork Books That Actually Improve Collaboration

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The 8 Best Teamwork Books That Actually Improve Collaboration

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Most leaders know teamwork matters. But few take the time to study what actually makes teams work.

We rely on instinct, gut feel, or experience from past teams—good or bad—and assume it’ll all work out. But in today’s complex, collaborative, cross-functional world, those assumptions often lead us astray.

If you want to lead high-performing teams consistently, you need better inputs. And for me, some of the best inputs have come from books—not just books about leadership, but books specifically about teamwork. The kind that change how you think about team culture, team dynamics, and the actual work of working together.

These aren’t just good reads. They’re the best teamwork books I’ve found, presented in no particular order because this isn’t a ranking… it’s a resource.

📚 Best Teamwork Books

1. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Probably the first one you thought of too. This is a business fable that somehow nails real team dysfunctions with precision. Lencioni’s model—from lack of trust to inattention to results—offers a practical, memorable way to diagnose and address breakdowns. I’ve referenced this book with dozens of leaders because it gets past the surface and straight to the relational heart of team performance.

2. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Coyle makes the case that talent alone doesn’t create great teams—culture does. He distills team culture into three key behaviors: build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose. What stood out to me is how much of team excellence is invisible, built in the small moments. It’s a great reminder that culture is less about slogans and more about habits.

3. Dream Teams by Shane Snow

This one turns a lot of conventional wisdom upside down. Shane Snow argues that the best teams aren’t the most harmonious—they’re the ones that learn how to disagree productively. With examples from science, sports, and even organized crime, he shows that friction (when handled well) makes teams smarter. A great read for leaders dealing with complexity and cognitive diversity.

4. Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal

McChrystal’s story of transforming Joint Special Operations Command is a masterclass in breaking down silos. His team couldn’t win modern battles using traditional hierarchy. So they built a “team of teams” built on shared consciousness and empowered execution. It’s a great reminder that agility isn’t just for startups—it’s a requirement in any complex environment.

5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: not all collaboration is good. Hansen shows that ineffective collaboration can actually make performance worse. His concept of disciplined collaboration—knowing when and how to collaborate—helped me see the difference between helpful alignment and wasted effort. Especially valuable for leaders in large or matrixed organizations.

6. Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright

This book maps out five stages of team culture, from toxic to world-changing. What makes it stand out is the focus on language—how the words people use reveal the tribe they belong to and the performance they can unlock. It gave me a new lens for diagnosing team dynamics and helping leaders upgrade their team’s shared narrative.

7. Teaming by Amy Edmondson

Unlike most books that treat teams as fixed entities, Teaming focuses on teamwork as a dynamic, ever-evolving process. Edmondson shows how people must learn to collaborate quickly across boundaries, roles, and expertise areas—especially in fast-moving environments. It reframed for me how learning and collaboration go hand in hand, especially when teams are temporary or fluid.

8. Best Team Ever by David Burkus

Yes, it’s mine. But if you noticed, a lot of these other books are pretty old. They’ve stood the test of time, but research is always evolving. And so I wanted to understand what consistently sets high-performing teams apart—based on the latest evidence. What I found were three repeatable habits: common understanding, psychological safety, and prosocial purpose. Best Team Ever is a blueprint for building teams where people do their best work—and genuinely want to.

Final Thoughts

You don’t have to read every book on teams to lead a great one. But you do need to rethink how you approach teamwork—what you reward, what you reinforce, and how you respond when things go sideways. These are the best teamwork books that helped me do that. They changed how I build, lead, and coach teams—and they might do the same for you.

Because great teams aren’t just born.

They’re built — habit by habit, choice by choice, leader by leader.

Image credit: David Burkus

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Leading to the Future of Work

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GUEST POST from David Burkus

If you led a team through 2025, you probably felt like you were trapped in a never-ending game of workplace buzzword bingo. Coffee badging. Quiet quitting. Quiet firing. Corporate catfishing. Every week came with a new term, a new “trend,” and a new reason to wonder whether you were falling behind in the future of work—or just drowning in noise.

That’s the challenge for leaders right now: not “keeping up,” but getting clear on what actually changed. Because some of what we saw in 2025 wasn’t a fad. It was a preview. And 2026 won’t be a clean break from the past; it’ll be the year those shifts harden into the new defaults.

Here’s what I mean. In hindsight, 2025 wasn’t a year of brand-new problems. It was a year when familiar tensions finally became impossible to ignore: autonomy versus control, speed versus security, loyalty versus flexibility, experience versus reinvention. The labels made it feel new. The underlying issues weren’t.

And the way most organizations responded? Predictable. Also, mostly wrong.

When leaders face uncertainty, they usually reach for what worked before. They tighten policies. They standardize schedules. They add approvals. They try to “fix” culture with perks. It’s a natural reflex—especially when performance pressure is high. But it assumes the problem is that people need more rules, more oversight, or more incentives.

In reality, the lesson of 2025 is simpler: the rules of work didn’t just bend. They rewired. And if you keep trying to manage 2026 with a 2016 playbook, your team won’t just feel frustrated—they’ll quietly build workarounds. That’s where the real risk lives.

The Future of Work Is Structured Flexibility, Not a Return to the Old Office

Take the return-to-office story. Early 2025 looked like a full-scale push back to “normal,” with big-name companies raising the stakes and making attendance a mandate instead of a suggestion. Plenty of leaders braced for a rebellion.

But the more interesting story was what happened after the headlines: most people returned. Not necessarily happily. Not necessarily five days a week. But they showed up — often because they felt they didn’t have a better option.

And then something else happened. Leaders started realizing that office time isn’t a strategy. It’s a setting. You don’t get collaboration just because you share a zip code.

In the data, the pattern has been consistent: the best outcomes show up when people have flexibility—and when that flexibility is designed with intention. Hybrid can work. Remote can work. In-office can work. What doesn’t work is forcing one model without explaining the purpose or giving people any control.

That’s why I don’t think 2026 will be the year “RTO wins” or “remote wins.” I think 2026 will be the year structured flexibility becomes the default. You’ll see more anchor days, where teams coordinate time together for the work that benefits from face-to-face interaction. You’ll see more meeting-free focus time. You’ll see more experiments that look like “summer Fridays,” only year-round.

The real debate was never about office chairs. It was always about autonomy.

And autonomy doesn’t mean chaos. It means leaders stop managing presence and start managing performance.

AI Didn’t Replace Your Team. It Joined It.

The second shift is happening just as fast, but with more confusion: AI stopped being a novelty and started becoming a coworker.

In 2025, a lot of organizations rolled out enterprise AI tools — often with the best of intentions. But leaders ran straight into a new kind of friction: security guardrails that made the tools less useful than the consumer versions people were already using.

So employees did what humans always do when systems slow them down: they routed around them. They used personal accounts. They used personal devices. They found ways to keep moving.

From a productivity standpoint, that makes sense. From a risk standpoint, it’s terrifying.

And it creates a trust problem on both sides. Leaders worry about data leakage and compliance. Employees feel like the company is handing them a power tool…then wrapping it in bubble wrap and asking why the job isn’t done faster.

Here’s what 2026 is likely to bring: less debate about whether AI belongs at work, and more expectation that everyone knows how to use it responsibly. Senior leaders will lean on it for strategic thinking and competitive analysis. Frontline employees will use it to automate the “gray work” that clogs calendars—summaries, drafts, templates, first passes—so they can spend more time doing what humans still do best: judgment, creativity, and problem-solving.

The winners won’t be the companies with the fanciest AI license. They’ll be the ones that treat AI like a teammate who needs onboarding, training, and clear norms.

Your Team Is Becoming a Network

Meanwhile, another major shift has been quietly becoming permanent: freelancing is no longer a side hustle. It’s becoming infrastructure.

Layoffs, hiring freezes, and reorganizations pushed a lot of talented people out of traditional roles. At the same time, organizations started pulling contractors in—not just for gig work, but for high-skill roles: finance, HR, operations, even fractional executives.

This blurs the line between “employee” and “teammate.” And in 2026, that line will blur even more.

That creates a leadership challenge most managers weren’t trained for. Traditional management assumes stable teams: the same people, the same roles, the same reporting lines. But the emerging reality looks more like a project-based network, where talent plugs in, contributes, and moves on—sometimes to your competitor, sometimes back to you, sometimes to three other clients at the same time.

If you keep treating contractors like “temporary labor,” you’ll get temporary commitment. But if you start treating them like part of the mission, you’ll get better work, better collaboration, and—over time—a stronger talent ecosystem around your team.

In the future of work, leadership is less about supervising a roster and more about stewarding a network.

Generational Change Isn’t a Culture War. It’s a Coordination Problem.

Finally, 2025 made one more shift impossible to ignore: the workforce mix is changing fast.

Millennials have moved into the largest share of management roles, Gen Z is stepping into leadership earlier than many expected, and boomers are retiring—but unevenly, and often later than planned. That means many teams now include people in radically different life stages, with different expectations about careers, technology, and what work is “for.”

A lot of leaders respond to this by stereotyping. “Gen Z doesn’t want to work.” “Millennials are entitled.” “Boomers won’t let go.” That framing is easy…and lazy.

The better framing is this: cross-generational teams aren’t doomed. They’re just harder to coordinate. And coordination improves with curiosity.

If you want the brilliance without the conflict, you can’t lead by assumption. You have to lead by inquiry.

What to Do Next: 5 Moves to Lead the Future of Work

The point of all these trends isn’t to predict the next buzzword. It’s to build a team that can adapt when the next shift arrives — because it will.

Start here.

First, design autonomy on purpose. Don’t “allow flexibility” as a perk; build it as a system. Get clear on which work truly benefits from synchronous time together — onboarding, creative collisions, complex problem-solving—and which work benefits from uninterrupted focus. Then build schedules around those moments. When people understand the “why,” they’ll stop treating policies like arbitrary rules and start treating them like shared commitments.

Second, upgrade accountability from monitoring to check-ins. If your instinct is to measure hours, logins, or keystrokes, you’re solving the wrong problem. Accountability works best when it’s social and meaningful: clear goals, frequent progress conversations, and regular moments where people can ask for help before they’re stuck. When teammates feel counted on—not watched—they show up differently.

Third, onboard AI like you would a new hire. Make training normal, not optional and not reserved for “the tech people.” Give your team safe ways to experiment. Define guardrails in plain language: what data can be used, what outputs must be verified, what decisions require human judgment. And partner with IT and compliance to make policies usable in real work, not just defensible in audits.

Fourth, lead your contractors like they belong. Invite them into the rhythms that create cohesion: the kickoff, the retro, the celebration, the shared language of “what good looks like.” Show them how their work connects to outcomes, not just tasks. You don’t have to pretend they’re full-time. But you do need them to feel like insiders while they’re with you—or you’ll pay the tax later in misalignment and rework.

Fifth, build reverse mentoring into the culture. Don’t wait for it to happen organically. Create opportunities where Gen Z can teach tools and trends, while more experienced employees share context, judgment, and the “why” behind how the organization works. The goal isn’t to make everyone the same. The goal is to help people value what the others bring.

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that change isn’t a season anymore. It’s the operating environment. High-performing teams aren’t the ones that finally “figure it out.” They’re the ones that keep learning faster than the world keeps shifting.

That’s what the future of work will reward in 2026: leaders who can replace control with clarity, replace policies with purpose, and replace rigid teams with resilient networks.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Compelling Narratives

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Compelling Narratives

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

As human beings we cling to two misconceptions of life. The first is that life is fragile. That is not quite right. Living things are certainly fragile — we are all subject to injury and will eventually die. Even whole species can go extinct. But life itself is anything but fragile. It originated some 3.5 billion years ago and has subsequently taken over the entire planet — land, water, sky, even deep within the earth — and shows no signs of loosening its grip. Life per se, in other words, may be the most powerful force we can experience.

Our second misconception is that, when it comes to our own lives, we are the ones in charge. There is some truth in this, but there is also truth in the notion that life is in charge of us. That is, life per se has an agenda that is independent of us, an agenda in which we are inexorably embedded, one that is grounded in the two universal functions that have enabled it to withstand the test of time — metabolism and reproduction.

We know a lot about these two functions from our study of the microbiology of the cell. Both entail a mindboggling number of chemical reactions chained together by a myriad of cascading pathways that are in turn governed by a byzantine array of positive and negative feedback loops. What is truly astounding is that, working in tandem, they have, from their very inception, been both dynamic — ever-changing—and persistent — continuity-maintaining. Life per se, in other words, is characterized by sustained dynamic equilibrium.

To be sure, life has evolved enormously since its cellular inception. After about 2 billion years of single-celled organisms only, cells began to collaborate with one another, leading to the emergence of additional layers of complexity. Over the 1.5 billion years since, they have generated all the variety of living things we see today, as well as a huge variety of species that have passed out of existence. But amidst all that change, over that entire immensity of time, at the level of the cell itself, this absurdly complex concatenation of cascading processes has never ever stopped. Based on this history, I think we must conclude that living things are compelled to live, and that includes us.

Yes, we can end our lives through suicidal interventions, but we cannot will our hearts to stop beating or our lungs to stop breathing. We can’t stop sleeping, and we can’t stop waking up. In short, we are embedded in something that is much larger and more powerful than our conscious selves, and we need to appreciate how this shapes our lived experience.

It turns out there is a whole tradition in philosophy called phenomenology that takes this premise as its starting point. It is organized around the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but not in a way I am happy with. Like most philosophers, Husserl and Heidegger anchor their work in analytics and then search for narratives to illustrate their concepts. This runs counter to the fundamental premise of The Infinite Staircase, namely that the stairstep of Narrative precedes the stairstep of Analytics, both in evolutionary time and in order of priority when establishing meaning. That is, you need to get your narratives in focus first and then apply analytics to them, not the other way around.

The reason this is so important is that lived experience expresses itself in narratives, not analytics. Analytics abstract from narratives underlying principles which can be used to refine our strategy for living. This is an incredibly important function, one that underlies virtually all the amelioration of the human condition that we have accomplished over the past several centuries. But analytics cannot substitute for narratives. They cannot capture the immediacy of experience nor engage our sensibility with anything like the power of narratives. We are story-telling creatures, first and foremost. That’s how and where we develop our understanding of cause and effect.

Now, if we take the notion that we are compelled to live and we add it to the notion that narrative is our primary mode for processing lived experience, we can reasonably surmise that we are compelled to tell stories. What might that mean?

Well, for those of us in business, this is not a big surprise. We spend the bulk of our time engaged in storytelling and listening. What are you working on? How is it going? What’s the plan? How did the call go? Did you find that bug? What did Harry want? You get the idea. Stories are our lived experience, even more so if we are working remotely.

More formal occasions call for more formal storytelling, be that a proposal, a report, an analysis, an earnings call, or an annual plan. The point is, in all those situations, we are compelled to tell a story. Now, to be sure, our story may well be challenged–that is the function of analytics—but it is not OK not to tell one. The reason is that all our future actions will ultimately be grounded in a story that we agree to accept. Even the most routine bureaucratic approval cycles involve storytelling at some point in the process. We cannot act without a storyline to guide us. Thus, we are compelled to tell stories.

This is even more the case in the realm of politics. Today we are awash in political storytelling, much of which is being labeled misinformation. But the term is misleading. It implies that the teller has got their facts wrong. But that is not what is happening. Instead, they are telling a story that they believe will generate the political response they are seeking, be that to get themselves elected, or to prevent someone else from being elected, or to get legislation passed, or to block legislation from being passed. Our job as responsible citizens is to apply our analytics to their narratives to detect the ones we endorse and those we repudiate.

In both business and politics, pressure-testing the narratives we are presented with requires both judgment and experience. We normally do not have access to an irrefutable body of facts. Instead, we have to assess the character of the storyteller based on how they come across to us, how self-serving their story might be, how plausible it is, and the like, and we often draw on the opinions of professional commentators whom we have found to be trustworthy. There is no guarantee we are going to get things right, but the more due diligence we do, the more likely we will get close.

But what about all the lies? What about all the blatant liars that are just getting away with it? Why aren’t they being held to account? Why do their supporters believe them? The answer, in my view, is because they want to. People are not stupid. They know when other people are lying. The reason they accede to such lies and bully each other into accepting them is because the story being told validates their lived experience. You or I might repudiate the narrative, but we cannot repudiate their lived experience. That is theirs, not ours.

What we can do is share lived experiences with each other with the goal of finding common values. This requires a level of civility that we see openly mocked and that mockery is perhaps the most dangerous current in our present circumstances. It is not the narratives that are the problem. It is the sneering. We can work our way out of the toughest situations if we respect each other’s perspectives. We cannot do so when we demean or demonize our opponents. Stories and storytelling are the currency of our being. We cannot let it be debased.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: 1 of 1,500+ FREE quotes available at http://misterinnovation.com

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How Human-Centered Leadership Can Reimagine the Aerospace Industry

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Move the Needle

How Human-Centered Leadership Can Reimagine the Aerospace Industry

GUEST POST from Kellee M. Franklin, PhD.

The aerospace industry is on a long flight, but subtle drifts in culture and practice have quietly moved it off its intended course. To get back on track, we don’t need a radical turn. We need to move the needle — one small, intentional correction at a time. This is the power of the 1-in-60 rule, a principle championed by former Thunderbird pilot Major Michelle Mace Curran: a onedegree error leads to being a mile off course after 60 miles. In the high-speed world of aerospace, those miles pass quickly, and the destination can be lost.

Reimagining this industry starts with recognizing that every decision, every interaction, is a chance to move the needle. A holistic educational campaign must be the first correction, teaching not just technical skills, but this very philosophy. It’s about empowering every team member to ask, “Is this choice moving us toward who we want to be?” When we let one “degree” slip — by skipping a quiet team member’s comment or bypassing a safety check because “it’s easier” — we compound a drift that, over time, takes us far from the vital human-centered power skills we need. In an era of increasing automation, skills like collaboration, critical thinking, empathy and ethical judgment are not soft — they are the critical systems that keep the mission on track. Yet, the industry remains focused on recruiting, hiring, and promoting for technical skills alone, placing it at risk of the pilot’s dreaded death spiral: a fatal, uncorrected descent caused by fixating on a single instrument while losing situational awareness.

This mindset shift is crucial for legacy employees — and necessary for an industry in need of refueling. Change can feel like a threat, but framing it as a series of small, needed adjustments to move the needle makes it manageable. It’s not about discarding experience, but about course-correcting outdated norms. Workshops and mentorship, inspired by experienced industry leaders like Curran and others, can offer profound insights. They can show how power skills — like maintaining broad situational awareness under pressure — enable teams to act decisively and create a culture that is far more dynamic, innovative, safe, and resilient. It requires leadership to invite challenge, conversation, and collaboration. In a traditionally hierarchical industry, these shifts can be difficult — but they are essential for real transformation.

How do I know human-centered leadership is not only needed but effective in the aerospace industry? Because I’ve had the good fortune of supporting leadership at the highest levels of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, and within major corporate entities that design, develop, and secure aerospace technologies, where the stakes of every decision are immense. In those rooms, I’ve seen that while technical expertise is the foundation, the true innovation — and the true
innovators — are found among the airmen, guardians, and on the front lines. The real gift of leadership isn’t just knowing the technology; it’s knowing the people. It’s understanding their challenges, their potential, and having the wisdom to guide them through the full terrain of complexity. That human-centered insight is what transforms good missions into great ones. This is the essence of leadership that moves the needle — insight no instrument panel can ever provide.

My conviction is further reinforced by my years teaching global scholars at Hult International Business School, where I witnessed firsthand how creativity and collaborative problem-solving, critical thinking and sound judgment, and emotional intelligence and empathy are the true catalysts for success in a complex world. This is not just theory. It’s a strategic imperative. Consider EY, one of the Big Four professional services firms and an educational partner of Hult, which is putting $100 million behind human skills. They are actively recognizing and rewarding the value of uniquely human capabilities alongside technical adoption, proving that the most forward-thinking organizations understand that people-potential is the ultimate competitive advantage. This growing emphasis on human skills in the Age of AI is not a new trend for me; it’s the core of a conscious leadership integrative model I designed in 2018, built on the principle that sustainable innovation flows from empowered people, not just advanced systems.

This urgency is underscored by the 2026 Oliver Wyman “Lift Off Leadership” survey in partnership with the International Aerospace Women’s Association (IAWA), which found that 78% of aerospace leaders identify a critical gap in human-centered skills, and 65% believe that without a cultural shift, their organizations will struggle to innovate at the pace required for the next decade. The survey provides a clear roadmap: organizations must embed active sponsorship as a core leadership competency and address the everyday workplace cultures driving female attrition; leaders must move beyond passive mentoring to actively advocate for women in highlevel decision-making rooms; and the industry as a whole must adopt strict gender-neutral recruitment standards and properly fund proven leadership initiatives. Industry surveys are always insightful, but without proper and timely executive execution of strategic recommendations, these exercises continue to place emerging talent and the potential of aerospace in a perpetual holding pattern. For real “lift off”, employees require advocacy, intention, and support — because no mission ever launched on insight alone. These small, but critical, system-wide shifts demand human-centered leadership — not just technical expertise — to guide the way.

Inviting a new wave of dreamers is another powerful way to move the needle. We can start by promoting STEM/STEAM programs early, allowing current employees to work hand-in-hand with the future of the industry. By engaging with local colleges and universities in hack-a-thons and other idea-generating initiatives, we not only ignite the next generation’s passion but also tap into a wellspring of raw, unfiltered innovation. In our workspaces, actively dismantling exclusionary barriers and creating clear pathways — like targeted one-on-one and group coaching, upskill/reskill programs, and ongoing mentor/development initiatives — opens the cockpit to brighter skies and unseen horizons. We must also actively encourage employees to participate in professional development opportunities beyond our own organizations, empowering them to connect with and learn from peers across the industry, and return with fresh perspectives and renewed energy to elevate our teams. This is not just about fairness; it is about taking the field to elevated heights. Broader disciplines with a wider array of perspectives are the ultimate navigational tools, helping us spot drifts we might otherwise miss and chart a more enduring course.

The future of aerospace won’t be defined by a single, massive overhaul. It will be built on the collective commitment to make small, consistent adjustments. Leaders can begin today by:

Hosting a “Drift Check” Workshop: Use the 1-in-60 rule to facilitate a team discussion on current cultural norms and co-creating a vision for the future.
Launching a Reverse Mentorship Program: Pair senior leaders with junior employees, allowing diverse voices to be heard and fostering open, two-way learning.
Implementing a “Power Skills” KPI: Include empathy, collaboration, innovation, and other power skills in performance reviews, publicly acknowledging team members who exemplify them.
Celebrating “Course Corrections”: Transparently share small changes and their impact, making learning a core part of the culture.
Building a Balanced Workforce: Sponsor a Dreamer’s Fellowship to fund underrepresented talent and actively recruit diverse disciplines. Intentionally blend technical expertise with human-centered innovators to create a more resilient and visionary team.

By embracing a 1-in-60 philosophy, we can recalibrate our heading, one degree at a time, and navigate toward a future that’s not just technologically advanced, but truly human-centered.

Image credits: Kellee M. Franklin

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What’s Your Learning Objective?

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What's Your Learning Objective?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation is all about learning. And if the objective of innovation is learning, why not start with learning objectives?

Here’s a recipe for learning: define what you want to learn, figure how you want to learn, define what you’ll measure, work the learning plan, define what you learned and repeat.

With innovation, the learning is usually around what customers/users want, what new things (or processes) must be created to satisfy their needs and how to deliver the useful novelty to them. Seems pretty straightforward, until you realize the three elements interact vigorously. Customers’ wants change after you show them the new things you created. The constraints around how you can deliver the useful novelty (new product or service) limit the novelty you can create. And if the customers don’t like the novelty you can create, well, don’t bother delivering it because they won’t buy it.

And that’s why it’s almost impossible to develop a formal innovation process with a firm sequence of operations. Turns out, in reality the actual process looks more like a fur ball than a flow chart. With incomplete knowledge of the customer, you’ve got to define the target customer, knowing full-well you don’t have it right. And at the same time, and, again, with incomplete knowledge, you’ve got to assume you understand their problems and figure out how to solve them. And at the same time, you’ve got to understand the limitations of the commercialization engine and decide which parts can be reused and which parts must be blown up and replaced with something new. All three explore their domains like the proverbial drunken sailor, bumping into lampposts, tripping over curbs and stumbling over each other. And with each iteration, they become less drunk.

If you create an innovation process that defines all the if-then statements, it’s too complicated to be useful. And, because the IF-THENs are rearward-looking, they don’t apply the current project because every innovation project is different. (If it’s the same as last time, it’s not innovation.) And if you step up the ladder of abstraction and write the process at a high level, the process steps are vague, poorly-defined and less than useful. What’s a drunken sailor to do?

Define the learning objectives, define the learning plan, define what you’ll measure, execute the learning plan, define what you learned and repeat.

When the objective is learning, start with the learning objectives.

Image credits: Pexels

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