The way we lead our people is the single most important element of the way we lead our organizations.

It’s also the hardest to get right.

I am an advisor, author, and executive. I've spent two decades working in the areas of leadership and human resources as a consultant, Fortune 50 executive, speaker, researcher, and writer.

In my advisory work, I help companies and leaders navigate the swirl, and discover the path to sustained improvement in their people practices.

In my writing, I explore the lessons from the real world that help people and teams thrive, and that make work a more human place for all of the humans in it.

In my executive roles, I have created and instituted new approaches to leadership development, feedback, team performance, coaching, employee engagement, performance management, people analytics, and more.

Advisory

  • A talent strategy answers the question, “How can we increase the overlap between what our people want from their jobs, and what our business needs from our teams?”  I help you:

    • Develop a talent strategy that begins with a cultural North Star and then orients all your people investments to this common objective.

    • Create a real-time intelligence strategy to track results and course-correct as needed.

  • Performance is an emergent quality of an organization.  But what does it emerge from?  I help you:

    • Build a team performance capability that puts individual and team contributions at the center, and that makes more teams like your best teams.

    • Revamp performance management to focus more on excellence, on continuous support, and on growth, rather than on annual reviews or rigid metrics.

     

  • I will help you manage transformation within your organization. My work on the foundations of employee engagement and the human need for stability is valuable for any organization undergoing a major shift—whether in culture, technology, or structure.  I will guide you on: 

    • Anchoring change so that it is comprehensible and focused.

    • Structuring teams for innovation so that improvement emerges bottoms-up.

  • A crisis demands a balance of agility and stability.  I help you figure out how to move—and what needs to be reinforced.  I will guide you on:

    • Leading for resilience and ensuring your teams remain supported and effective.

    • Building for resilience so that your organization is better prepared for the unexpected.

  • The fundamental task of a leader is to help others do their best work.  I help leaders get clear on the what and the how of their approach to performance and growth.  I will work with you to: 

    • Upgrade leadership capabilities by embedding a focus on individual and collective strengths, on self-awareness, on instilling confidence, and on group cohesion into your leadership operating system.

    • Transform leader communications by helping you and your team communicate in a way that builds trust—because all leading is communicating.

Writing

My Substack, The Second Circle: Essays about humans at work, is now live.

My most recent book, The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, looks at why change is hard on people, and what we can do to draw its sting. It has been named the Porchlight Books Best Management and Culture Book of 2024, a Financial Times Best Business Book of the year, and a Globe and Mail Best Business Book of the year.

I’m the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019)—which was selected as the best management book of 2019 by Strategy + Business and as one of Amazon’s best business and leadership books of 2019. I’m also the co-author of two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy (March/April 2019)—which was Harvard Business Review’s most popular article of 2019—and Reinventing Performance Management (April 2015).

I have written for and been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc. Magazine, the Sloan Management Review, and The Harvard Business Review.

Executive

My first experiences of teams and leadership were as a student musician and conductor.  I was fascinated by the unspoken understanding between people playing together and carried this fascination with me into the corporate world. My most recent executive role was at Cisco, where I spent six years as a Senior Vice President of HR.  The organizations I shaped and led there focused on leadership, on teams, and on research, and took on some of the most challenging questions about work. What is special about the best teams?  Why do we follow one leader and not another?  How can we measure our experience at work reliably?  Of the things that we can measure at work, which matter most?  And how can we take what matters most and embed it into our people practices and systems?

Prior to Cisco, I spent fourteen years at Deloitte as a consultant and as the Chief Learning Officer for Leader Development. 

The new approaches I have pioneered address everything from performance management, to feedback, to team engagement technology, to real-time team intelligence, to social network mapping, to strengths-based leadership—and together these challenge much of the conventional wisdom of work today.

In the news…