What Are You Asking People to Lose?
Publication: change management | decision making | influence | leadership | Loss Aversion
Have you ever held on to something longer than you should have because you didn’t want to let it go? Perhaps it was a project you’d spent months developing, a role you’d outgrown, an item you no longer needed or a decision you were reluctant to revisit. You can become attached to what you already […]
What Happens Before You Make Your Case?
Publication: communication | decision making | leadership | priming | Strategic influence
One thing people often ask me is, “How do I get people to listen to my ideas?” Usually, they’re thinking about how to make their case more compelling, explain their thinking or get someone to see what they see and agree with their idea. But there’s another part of strategic influence that receives less attention: […]
How Do You Challenge What You Can’t Immediately Disprove?
Publication: Critical Thinking | decision making | Evidence-Based Leadership | leadership | Workplace Culture
Recently, I read an email from The Atlantic that took me behind the scenes of its fact-checking process, with research chief Yvonne Rolzhausen explaining how far fact-checkers go before a feature is published. Depending on the story’s complexity, the process can take hours, weeks or even months. The article is reformatted with wide margins. Checkable facts are […]
Drawing the Ethical Line: When Your Compromise Becomes Complicity
Publication: Ethical Decision-Making | Integrity at Work | leadership | Values and Decision-Making | Workplace Ethics
First article in a three-part series on where you draw the ethical line. Over the course of my career, I’ve had plenty of moments where I disagreed with a decision. Most were straightforward situations where I put forward my position, someone else made the call, and while I didn’t like the decision, I got on with it. The […]
What Keeping People Waiting Says About Your Leadership
Publication: leadership | respect | Time management | Trust | Workplace Culture
Years ago, I was told to arrive thirty minutes early for a presentation to the Board, just in case they were running ahead of schedule. They weren’t. I sat outside that boardroom for four hours. Then, my sixty-minute presentation got cut to thirty minutes. Then fifteen. Then ten. Eventually, the door opened, and I was told […]
Bored at Work? Pay Attention
Publication: Career Development | Employee Engagement | leadership | Meaningful Work | workplace boredom
You are three slides into an update when you realise you stopped listening two slides ago. Your eyes are on the screen. You may even look attentive, but your mind has quietly gone elsewhere. Or perhaps it is the report you have written so many times that it has become almost automatic. The meeting where you know what […]
Who Holds the Leader? Why Authentic Leadership Needs Trusted Challenge
Publication: Authentic Leadership | decision making | leadership | leadership isolation | mentoring
Recently, several senior leaders have asked me for advice as they navigated genuinely difficult situations. There were complex relationships, competing expectations and decisions with no obvious or risk-free answer. I asked questions and challenged assumptions, offered analysis and different perspectives, and we worked through options. Yet when they later reflected on what had helped the […]
Vietnam.vn: People skills are always a competitive advantage.
Publication: Emotional intelligence | Future of Work | leadership | people skills | workplace skills
Michelle Gibbings, a leadership expert, shares her perspective on why people skills remain a powerful competitive advantage in an increasingly technology-driven workplace. This article was originally published by Vietnam.vn. In the age of AI, the ability to communicate, empathize, and influence is key to career advancement. The development of artificial intelligence is forcing many working […]
The Negotiation Trap That Starts Before The Conversation Begins
Publication: BATNA | decision making | influence | leadership | negotiation
Second article in a three-part series on negotiating at work. Early in my career, I was involved in a high-stakes negotiation that required far more preparation than I had expected. Before we entered the room, we went through intensive negotiation training. We prepared the issues, mapped the stakeholders, tested our assumptions and rehearsed how the […]
The Blind Spot That Power Creates at the Negotiating Table
Publication: decision making | leadership | negotiation | Perspective-taking | power
First article in a three-part series on negotiating at work. In 2006, researchers from Northwestern University, New York University and Stanford ran a deceptively simple experiment. They handed participants a marker and asked them to draw the capital letter E on their own forehead. There are two ways to do it. You can orient the […]