What’s Your Impact on Your Peers?
When someone gets promoted, your gut reaction tells you a lot.
Is it a warm surge of YES!! They deserve every bit of this?
Or is it something more complicated?
When Contempt Enters the Room
As I interviewed George, I heard all the right things. But his voice and body language told a different story. Every time he said the right thing, there was a slight edge in his tone when certain names came up. A pause before responding that was half a beat too long. A way of quoting other people’s ideas that landed as a dismissal of those ideas. A slight raising of the eyebrow when he described a peer’s impact.
Underneath all of it was contempt. Unadulterated contempt.
I had to name it. And naming it out loud, with George sitting across from me, opened something that months of careful conversation had not. What followed was not unusual. What was unusual is that we finally went there.
Return-to-Office Mandates Expose a More Uncomfortable Problem
When a professional services firm I work with rolled out its return-to-office mandate last year, the executive team invested significantly in getting the communications right. Town halls, manager talking points, a well-crafted rationale. What they spent almost no time on was a harder question: did their teams have the design and leadership conditions to be effective together in person? Three months after the mandate, attendance was up. Engagement scores were not.
Exploring Team Norms: Why is this ok?
Most leaders think they have a communication problem.
They don’t.
They have a tolerance problem.
I worked with a leadership team where:
11 out of 40 people responded to a survey…
…and that was considered a win.
Why?
Because non-responsiveness had become normal.
Unchallenged norms are what keep teams stuck.
Not lack of skill. Not lack of effort.
If you want to shift performance, don’t start with tactics.
Start with this question:
“Why is this okay for us?”
When the Deadline Lands on Five Different Teams at Once
Here is a question worth asking before the next major initiative hits your organization:
When the deadline arrives, will your organization move faster—or will it meet more often?
Most executives recognize the pattern immediately: a mandate emerges that demands coordination across multiple functions, and while the objective is important, the deadline real and everyone agrees the work must get done, it stalls.