Leadership

Every fall, leadership teams sit down to build next year's plan. The thinking is usually good. People disagree well. The whiteboard fills up. And by spring, a lot of those plans look like the plan from the year before. That isn't a thinking problem. It comes from how the plan got built. Most plans are built by addition: the team decides what it wants and writes it down, one reasonable item at a time. Five signs your plan was built by addition The same items show up two years

Everything in this series so far has been a one-time exercise. Find the pattern. Name the role. Take one thing off. Each of those is worth doing once, and each of them decays. That is not pessimism, it is just how a busy quarter works. The week fills back in. The request you would have declined in September arrives in November, when you are tired, and it is easier to say yes. Three months after the subtraction, most leaders are carrying the same load in a different shape. So

Watch a leadership team set priorities for the year and you will see a well-run process. Discussion. Debate. Real thought about what matters. A short list at the end, usually 3 or 4 priorities, and genuine commitment to it. Now watch the same team a year later. The list of the work that was prioritized has five things on it. Nobody remembers when the fourth and fifth arrived, and nobody removed anything to make room. That is the subtraction problem, and it is nearly universal

Last month I wrote about where a leader's time actually goes, and the exercise that shows you. Most people who run it land somewhere near fifteen percent on the work only they can do, and almost everyone thinks that work is higher. Because that is where they spend their time. The number is useful. It is not the finding. The finding is the reason the month took that shape, and it is almost always the same reason. Founders write every job description in the organization. Almost

Ask a leader how they ended up spending their week and you will not hear about a mistake. You will hear about a sequence of reasonable decisions. A client needed something adjacent to what the company does, and the revenue was real, so they took it. Someone left and the gap got covered from the top, just until they hired, and then hiring got hard or training the new person got pushed off because of ‘busy.’ A customer asked for something and it became a product line nobody wan

Think about the last performance review you gave. Now ask yourself an uncomfortable question. Could the person you gave it to repeat back what you said? Most could not. And it is not because they were not listening. I have watched a lot of organizations try to fix performance reviews. New forms. New rating scales. Calibration sessions. Quarterly instead of annual. Continuous feedback platforms. Some of it helps a little. Almost none of it fixes the core problem, because the c

"Improve client retention." "Strengthen the leadership bench." "Get better at project delivery." Every one of those is a wish with a verb in front of it. They sound like goals. They are not, because none of them can be met or missed on a specific day, which means none of them can be steered, and none of them can be the basis of an honest conversation. The fix is not more rigor or a better acronym. It is a date. Three of them. The Move Take the outcome and write what it looks

There is a particular meeting that every leadership team eventually sits in. The scoreboard says everyone won. The results say otherwise. Every department hit its goals. The company missed its year. Nobody in the room underperformed. Nobody slacked. And that is what makes it so disorienting, because the usual explanations do not apply. You cannot point at a person. There is no obvious failure to fix. Here is what is almost always going on. The Goals Were Reasonable. They Were

Ask a leader to name their best performer and they will answer immediately. Ask them to describe what good looks like in that person's role, without mentioning hours, effort, or availability, and watch what happens. The pause is the whole problem. Last month I wrote about how organizations default to measuring time because value was never defined. The response I heard most was a fair one. Fine, so how do I define it? Here is the answer, and it is smaller than people expect. F

In July, my son passed his Army Combat Field Test. As he crossed the line, his sergeant turned to the soldier who finished right behind him and said, "You just let a guy who hasn't run in two months beat you." I have been turning that morning over ever since, and not for the reason you would expect. The proud-mom part is easy. The part I keep coming back to is what the Army had done months before he ever showed up that day. They told him exactly what good looked like. The Sta

A while back, I sat with a CEO who had built a genuinely good leadership team. Smart people. Well-intentioned. Real commitment to the company. And yet nobody was holding anybody to anything. Deadlines slipped. Decisions got relitigated. And the CEO was quietly filling the holes herself, wondering why everything kept routing back to her. Why This Looks Like a People Problem (And Isn’t) If you lead a team, you’ve probably lived some version of this. And the instinct is to read

Every firm has one. The person whose name never tops the billing report, but whose exit would quietly take a piece of the firm with it. You know the type. Not the highest utilization, just the highest everything-else. In a lot of professional services firms, that makes them invisible, because we’ve decided your value is your billable hours, and their best work doesn’t bill. Because the work that also keeps a firm alive rarely shows up. Developing the next generation of staff

Ask a leader who their best performer is, and they’ll answer without hesitating. Ask them how they know, and watch what happens. Usually, it comes back to something that they can see. Who’s always here. Who’s always slammed. Who bills the most hours. And if you ask how they hold that person accountable, you’ll almost always hear the same word: responsibilities. “I hold my people accountable to their responsibilities.” Here’s the problem. Doing your responsibilities and creati

BCG research says 70% of AI deployment success comes from people, process, and context. Sauder says only 25% of leaders have a comprehensive AI roadmap. Grant Thornton says only 6% of executives recognize change leadership as the critical AI skill. The math tells you exactly where AI ROI is leaking. Here is what that costs, and how to close the gap. The Question I Keep Hearing A CEO called me last quarter. Her organization had just finished a six-figure AI rollout. New tools,

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Reflect on what the year truly taught you as a leader. Discover the deeper lessons of conscious leadership and growth beyond goals with Hoege Consulting & Coaching.