Karen’s Articles
The Cost of Waiting
I play cards with a group of women. There's a little food, a little wine, and a lot of laughter that gets louder as the evening goes on. When the group first started, the hostess shouted to her husband in the kitchen, with silliness in her voice, "The dessert isn't...
Changing Our Questions
Last week's blog, Less Wrong Tomorrow, clearly struck a chord. The responses came quickly, and many were vulnerable and personal. One reader wrote about caring for her aging father: "We have so many decisions to make, but Dad seems paralyzed. We're uncertain about...
Less Wrong Tomorrow
One of my favorite workshops to facilitate is strategic planning, and one of the most common reactions I hear during those sessions sounds something like this: “How can we plan when leadership keeps changing direction?” “We don’t even have a finalized budget yet.”...
The Mistakes We Manufacture Under Pressure
I walked into Anna’s office 11 years ago for a coaching session that didn’t happen. Again. It was the fourth time “something had come up.” After six weeks of my showing up, we still hadn’t had a single real undistracted, productive, focused session. Anna worked in a...
The Mistakes We’ve Stopped Seeing
For the past few weeks, I've been writing about mistakes—how we make them, how we respond, and how leaders can guide their teams through them. This week, I want to address perhaps the most dangerous type of all mistakes: the mistakes that have become normalized. These...
Mistakes and the Art of Owning It
For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about mistakes including how we make them, how we respond, and more recently, how not everything that feels off track is actually a mistake. This week, I want to come back to something very practical. What happens in the...
Mistakes and How They Shape Us
For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about mistakes at work, including how we make them, how we respond, and what people remember. This past weekend gave me a different lens through which to consider mistakes. The weekend didn’t have the look or feel of...
How to Lead Like a Leader When Others Mess Up
Last week, I wrote about what to do when you make a mistake. What about when you are a leader and someone on your team makes a mistake? A mistake can become bigger than it needs to be when a leader acts too strongly or harshly. The response to the initial mistake has...
When You Mess Up at Work (Because You Will)
I stepped in it this week. Interestingly, I was also hired as a coach by a leader who also, in a very different way, made a big mistake. We all make mistakes, some of us more than others. So how can we prepare, learn from them, and recover well? Over the years, I’ve...
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