Karen’s Articles
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...
When the Comments Become the Conversation
Over the past few weeks I have shared thoughts on workplace culture stemming from an incident during a program I was facilitating. The CEO made an off-hand and disrespectful comment about a colleague’s lunch, mocking curry for sure, and perhaps ethnicity. Then he...
The Signal Leaders Send
The last two weeks, we examined how a comment, nervous laughter, and the phrase “that’s just the way he is” created a culture that valued harmony over honesty. I was reminded of this situation recently, when after the winter Olympics I watched a public leadership...
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