"In an era when every competitor is racing to add more features, channels, data, and spend, the real differentiator is the courage to remove. Subtraction is neither austerity nor minimalism; it’s strategic design. By carving away the non-essential, leaders create the white space where breakthroughs can grow and position their organizations to be first off-the-blocks when the rebound arrives."

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"It’s the best way to anticipate the many secondary effects of change in an interconnected world."

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"...are architects of group performance who bring people together optimally. [They] integrate diverse expertise, promote equitable contributions, and cultivate trust. In doing so they generate collective intelligence, or a group’s ability to reason, innovate, and solve problems."

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"They assume the size of the pie is fixed—and miss opportunities to create value." [KJ: For an excellent companion perspective from a former hostage negotiator, see Scott Walker's HBR article delineating his approaches to effective negotiation.]

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"Timely input, candid feedback, and robust debate are as vital for ensuring innovation as for preventing strategic blunders. Leaders who create the kinds of teams that practice these ways of interacting will be poised to outperform those who do not. Ultimately, psychological safety is about changing the expectations for how we work together to successfully navigate the storms ahead."

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"When leaders constantly push forward without pausing to recognize progress, they risk burnout, diminished resilience, and poorer judgment...By making progress visible, separating real from self-imposed urgency, and redefining what celebration looks like, leaders can strengthen confidence, sustain motivation, and stay grounded in what’s working—even amid relentless demands."

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"...Many employees don’t feel that they matter to their employers, bosses, and colleagues. Mattering—a mainstay concept in psychology—is the experience of feeling significant to those around us because we feel valued and know that we add value...[What should leaders do?] First, leaders need to truly see and hear team members during daily interactions. They must also regularly affirm their people’s significance. And finally, senior leaders need to scale these skills up to the organizational level so that mattering becomes a cultural norm. These behaviors may seem like common sense, but they’ve ceased to be common practice in a world of brief digital communications and condescension toward soft skills, and they’re well worth relearning."

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"At some point, everybody dreams of quitting their job to do something completely different. Sometimes, those dreams fall under pure fantasy. At other times, they’re grounded in reality and hope. In the spirit of such hope, we found seven people whose major career changes worked out astoundingly well — both financially and emotionally."

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"Many important tasks can be done by other people. Focus on what you can do a lot better than anyone else."

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“Whether you are an employee or employer, it is a better investment to increase happiness at work and in life, rather than simply trying to increase measures of success.”

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In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Why Employees Quit, the authors look at the motivators and behaviors that both "push" people to leave their employers, as well as those that "pull" them to stay. Many people are pushed due to a lack of respect, trust, engagement, sense of purpose, porous boundaries and unclear paths for growth, development and advancement, to name a few. They are pulled, essentially, by the exact opposites forces that push them, with many attractive pull features coalescing around autonomy, mastery and purpose.

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"As many organizations continue to wrestle with how to structure work policies, now is the time to figure out how to grant employees control over their time in ways that can motivate them to do their best work, and experience greater satisfaction in both work and life. In our research we found that employees who have greater control over their time tend to be more satisfied with both their work and their lives. This suggests that work arrangements that grant employees more control and flexibility may not only improve employee well-being, but may also help employers retain the top talent they’ve been struggling to keep."

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“...Great communication is a skill that nearly anyone can learn by taking the following steps: preparing before a conversation, asking deep questions during a conversation, and asking (and answering) follow-up questions throughout. In the context of work, mastering each step can help you...build lasting connections with people at all levels of your organization — connections that go a bit deeper than your typical professional relationship...Ultimately, they can help you grow in or beyond your role.”

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"It’s common to wrestle with feelings of unmet expectations, missed opportunities, and paths not taken when you reach the midpoint of your career. But experts say that arriving at middle-age is also a profound opportunity for growth and self-reflection. It’s a chance to reevaluate your priorities, draw from your experience, and carve out a path that aligns with your goals for the second half of your professional life."

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In her Harvard Business Review article, Why Career Transition Is So Hard, Herminia Ibarra posits that "you need to diverge and delay, exploit and explore, and bridge and bond to find a new narrative thread. In doing so it’s essential to engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help...As constant reinvention becomes the norm, the stories that define us have no start or ending. Instead of closure, the prize is learning: What we learn about ourselves when we embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give us access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career."

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"Servant leadership brought us to a more compassionate, human-centered work environment. It’s time for us to make the next leap. In today’s environment, burned-out leaders endlessly trying to serve will struggle to drive the innovation, resilience, and sense of meaning required for future growth. Elevating the lens to noble-purpose leadership has the power to unite employees and managers in the pursuit of making a difference."

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"Giving developmental feedback that sparks growth is a critical challenge to master, because it can make the difference between an employee who contributes powerfully and positively to the organization and one who feels diminished by the organization and contributes far less. A single conversation can switch an employee on — or shut her down. A true developmental leader sees the raw material for brilliance in every employee and creates the conditions to let it shine, even when the challenge is tough."

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"To treat mistakes restoratively, leaders need humility, grace, and patience. They must see any person’s arc of professional success as more than the sum total of any single assignment. Leaders also need the humility to acknowledge their contribution to people’s failures...We have a long way to go before accountability within organizations becomes a welcomed process that yields fair, actionable feedback and encourages employees to embrace the opportunity to improve their performance and expand their contributions. Making dignity, fairness, and restoration foundational components of accountability systems is a powerful place to start."

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"How can white men be effective allies to those employees? First, by taking responsibility for their own behaviors, educating themselves about racism and privilege, and getting and accepting feedback from people in underrepresented groups. They can also become confidants to and sponsors of women and people of color and insist on diverse hiring pools and practices. They can vigilantly watch out for bias at work, intervening decisively if they discover it. Last, they can work to build a community of other allies against racism and sexism."

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