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04.16.26
Leading Thoughts for April 16, 2026
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Nir Eyal on change: “Positive thinking alone so often fails to create lasting transformation. Simply telling yourself you have control isn’t enough. Your brain needs direct evidence that change is possible. Every small victory that proves our actions matter helps build beliefs that override our default passivity.” Source: Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results Paul Ingram on values-based leadership: “Individuals are more motivated when they are responding to intrinsic motivations, such as when they are acting in accordance with their values. Leaders who affirm their values tap into this benefit, but they also invite others to think about their own priorities. Good leaders know that it is better to explain your thinking, and let followers reach their own conclusions as to how to behave, than to issue commands. Values-affirmed leaders are more likely to give their followers this opportunity.” Source: What Do You Really Stand For?: The One Question That Will Transform Your Work and Life Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.   Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:11 AM
04.14.26
7 Essential Elements for Managing Your Greatest Asset – Your People
YOU can have an amazing business plan and strategy, but if there are issues with recruiting and keeping your people, your strategy will fail. Finding the right people and incorporating essential elements so that they will stay, are key to managing your organization’s greatest asset — your people. It starts with hiring for fit. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you could have two companies in the same industry in adjacent buildings. They may have very similar business models and customer bases; however, the two owners have very different values and personal philosophies — which lead to very different cultures and, therefore, very different strategies and plans. The target candidates for each company will be very different given the values and cultural differences. The way candidates are sourced, hired, trained, deployed, engaged, and evaluated might be very different. I know of two competing companies in which one has a strict uniform policy, and the other doesn’t. Can you see how that would affect everything? Looking back at my career, I can remember working for companies where I didn’t fit in. I can also recall places where I felt fully engaged. From a talent management perspective, it’s necessary to clearly define — and relay as early in the recruiting process as possible — what it means to “fit in” with your company. Strategies and plans can then be formulated to increase the company’s chances of attracting and hiring the candidates that fit that definition. Some organizations think that fitting in somehow happens by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you successfully define the criteria and apply it in the selection process, employee retention will go up. As a result, all the associated time, effort, and costs of employee turnover will evaporate. This is how you begin to build your amazing culture based on sincerity and integrity. One way to define the culture fit for your organization is to ask employees their top three reasons why they work here. In one organization where we asked the question of the employees, one word, “community,” came up in every response even though they hadn’t discussed the assignment with each other. We then crafted an employer brand with the word “community” as the centerpiece. From the top to the bottom of the organization, everyone agreed that the employer brand was them. From that point forward, candidates could review the employer brand and know whether they’d fit in. If not, they knew not to bother applying. Aligning the 7 Elements for Success From my years of experience, I’ve identified seven elements associated with exceptional talent management: plan, attract, invest, deploy, engage, reward, and retain. Each of the seven elements must have a strategy that fits with the other six to provide the needed talent results. Too many organizations try to implement strategies for each element as if they were silos and essentially end up canceling each other out. Whenever conflicts exist among the seven elements, you won’t get the overall talent results you want and need. As you examine the seven elements, think about how each connects to the others. 1. Plan: This involves creating tactical plans that define what skills are needed, when, where, and their associated cost. This is a huge area of opportunity in most companies. Many organizations trade planning for fighting fires. Don’t overcomplicate it —keep it simple. 2. Attract: What avenues or sources will you use to attract talent? I’ve found that many companies have no idea about the variety of avenues available. They don’t understand or use their employer brand, or know how to recognize their target candidates when they walk in the door. 3. Deploy: Onboard employees in the organization, establishing employee connections and maximizing the opportunity for success. It’s critical that organizations do this on a consistent basis over time and across departments. 4. Engage: Define the norms, principles, and behaviors that your company embodies and reinforce them within the organization. 5. Invest: Analyze new skills and competencies you must develop in your people and know how they’ll be delivered. Your greatest asset is made even greater when you invest in them. Knowing what needs to be taught and the best way to do so provides personal and professional development — a key component in reducing turnover. 6. Reward: Establish how you will measure and reward success, alongside identifying future leaders. This, when combined with the earlier elements, enables your organization to realize infinite advantages. 7. Retain: Finally, agree on the strategies and processes used to retain employees who perform at the desired level. This element is the final scorecard of the other six elements. The more you can get each element to work well and work together with the other elements, the more your employee turnover rate and associated costs will nosedive. Together, the seven elements provide the formula for effectively managing your greatest asset — your people. And the end result: your people are as invested as you in building your business.  Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:50 PM
04.10.26
Why Managing Attention Is the Key to Effective Leadership
IN MANY organizations, productivity is flat while stress and burnout are climbing. While many blame the unmanageable workload, the problem is really the overwhelming thoughtload. Thoughtload is the invisible tax on performance and productivity that comes from a treacherous triad of rising cognitive demands, escalating emotional burdens, and declining energy reserves. As thoughtload increases, it’s less likely that team members will be productive, creative, or collaborative. Managers need to support their teams in reducing each component of thoughtload, but first, they need to address their own chaotic experience. It’s impossible to manage the madness if you’re creating it. Focus Your Distracted Attention While the endgame is for you to reduce your team’s thoughtload, you cannot manage the madness if you’re caught up in it. Just think of all the ways your thoughtload impacts your team members. If your attention is diluted across a vast range of issues and initiatives, your team won’t know what to prioritize. If you’re nervous, impatient, demoralized, or hostile, you’ll pass that emotionality on to your people. If you’re run down, exhausted, and uninspired, how do you expect your direct reports to have pep in their step? You need to tackle your thoughtload first. But where to start, given that your attention, emotions, and energy are so intimately intertwined? I always tackle attention first, because you have no hope of taming emotions or restoring energy if you don’t manage your attention. The Achievable Ambition: Focused and Flowing Before we talk about how to effectively focus your attention, let’s agree on what “good focus” would look like. I’m not promising you that you can achieve Zen master status, but I’m promising you that you can create a world where you experience periods of deep concentration, leading to productive work and a sense of accomplishment. What if you could experience this:
Science Synopsis What’s going on in your body and mind when your attention is distracted? To put it simply, your brain is a mono-tasker, not a multi-tasker. For the most part, you can pay attention to only one thing at a time. Sure, you can walk and chew gum, but that’s because you don’t need to pay conscious attention to do either. If you switch out gum chewing for walking and texting, you’ll get a different result. Your attention goes to texting, not walking, and you’re okay until there’s a bump on the sidewalk. While you feel like you’re multitasking, what you’re actually doing is toggling—switching your attention from one thing to the other. It turns out that toggling is inefficient:
And multitasking doesn’t just slow you down; it gets you down. Attempts to multitask are associated with increased stress, heightened anxiety, and even temporary depressive symptoms. When it comes to thoughtload, multitasking is part of a vicious cycle. When you’re anxious about how much you have to do, you tend to multitask to alleviate anxiety. Ironically, instead of helping you plough through more work, multi-tasking can make you less productive, leaving you with more to do, which in turn makes you even more stressed. Brutal! If multitasking doesn’t work, why do we keep attempting it? That’s another aspect of the vicious cycle. The more tired and overwhelmed you are (the energy component of thoughtload), the poorer your brain is at calibrating what you should attend to and what you should ignore. Instead of focusing on the most important thing, you prioritize based on more primal criteria like recency (What was the latest notification to ping?), fear (Who’s the scariest person breathing down your neck?), or comfort (What’s the easiest or most fun thing you could strike off your to-do list?) When you make one of these suboptimal prioritization decisions, you dig yourself into a deeper hole. Bad attention choices lead to poor outcomes for your emotions and your energy. A Better Alternative What does science tell us about a better alternative? Most of us work more effectively when we focus on one thing at a time and work uninterrupted for 30 to 45 minutes. Between blocks, we need a 5- or 10-minute rest to reset, and then we’re able to do another sprint. After two or three blocks, we need a longer break. One series of studies showed a range in the most productive durations with sprints ranging from 52 to 112 minutes with the accompanying rests of between 17 and 26 minutes. Working this way, in a series of sprints and rests, we get more done, with higher quality, and less stress. But before you start hacking productivity like a tech bro and thinking that your goal should be eight (or eighteen) hours a day of uninterrupted, heads-down focused productivity, note that you’re probably built for at most four hours a day of this quality of work. Your brain doesn’t stay at peak performance for longer than that. Another thing to understand about your brain is that different tasks require different brain processes. Task batching, that is grouping similar activities, reduces the cost of switching and decreases errors. When speed is the goal, put like with like. In contrast, to increase creativity or provide some mental relief, deliberately switch tasks to something with an entirely different vibe. Armed with that understanding of the value of focus, let’s talk about what you can do to reduce your thoughtload by managing your attention. Here’s what I’ve seen when it comes to your focal point: Focus on activity, become a busy person. Focus on outputs, become a productive person. Focus on outcomes, become an effective person. Sure, being productive is better than being busy, but if your productivity isn’t leading to changes in your outcomes, what’s it worth? Being effective is what it’s all about. When you pay attention to being effective, you don’t need to be as productive because all those things you were churning out that weren’t making a dent aren’t required anymore. When you don’t need to be as productive, you can be less busy because fewer outputs mean fewer tasks. That’s the first step in managing your thoughtload—choosing your quest and aligning your attention to accomplish it. Once it’s clear, find a way to keep your quest top of mind. The work to confront how your environment and even your own delusions direct your attention to all the wrong things can be intense and excruciating. And it’s not lost on me that your boss, who is slagging you for not making more progress, is the person most likely to be swamping you with low-value activities. (If that’s the case, your boss needs this process as much as you do. Work through it together.) You have things to accomplish. Real things. Meaningful things. The better defined they are, the easier it is to see what’s essential versus what’s trivial and wasteful. When you do more of the former and less of the latter, your team will benefit and both you and your boss will get kudos. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:56 PM
04.09.26
Leading Thoughts for April 9, 2026
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Greg Satell on change: “It is never enough to merely state grievances to challenge the status quo. To create meaningful change, you must put forward an affirmative vision for what you want the future to look like. This is not about messaging. It’s not enough to merely express your grievances more artfully. You have to define an alternative that is actually better, not just for those who agree with you, but for the vast majority of those who will be affected by the change you seek.” Source: Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change Richard S. Tedlow on seeking truth: “Denial is a powerful impulse, but we are not entirely powerless to resist it. Through self-knowledge, openness to criticism, and receptivity to facts and perspectives that challenge our own, we can arm ourselves against denial. This is easier said than done.” Source: Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face—and What to Do About It Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:16 PM
04.02.26
Leading Thoughts for April 2, 2026
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Frank Barrett on Provocative Competence: “Leadership as design activity means creating space, sufficient support, and challenge so that people will be tempted to grow on their own. The goal is the opposite of conformity: a leader’s job is to create the discrepancy and dissonance that trigger people to move away from habitual positions and repetitive patterns. I’ve come to think of this key leadership capacity as ‘provocative competence.’” Source: Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske on self-awareness: “Developing your sense of Self-Awareness not only helps you gauge how you are likely to react in a given situation, but it can also provide some in-sight into the people around you. Having a stable sense of self can therefore ground you in situations when many other circumstances are beyond your immediate control.” Source: The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:05 AM
04.01.26
First Look: Leadership Books for April 2026
HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in April 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.
Think about the last time you said, "I love that." Maybe it was about a product that exceeded expectations, a service experience that built instant loyalty, or a moment when your work brought out the best in you. That reaction isn't just emotional—it's electric. In the organization, it fuels engagement, strengthens performance, and drives lasting success. Yet most leaders don't even acknowledge it, let alone measure or make use of it. In Design Love In, leading researcher on human performance and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham reveals how love—the deep connection that makes people feel seen, valued, and inspired—isn't just a soft feeling. It's a measurable driver of performance and growth. He shows how leaders, as experience-makers, can intentionally "design love in" to everything we do: our interactions with team members, our company policies and practices, the products and services and experiences we create for those we lead and serve.
Increasingly today we find ourselves surrounded by chaos, turbulence and existential threats. We are at a destiny-shaped moment for humanity that calls for a next level of consciousness, courage and compassion from business leaders, who have a chance to contribute to the common good. In this context, and building on the main themes of Janni’s first book, he has come together with another pioneering leadership expert, Amy Elizabeth Fox to create Leading in Chaos, based on their mutual recognition of the unique demands the world faces today. Together, they encourage leaders to take one step further on the journey of self-discovery and self-mastery. Today’s fast-changing, uncertain times call for leaders to develop new capacities of consciousness and to view leadership as a sacred vocation – to become a blessing in the world through presence, coherence and deep human connection.
Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line? This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The authors draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.
Fearless Persistence is about the systems that quietly shape creative success and why so many talented people struggle without ever understanding why. Drawing on decades inside film studios, creative institutions, and leadership classrooms, Adam Leipzig reveals the hidden systems that support and constrain success-how power, pressure, time, belief, and structure shape whose work travels and whose work stalls, regardless of talent. Rather than offering inspiration or hustle culture, Fearless Persistence reframes persistence as design. It shows how creators and leaders build structures that allow their work to continue when conditions change, as they always do. Clear-eyed, deeply practical, and grounded in real experience, this book helps readers see the system beneath the story and redesign their creative lives for endurance, integrity, and impact. Creative success is shaped by systems. This book shows how to design a life that thrives inside them.
Every leader reaches a moment when skill isn’t enough.When the challenge cuts deeper and tests conviction, humility, and heart. The Core takes readers into that defining space, introducing us to Clint Smith and his mentor, Dr. Bill Jackson, and revealing that the foundation of lasting influence doesn’t come from power or position—it comes from the strength of one’s core. Through the journey of a young man whose plans are upended by tragedy, The Core blends a compelling story of mentorship with timeless principles of leadership. Under Dr. Jackson’s guidance—a hospital CEO who leads with quiet strength and deep conviction—Clint discovers that great leadership grows from the inside out.
Why do some of the most successful people in the world―from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey to Ralph Lauren―never finish college, while others with every academic advantage still struggle to find their way? For William R. Brody, a renowned physician-scientist and the former president of Johns Hopkins University, the answer lies in a truth higher education all too often overlooks: life, unlike textbooks, has no answer key. Most of the truly important questions we face rarely have a ready rubric and a simple solution. In Uncommon Sense, Brody distills lessons from decades in medicine, engineering, entrepreneurship, and academic leadership into a thoughtful, surprising, and often humorous exploration of how to think―and live―beyond the syllabus. Born from his popular Johns Hopkins seminar aimed at graduating seniors, the book exposes the gap between classroom achievement and real-world wisdom, offering readers a practical framework for navigating the unpredictable opportunities and sometimes contrarian decisions that define success and fulfillment.
   
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” — Charles W. Eliot
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:54 AM
03.31.26
LeadershipNow 140: March 2026 Compilation
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:09 AM
03.30.26
Why Best Practices Hold You Back: When Yesterday’s Logic Meets Today’s Complexity
BEST practices are often viewed as the key to success in the business world. Certifications to prove practitioners are competent in accordance with a best practice make sense at the surface. However, they’ve become psychological cover that create mediocre results at best. It’s reassuring to be able to point at the protocol and say, “I followed the best practice. It’s not my fault.” Take project management, for example. Most project managers I’ve met (my younger self included) come from technical backgrounds who love best practices. I genuinely thought project management was about following the best practice and forcing people to follow my plan. Spoiler alert: That didn’t work. With today’s disruption and volatility, “business as usual” means little when there’s no “usual” anywhere in sight. Although Disruption and Volatility would make great names for a law firm, they require an adaptive approach to ensure survival and sustainability. Best practices bring a false measure of certainty for keeping threats at bay. However, they’re largely irrelevant as they’re developed by looking in the rearview mirror according to what worked under the conditions at that time. The solution is enhancing critical thinking to navigate complexity in real time. These days, to be successful, you need to be adaptable. This requires developing the critical thinking skills to solve the unique challenges your situation presents. To do so, follow these tips: 1. Don’t Mistake Motion for Mastery Attending endless meetings, always agreeing with leadership, escalating decisions, and “checking the boxes” that show you observed the best practice are all compliance-based behavior. You feel like you’re providing value but are really providing only a superficial benefit. Busy work consumes energy. It moves the needle little in terms of value delivered. This puts your organization and yourself at risk. Mastery comes from thoughtful distillation to what matters. Condense your work down to its essence — the 1 percent that really moves the needle. This involves having the important coaching conversation to shift the thinking of a team member, sharing the contrarian viewpoint that no one else sees, or carving out time for learning and growth to build new thinking. These are all leverage plays that return far more over time than they consume. 2. Understand That Best Practices Become So in Hindsight I started my career in engineering and realized early on that the work I did was a “good enough” approximation of the real-world physics my designs operated in. This allowed me to build things that consistently worked at a reasonable cost. Best practices are an approximation of what works in the real world. However, they’re only a snapshot of what worked at one point in time in the past. The business environment evolves rapidly at an ever-increasing rate of change. Best practices are backward-looking and largely irrelevant to the modern environment in which we try to apply them. This is why we talk of “better” practices and not “best” practices. You should always be getting better in the system in which you operate. Once you think you’ve arrived at the “best,” there’s no point to continue getting better. That leads to complacency. 3. Realize That Value Lies Beneath the Surface Understand what the organization you work within truly values. I often find when working with clients, whatever leadership thinks provides value in terms of outcomes are in tension with what leaders actually show they value day to day. For example, they may say the organization needs to be the top innovator in its industry globally. Then, leaders micromanage, reinforce compliance, and criticize mistakes. You can’t get to innovation if you value compliance, shame risk-taking, and make it intimidating for people to pursue efforts that might come up short. Success comes to those who are brave and can push back against the behavioral norms despite the daily rhetoric. Speak up when it feels uncomfortable. Have one high-leverage conversation tomorrow that you’ve been putting off. I rarely meet leaders who don’t value results when you show them you can achieve them. People who can do this write their own ticket. That means you need to be ready for some social discomfort on your journey to delivering the results your organization truly wants. Best practices are misaligned with the needs of the modern business environment because they’re rooted in yesterday’s logic and provide convenient psychological cover. In a world that previously rewarded compliance, many professionals were never required to develop strong critical thinking. That world has shifted. Leaders must move beyond the comfort those practices once provided and focus instead on the high leverage work that creates real outcomes. The willingness to think, question, and adapt is now what separates compliance from true leadership. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:46 AM
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Design Love In
Leading in Chaos
Making Organizational Culture Great
Fearless Persistence
The Core
Uncommon Sense
Here is a selection of 
