IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Tim Elmore on balancing confidence and humility:

“Leading today requires combining these two attributes—confidence and humility. Reality changes so quickly, leaders cannot become arrogant, but must remain in a learning posture. At the same time, team members long for their leader to inspire them with confidence. Bob Iger said, “There’s nothing less confidence inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess. True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.”

Source: The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership: Embracing the Conflicting Demands of Today’s Workplace

Hasard Lee on decision-making:

“When we rashly turn over our decision-making to external aids, such as committees or computers, we lose the ability to bring the full power of our brain to bear on a problem. We, in essence, have carved out a hole in our understanding and replaced it with someone else’s solution. If we don’t learn the underlying concepts behind that new infor-ation, then we’re blindly trusting that it’s correct. We lose the ability to quickly reconfigure concepts into creative solutions, which is one of the great strengths of the human mind.”

Source: The Art of Clear Thinking: A Stealth Fighter Pilot’s Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

THE gap between what leaders say and what they do may be the single greatest destroyer of hope in organizations today. I learned this the hard way—by being that leader whose midnight emails contradicted my daytime messages about work-life balance. Often, without realizing the impact, organizations reinforce hopelessness across culture, policy, and procedure. From leaders and employees alike, I’ve heard consistent stories about what creates hopelessness in organizations. Frequently, it begins with the signals leaders send through their actions, including:

• Learned helplessness modeling: Leaders who themselves display resignation demonstrate that there’s no reason to push for change.
• Inconsistent standards: Different rules applied to different people without clear rationale leave everyone confused and can incite workplace paralysis.
• Information hoarding: Withholding context that would help employees understand decisions can spark a feeling of detachment.
• Mixed messaging: Saying one thing while incentivizing another implies there is no clear path to follow.
• Failure intolerance: Punishing well-intentioned experimentation that doesn’t succeed leads, predictably, to a lack of experimentation.

Leadership patterns influence organizations, quietly shaping what people believe is achievable. I noticed this dynamic unfold while coaching a new director. When our work together began, she approached her role with creative ideas and genuine enthusiasm. She would share thoughtful solutions in leadership meetings and engage her team in meaningful initiatives.

Over the next several months, however, I noticed a change in her approach. She started introducing her suggestions with phrases like, “I know this might be challenging, but…” and became more selective about which ideas she brought forward. During our coaching conversations, she would cautiously assess which situations merited her advocacy.

This shift wasn’t a reflection of her abilities. Rather, it seemed to develop through repeated exposure to subtle organizational signals suggesting that innovation, while publicly encouraged, faced numerous obstacles in practice. She had observed how established executives often highlighted potential problems with new approaches, had seen how resource allocations didn’t always align with stated innovation goals, and now recognized that maintaining current practices often received more positive attention than proposing change.

When there’s a disconnect between what’s communicated in formal settings and what’s reinforced through daily decisions and recognition, even the most highly motivated leaders may begin to question the potential for meaningful progress.

I recognized this same pattern in my own leadership. I found myself regularly telling my team to maintain work-life boundaries that I myself ignored. I’d send emails about wellbeing at midnight, speak about psychological safety in town halls while reacting defensively to challenging questions in private sessions, and emphasize the importance of rest while visibly exhausted. The realization was uncomfortable: what I said and what I did didn’t align, and this gap was gradually eroding my team’s trust in meaningful change.

Even more troubling was the unintended message I was sending: if you want to advance to a role like mine, you too must sacrifice balance and authenticity. Without realizing it, I was modeling the very behaviors I claimed to want to change. This insight transformed my approach. I began to see that creating hope means empowering others to do things differently — and perhaps better — than I had done. True leadership isn’t about demanding what we ourselves can’t demonstrate; it’s about creating conditions where others can surpass our own limitations, building environments more balanced and humane than the ones we inherited.

The path out of hopelessness isn’t paved with motivational posters or forced optimism. It begins with the step of acknowledging reality exactly as it is — including the legitimate reasons for feeling hopeless.

It’s not only okay to feel hopeless at times, it may be necessary. Hopelessness isn’t failure; it’s an honest recognition of reality that creates the possibility for authentic hope to emerge. Leadership expert Margaret Wheatley calls this “facing reality without fear.” It’s the difficult but essential practice of seeing clearly without becoming paralyzed.

Hopelessness can coexist with hope — sometimes within the same hour or meeting. This paradox confused me until I recognized that both stem from how we make meaning of our experiences. We can hold serious concern about climate change while feeling authentic hope about specific environmental programs. We can understand the shortcomings of current structures while building pockets of effectiveness within them.

This coexistence isn’t a contradiction — it’s a natural aspect of human experience.

Many people find that during recovery from professional challenges, they can hold both perspectives simultaneously. While recognizing limitations in certain organizational areas, they often discover new possibilities for contribution by shifting focus to areas where impact remains possible. The concerns don’t disappear, but they no longer define one’s professional approach.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Alan Stein on self-awareness:

“It’s called “self” awareness, but the people you choose to surround yourself with play a part in that. A self-aware person is going to invite healthy criticism, and one way to do that is not to shy away from hearing the truth. It’s important to have supportive people who aren’t afraid to tell you things that you need to hear instead of the things that you want to hear.”

Source: Raise Your Game: High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best

Patty McCord on sharing information:

“If your people aren’t informed by you, there’s a good chance they’ll be misinformed by others. If you don’t tell them about how the business is doing, what your strategy is, the challenges you’re facing, and what market analysts think of how you’re doing, then they’ll get the information elsewhere – either from colleagues, who will often be equally ill informed, or from the Web, which loves nothing so much as a rumor of doom or a juicy conspiracy theory.”

Source: Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

WHILE we all seek expert advice to increase our chances of success, we also encounter situations in which no expert advice can uncover the right decision to make.

For example, expert advice can’t tell someone how to decide between a position in the public sector or a private sector position that pays more but serves the public interest less. Such decisions represent dilemmas — situations that involve competing goals, aspirations, and demands.

Moreover, dilemmas such as this career choice involve values and intrinsic motivations, which expert advice can’t address. An expert can’t tell you how to live out your values. Ultimately, only you can determine how to enact what you see as right, given your choices.

Arriving at the right answer in such dilemmas involves introspection. It requires examining your values and relying on your sense of personal judgment — not only weighing information and drawing conclusions, but also evaluating the ethical aspects of a situation.

A key means to enhance your personal judgment is to understand frames of reference, perspectives, and principles that can balance the competing — and potentially good — outcomes that compose a dilemma.

Employing these six questions enables you to capture perspectives that can enhance your personal judgment when addressing dilemmas:

1. What rules may be relevant to this dilemma?
2. What is the consequence I hope to see resulting from my decision?
3. What virtues (patience, courage, humility, etc.) are relevant to my decision, and what virtues do I want to develop and model through my choice?
4. What rights do the parties involved in the dilemma have, which must be respected? What rights do I have that must be respected?
5. What community values and traditions should my choice reflect or embody?
6. How will each possible course affect the relationships of those involved? What will build trust and fidelity, and what would erode these?

Let’s apply these questions to a specific dilemma: Imagine you are tasked with funding executive MBA programs for three employees in your firm. One employee, a rising star, has been accepted to an Ivy League program. Equipping this employee with a competitive MBA degree would assuredly be a financial benefit for your organization.

Two other long-term, loyal employees who you want to retain have been accepted into a local executive MBA program. Funding their MBAs will reward them for their engagement and commitment.

The cost of the Ivy League MBA program, however, translates to three executive MBA spots at the local institution, which is the amount your budget can cover. You face a dilemma: fund one high potential person and decline assistance to the two loyal, long-term employees, or reduce assistance to the rising star in order to fund all three.

As you apply each of the questions above to your dilemma, you consider:

1. What are the relevant rules? You must stay within your continuing education budget.
2. What consequences do you want to see from the decision? You wish to grow value for your firm while retaining all three executives.
3. What virtues are relevant to your decision? You hope to uphold fairness and honesty.
4. What rights may the parties involved have? Your MBA candidates deserve equal access to resources.
5. What community values and traditions should your choice embody? Your organization values loyalty and recognition.
6. How will each course of action affect relationships? Not funding each of the deserving employees will damage those relationships.

As you can see from this case, applying the questions intended to clarify your perspective leads you to conclude that privileging one individual with a degree at the expense of two other employees doesn’t uphold your organization’s values or the virtue of fairness. You resolve the dilemma by offering the employee accepted to the Ivy League program tuition assistance in the amount equivalent to full tuition at the local university, while also fully funding the two additional employees pursuing their MBAs locally.

This solution allows you to recognize the high potential of the one employee seeking the Ivy League degree and reward the loyalty of the two longer-term employees accepted to the local program. It also respects their right to equal access to company resources.

As this scenario illustrates, exploring a dilemma through six perspectives enables you to exercise refined personal judgment. (If you “pull back the curtain,” you’ll find that these six questions represent six types of philosophical ethical theories.)

Today, we’re increasingly expected to navigate gray areas in which expert advice doesn’t necessarily pertain. Applying the approach outlined here to refine personal judgment calls will help you master this crucial skill for success in business — and more broadly in your life.

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HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in March 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards and Jason Wild

Innovation doesn't just happen. You need to lead it. Discover the three critical roles leaders must play in driving—and scaling—innovation. Constant tech disruption. Unrelenting economic volatility. Radically shifting demographics and work norms. More than ever, we need to innovate amid these daunting global challenges. But do we have the leadership it takes to make this innovation happen successfully? Genius at Scale breaks new ground, showing how moving from generating new ideas to actually scaling them involves cocreation—collaborating, experimenting, and learning with others both inside and beyond the boundaries of the organization. This requires three distinct types of leadership: Leader as Architect, Leader as Bridger, and Leader as Catalyst.

Leading with Strategy: Using Your North Star to Guide Decision-Making by Timothy Tiryaki

A powerful collection of over 50 adaptable strategy frameworks to solve today's most complex business challenges. In Leading With Strategy veteran executive coach and strategy consultant for Fortune 500 firms Timothy Tiryaki delivers a transformative guide that clarifies the complex tradeoffs in today's AI-enabled business environment. Dr. Tiryaki explores the contemporary maze of undiscussed leadership dilemmas that have been surfaced by the latest generative AI technologies and provides unique perspectives on strategic thinking and leadership. At the core of Leading With Strategy are 50 practical visual frameworks. They're dynamic tools designed as adaptable tools for creatively tackling diverse challenges and obstacles. These frameworks go beyond staid, one-size-fits-all approaches to common business problems and help you master essential strategic thinking and execution skills.

Almost Reckless: A Creative and Pragmatic Approach to Taking Risks by Amy Smilovic

“Almost Reckless is not just a book, it's a permission slip. It's about the courage it takes to step off the algorithm's path, the clarity that comes from defining your own principles, and the joy of building something that feels unmistakably yours” saysWill Guidara, bestselling author of Unreasonable Hospitality. Amy Smilovic's cult fashion brand, Tibi, was a thriving $70 million business when she realized she was working toward someone else's idea of success. So she threw out the rulebook of how things should be done and went with her gut instead. Today Tibi is more successful than ever, and all on Smilovic's groundbreaking entrepreneurial terms. In Almost Reckless, she invites you to get comfortable with embracing smart risks in pursuit of your own vision. Sharing her story and drawing on her years of helping others identify their values and principles, Smilovic teaches you to hone your gut, and your trust in it.

The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX by Jon McNeill

From a former President of Tesla comes The Algorithm—the first book written by any of Elon Musk’s direct reports—a transformative guide for leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators who want to emulate the paradigm-shattering approach Musk used to launch Tesla and SpaceX to meteoric success. Jon McNeill had already founded and sold six startups when Sheryl Sandberg introduced him to Elon Musk, who was looking for help at Tesla. McNeill was steeped in the lean principles that had made Toyota a global powerhouse—principles focused on achieving efficiency and optimization by incrementally improving existing systems and processes. What he learned from Elon at Tesla was its antithesis, an approach that required radical rethinking to explode the status quo, attack complexity, and set seemingly unrealistic goals. Elon called this five-step framework “The Algorithm.”

Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters by Anthony Klotz

Most of us are just one event away from leaving our job. Conventional wisdom and lists of the “top reasons people quit their jobs” would have us believe that people quit when the toxic elements of their jobs grow too big or when they spot a better professional opportunity. But that’s only half the story. In reality, quitting is often triggered by a single event, inside or outside our jobs, that stops us in our tracks and causes us to rethink our relationship with work. These events are what organizational psychologist Anthony Klotz calls “jolts,” and they are the most underacknowledged realities in our work lives today. Jolts represent pivotal moments in our careers, and yet all too often, we respond to them in ways that harm our well-being and success. In Jolted, Klotz breaks down the different types of jolts we encounter and provides a road map to help us navigate them in ways that improve, rather than derail, our pursuit of the good life through our work.

The Tyranny of False Choices: A Guide to Authentic Decision-Making by Rey Ramsey

Every day, powerful forces work to narrow your thinking and constrain your options. Institutional gatekeepers, social pressures, misleading narratives, and internal doubts create false either-or scenarios that trap you in cycles of mediocrity and compromise your authentic purpose. Rey Ramsey reveals how to recognize and overcome these thought tyrannies. Through compelling personal stories and proven frameworks, he shows how to harness essential virtues like humility, courage, and perseverance to expand your possibilities and make decisions aligned with your deepest values. This practical guide provides methods for critical thinking, moral compass navigation, and building resilience against manipulation tactics. Whether facing institutional resistance, conformity pressure, or limiting beliefs, you'll discover how boundary-crossing leaders break through barriers and create meaningful change.

Here is a selection of Posts from February 2026 that you will want to check out:

• Why Being Small Could Be The Best Thing Ever by @PhilCooke
• The Power of Simplicity: 3 Lessons on Why Overthinking is Sabotaging Your Leadership by @BrianDoddLeader
• Effort is necessary. Results count. by @artpetty
• Presidents' Day Doesn't Cut It by @jamesstrock
• 3 Signs It’s Time for Your Next Chapter via @KelloggSchool
• Common Truths in Leadership and Business by @KatColeATL
• Five big mistakes to avoid when changing careers by @artpetty
• Leading with Inquiry (How to Have a Better Dialogue) by @edbatista
• How to Be Great and Be Present More Often by @TomBrady
• 5 Leadership Mistakes That Cost Your Team Championships and Causes You To Miss Your Goals by @BrianKDodd
• 21 Things All Great Leaders Do by @cnieuwhof
• When the 80/20 Rule Fails: The Downside of Being Effective by @JamesClear
• Rethink How You Think Creatively. Creativity isn’t just about talent or taste; it’s about how you think.
• Beyond Slop: Human Participation Is the New Currency of Trust via @LBBOnline
• Norway's Dominance at the Winter Olympics Has a Lot to Do With Youth Sports—And It's the Opposite of America by @BStulberg
• The Mind-Deadening Gravitational Pull of a Leadership Singularity by @artpetty There’s a force at work in too many organizations imposed by senior leaders that gives the appearance of action but reflects cognitive and productive paralysis.
• How Mental Toughness Can Help Leaders Make A Greater Impact by @LaRaeQuy
• How to Facilitate a Conflict on Your Team by @edbatista
• Can You Make Me Better? via @TheDaily_Coach Lou Holtz’s career is proof that all players will listen to leadership under one condition: Can you make me better in all areas of my life?
• What Doesn’t Change via @collabfund
• Why Capable People Underperform by @AwesomelySimple John Spence https://buff.ly/0nsYdr2 Most organizational performance issues aren’t caused by weak execution or lack of talent. They’re caused by unclear expectations.
• Epstein Files Expose Our Oligarchy by @jamestrock
• And then? by Alan Jacobs "You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing."

See more on Twitter.

IN The Next RenAIssance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential, AI expert Zack Kass believes “properly harnessed, AI could democratize education, revolutionize healthcare, and accelerate innovation,” but “for Al to truly serve humanity, we will be forced to solve radical new ethical dilemmas, unprecedented economic disruptions, daunting technical challenges, environmental collapse, dehumanization, the loss of identity, and above all, terrifying uncertainty.”

Yet because AI is not a tangible tech – something we can see – we are naturally suspicious. How does it work? Kass writes that AI systems must begin to “show their work” rather than just spitting out an answer if they are to be trusted. How did you get to the conclusion it came to? What information was considered? How valid is it? We need real-time transparency. “Real-time transparency gives users a window into what the system is prioritizing and why, helping build informed trust instead of blind faith.”

What about the future of work? “Predicting Al’s impact on jobs has become high-stakes roulette, and the bets often say more about the gambler’s worldview than technology itself. Even among industry and economic experts, the topic is very much still up for debate.”

Kass offers a set of four principles meant to guide how we live, work, and lead in the age of artificial intelligence.

1. Go Outside: The physical world matters more than anything else. It is life in four dimensions. Serendipity happens naturally.

The physical world carries variety that no recommender system can deliver. Algorithms collapse toward similarity. Streets, markets, trails, and small talk offer variance and surprise. Serendipity does not follow a schedule. It happens when you are a little off route, a little curious, and fully present. It shakes loose stale assumptions.

It builds resilience. You learn to adapt.

Adaptability will keep you relevant. Anchors will keep you principled. If you confuse methods for values, you will collapse with them. But if you adapt while anchoring in your values, you will find the formula for resilience in any era.

Go outside and be in the world you are trying to serve. Be in it.

2. Learn How to Learn: Study what you want. The process alone will teach you how to learn something else. Learning trumps what you already know.

You will not be defined by what you know, or even by what you have already mastered. You will be defined by your ability to master something new, and your drive to keep doing so again and again. Knowledge expires. Tools expire. But learning endures.

3. Optimize for Human Qualities: Be Human. AI will make human qualities more valuable.

Courage, compassion, hope, curiosity, humor, wisdom, and empathy are measures of human achievement. And soon these “soft skills” may in fact become our primary means of differentiation.

In the age of AI, your humanity is the product. Your bedside manner matters.

4. Lead with Optimism: Lead with optimism. Fear constrains. Choose a can-do approach.

Progress does not happen by default. People build toward the stories they believe. Narrative sets policy. Belief sets budgets. A leader’s horizon becomes a team’s boundary conditions. If we tell stories of decline, we will write rules that constrain. If we tell credible stories of a better future, we will invest, upskill, and move.

Optimism is the way forward.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Deborah Gruenfeld on showing respect:

“We often fail to realize that the ability to show respect and even submission can also be a source of power. Deference is treating another person in ways that acknowledge that their expertise and experiences are at least as important as your own. It does not mean you have less power than the person you are deferring to. It means you do not intend to use the power you have against your relationship partner. Deference is disarming, it signals an absence of threat, and it creates a foundation of trust that allows a relationship to form.”

Source: Acting with Power: Why We Are More Powerful Than We Believe

Tony Dungy on putting others first:

“Instead of asking, how can I lead my company, my team, or my family to a higher level of success? we should be asking ourselves, how do others around me flourish as a result of my leadership? Do they flourish at all? How does my leadership, my involvement in their lives—in whatever setting we’re in—have a positive and lasting influence on them?”

Source: The Mentor Leader: Secrets to Building People and Teams That Win Consistently

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

WHEN Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled his chess-playing automaton in the courts of 18th-century Europe, audiences were spellbound. The “Mechanical Turk” was the first machine that appeared to think like a human. It beat anyone it played against, regardless of their playing abilities or social status. For decades, it toured the world as proof that human intelligence had finally been replicated by a machine.

It took bribery to finally get von Kempelen to reveal the secret of his unbeatable machine. Hidden inside the cabinet, crouched among gears and pulleys, sat a human chess master. The intelligence had never been artificial. It had just been concealed.

This may be an old and well-known story, but its lessons haven’t stuck. Today, we’re once again mesmerized by machines that appear to think, speak, decide, and even lead. From algorithmic hiring tools to AI-generated strategies — even to AI “CEOs” — leadership is being reframed as optimization, speed, and polish. While many see the danger of AI as machines becoming more human, the real danger is that human leaders are becoming more mechanical.

In the age of AI, the leaders who matter most will be the ones who lead most like humans, precisely when too many leaders are acting as if they, too, are automated. Just like the automaton, perfection looks impressive from a distance until you can see, up close, that it’s hollow.

The more polished leaders become, the more people worry about what they have to hide. This is why the future of leadership belongs to those who are prepared to be radically human. It belongs to those who hesitate, question, doubt, regret, and care. It’s these attributes that constitute the raw material of trust.

For decades, we’ve tried to be predictable, efficient, emotionless, and certain. We’ve confused clarity with certainty and polish with credibility. Leaders are compelled to hide the very elements that make people want to follow them.

Radical humanity asks for the opposite. It asks leaders to stay present rather than performative, curious rather than certain, courageous rather than compliant. It asks them to resist the illusion that confidence is the absence of doubt, or that authority comes from having all the answers.

The Mechanical Turk fooled Europe because people believed intelligence could be detached from messy humanity. We want to believe the same thing today. But leadership isn’t perfection. Leadership is judgment, presence, and moral courage in an imperfect world populated by imperfect people living imperfect lives. That’s why the future of leadership will never belong to those who sound most like machines. The future belongs to those who are willing to sound unmistakably human.

Here are five actions leaders must take if they want to remain credible and trusted in an AI-saturated world.

1. Show your workings, not just your answers. I learned at school that to get marks you had to show your workings. A confident answer without any context only breeds suspicion. As a leader, show how you think, where you hesitate, and the dilemmas you’re grappling with. Vulnerability increases credibility just as fake certainty destroys it.

2. Say “I don’t know” sooner than you feel comfortable. “But if I say I don’t know, won’t they wonder why I’m paid more than them?” was the reply to me when sharing this tip with a client. But showing uncertainty demonstrates value. By signalling honesty and inviting contribution, you create safety in a way that hiding doubt or giving a polished answer never could.

3. Stand still when pressure demands speed. AI optimizes for immediacy. But while everyone can think fast and AI faster, no one can reflect quickly. Leadership has always required discernment. Pausing to sense emotions, tensions, and ethical trade-offs is a human advantage, not a weakness. Married with tip 2, it’s a superpower.

4. Stand up for what’s right, not just what’s expedient. You will be remembered for what you tolerated way more than for what you did. Standing up for what’s right is what people will remember long after the results themselves have been forgotten.

5. Design culture through presence. Belonging is created in how leaders show up, listen, and respond under pressure. Culture isn’t designed, declared, or demanded. It’s experienced. Be in the moment wherever you are.

The Mechanical Turk eventually lost its mystique. Born in the courts of Europe, it was finally laid to rest in its fairgrounds. The illusion collapsed as the truth became known.

There’s no doubt that AI will continue to improve. Systems always become faster, smoother, and more convincing. But leadership was never meant to be mechanized. The uncertainties, emotions, and imperfections we are tempted to remove in the face of machine-like precision are precisely the qualities that allow trust, responsibility, and belonging to exist at all and the truth to emerge.

The future of leadership isn’t artificial. It has to be alive.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Nicole Vignola on self-talk:

“If you tell yourself you’re having a bad day, your brain will find ways to reinforce that belief, and you’ll go about the rest of your day finding ways to prove that this day is bad. And so it is with negative self-beliefs. When you believe that you are not worthy, or not confident, or you have a negative belief about yourself, your body language follows that belief. Moreover, the brain perceives your behaviour as normal and stops paying conscious attention to it, and before you know it, you’ve snowballed to further reinforce this belief with everything you do.”

Source: Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change

Leslie John on the power of opening up:

“Something sensitive, we are not necessarily entering a zero-sum transaction. We are creating a possibility for mutual trust, better relationships, connection, growth, even safety. Ironically, what seems like a loss of control is often what unlocks the very things we want most. This is the mistake economists (and, frankly, a lot of us) often make: treating information as a commodity to be protected or extracted. Disclosure is an investment—it’s risk in the service of trust.”

Source: Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Mark Crowley on being passionately curious:

“Something insidious often happens when people become adults. We become almost anti-curious. One big reason for this is that our human egos prefer to feel knowledgeable and successful at all times. Not wanting to feel vulnerable to anything unknown or in flux, our minds silence otherwise solid reasons to seek new methods, approaches, or skills. ‘You’re already doing great,’ our egos assure us. ‘There’s no need to invest time and energy in anything new.’”

Source: The Power of Employee Well-Being: Move Beyond Engagement to Build Flourishing Teams

Todd Henry on knowing yourself:

“The stories we believe about how the world works often play a critical role in helping us interpret the meaning of events. It’s important that we gain an understanding of not only what those deeply held beliefs are, but also how they might be affecting our daily activity. Doing so, and then mapping our activity around that self-knowledge, is one of the keys to sustained success.”

Source: Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

WE’RE often told about the benefit of learning from our failures, but the reality is that it’s easier to say than do. Failure feels uncomfortable and exposing. Rather than sit in vulnerability, it’s much easier to move forward and replace reflection and regret with action and distraction. But leaving the learning behind means we miss an opportunity to grow.

Our career resilience relies on being able to navigate hard moments with confidence and control and become better because of them. Whether it’s a presentation that’s gone wrong, a relationship that has broken down, or an important deadline that you’ve missed, our first response should be to pause, reflect, and learn from the situation.

Waiting for a BIG failure makes it hard to develop this skill. Big failures don’t happen often and come with lots of emotion. Trying to change your behavior when you’re in the middle of a big failure can feel doubly difficult. It’s much better to look for smaller failures to learn from, also known as mistakes. Mistakes are a much easier place to start. We all make lots of mistakes, so we have many more moments to learn from, and they are less emotionally charged so reflection feels less daunting to do.

A mistake might look like sending the wrong information in an email, arriving late for a meeting or not having the right data you need for a discussion. Mistakes won’t be disastrous for your development, but missing out on the learning might be. Repeating the same mistake can affect your reputation and lead to small issues, causing more significant problems over time. Turning mistakes into learning is a healthy habit for everyone’s development.

There are two ways you can start to learn from mistakes:

1. Mistake meetings – these work well as a team learning activity. A regular meeting goes in the diary (monthly seems to be the right cadence for most of the teams that we work with), and everyone brings a mistake they have made. The mistake is shared, the team offers support, and a plan to prevent the mistake from being made again is co-created. The benefit of this approach is that the discussion creates trust in the team and means that everyone is more likely to buy into doing things differently in the future.

2.Mistake moments – this approach works individually or as a team and has created more immediacy than waiting for a meeting to go in the diary. With Mistake Moments, the reflection happens within 24 hours of the mistake happening. The mistake is either written down or shared with a group on the day via an online communications channel like Teams or Slack. A similar structure is used for each mistake: What was the mistake, why did it happen, and how can you learn from it. The benefit of this approach is that the weight of a mistake doesn’t sit with anyone for long, support is offered rapidly, and learning from mistakes can quickly become a routine.

The more regularly you reflect on your mistakes, the less exposing failure feels. Instead of moving on and leaving the learning behind, we become more comfortable with the inevitable change and challenge we all experience at work, and much more skilled at growing through what we go through.

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On her podcast A Bit Personal, Jodi Shelton asks NVIDIA founder and CEO who’s the smartest person you’ve ever met?

A Bit Personal is a long-form interview podcast hosted by Jodi Shelton that explores leadership through a human lens. Featuring candid conversations with technology leaders, the show focuses on the personal experiences that influence how decisions are made at scale.

Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Brad Stulberg on being patient:

“Remember that doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff isn’t progress. It’s just doing stuff. Be patient, you’ll get there faster.”

Source: The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds—Not Crushes—Your Soul

Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar on ruminating:

“When a big change occurs, our negative thoughts can take on a life of their own, nestling into our psyches and stoking our biggest fears. This is known as rumination, and it can involve obsessively rehashing something in the past, grappling with perceived problems in the present, or catastrophizing an imagined future. When we ruminate, we keep going over and over the same negative thoughts, and we get stuck in a loop. Our brain trick us into believing we’re making progress on our problem when we’re often just making things worse.”

Source: The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in February 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done by Rebecca Hinds

Meetings are broken. They are relics from a bygone era of top-down hierarchies and factory-like procedures—designed to issue orders, flaunt power, and keep the hierarchy intact. In today’s digital, collaborate-or-bust era, this model isn’t just inefficient, it actively harms employees and organizations. Drawing on decades of research and stories from leading companies like Google, Salesforce, Pixar, YouTube, and Dropbox, Your Best Meeting Ever provides a blueprint to transform your meetings from monotonous, soul-crushing time sinks into powerful tools for collaboration. The secret? Treat them like products. Using seven product design principles, you’ll turn your meetings into well-designed products that actually drive work forward and serve your most important users—the people in your organization.

The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations by B. Joseph Pine II

Welcome to the Transformation Economy. To truly compete in today's marketplace, enterprises must create transformative experiences that guide customers to achieve their aspirations, whether that's improving well-being, increasing prosperity, developing knowledge, or finding purpose. These aspirations speak to customers' greatest desires, their dreams for the future, and their conceptions of who they are and who they strive to be. In this book, bestselling author B. Joseph Pine II builds on his iconic work on the Experience Economy to explain what this new shift means for companies looking to stand out and gain competitive advantage. Using examples from organizations across industries, including Noom, Symplany, Hydrafacial, London Business School, and Johnnie Walker Whisky, Pine provides practical, proven frameworks for organizations to design, create, and guide transformative offerings that help customers reach their greatest aspirations and flourish over the long term.

Permanence: Become the Person You Want to Be—and Stay That Way by Lisa Broderick and Marshall Goldsmith

Answer six simple questions daily and you can change almost anything. If you’ve ever hit a goal and thought, Now what?—you’re not alone. Permanence is your tool for lasting success—not the kind that’s here one day and gone the next, but the kind that sticks with you. How? Small, consistent steps—six questions daily—that keep you focused, on track, and synced with what you care about most. The real challenge isn’t just getting there. It’s staying there. In this book, you’ll learn the Daily Question Process, how to use feedforward instead of feedback, and how to build systems of accountability that actually work. You’ll stop thinking about quick wins and start getting better and better in a sustained way—driven by who you want to be, not what others are doing.

Creativity's Edge: Unleashing Humanity’s Greatest Advantage in the Age of AI by Susan M. Riley

In an AI world that can write, code, and design, what's left for humans? Everything that matters. The world is changing fast. Are you ready for what's next? Technical skills alone won't keep you ahead anymore. Creativity has now become the dividing line between those who will lead the future and those who will be automated out of it. This book shows you how to build the creative abilities AI can't touch: finding problems worth solving, linking ideas in new ways, and infusing work with meaning that only humans understand. These aren't vague ideas - they're real skills you can start building today.

Dare to Think Differently: How Open-Mindedness Creates Exceptional Decision-Making by Gerald Zaltman

A Harvard Business School professor's guide to thinking about thinking, using the creative power of the unconscious. Gerald Zaltman's pioneering research methods for understanding the unconscious desires of customers are used by companies around the world. Dare to Think Differently draws on the same groundbreaking methods to explain the deep and innovative thinking used by highly successful executives. Reflecting emerging viewpoints in neuroscience, Zaltman contends that multiple forces, not just a brain, collaborate to produce a mind. Highly effective decision-makers are able and willing to go beyond their conscious thinking and surface powerful, creative, unconscious thoughts and feelings. They candidly ask whether what they feel they "know" is actually warranted, opening their minds to new alternatives. With this book, Zaltman presents six techniques to tap into the creative power of the unconscious: serious playfulness, befriending ignorance, asking the right discovery questions, chasing your curiosity, panoramic thinking, and using the "voyager outlook."

Learn Like a Lobster: Accelerate Your Growth, Achieve More at Work, and Advance Your Career by Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper

An empowering guide to career growth that reveals how to “be more lobster” —to never stop learning and pave the way to a meaningful working life. In today’s working world, careers are characterized by change. You can take control of your own development at any time, but many of us don't as we feel held back by time, money, or imposter syndrome. Careers used to be linear and ladder-like. They were about following in other people’s footsteps and focused on getting to the top. This predictable approach to careers no longer fits—and it doesn’t reflect people’s reality or their individuality. Enter the lobster, which never stops growing.