I was an ambitious Amazon exec who solved my burnout without skipping a beat at work. Here’s how.

A former Amazon exec describes hitting burnout after two years of relentless overwork with no feedback from leadership. Her recovery wasn’t dramatic — it was small, deliberate shifts: eating lunch, reading before bed, saying no to low-value commitments, picking up hobbies, and working with a therapist. Her core lesson: pushing harder through burnout makes you less effective, not more. Small habits compound. You don’t need a dramatic overhaul — you just need to start somewhere.

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If You Want to Be a Better Boss, Science Says Stop Serving Feedback Sandwiches

The feedback sandwich — positive, negative, positive — feels manipulative and rarely changes behavior. Research shows people focus on the delivery rather than the actual feedback. The better approach is benevolent honesty: deliver criticism directly, but pair it with a clear signal that you believe in the person’s ability to improve. One sentence — “I have high expectations because I know you can meet them” — makes feedback up to 40% more effective. The goal isn’t to make the conversation comfortable for you. It’s to actually help the other person get better.

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Should You Develop Your Leadership Strengths or Fix Your Weaknesses

Leaders shouldn’t automatically choose between building strengths or fixing weaknesses. Instead, they should diagnose what their situation requires by asking questions.

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The Career Advice No One Teaches High Achievers

The article argues that career advancement depends not just on performance, but on how clearly you communicate your impact. Strong narratives, crisp positioning, and self-advocacy matter as much as the work itself—because if people can’t quickly understand your value, someone easier to explain will get the opportunity instead.

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Your Best Employees Are Leaving Because of “Minor” Decisions

Your best people aren’t leaving for more money — they’re leaving because of what your small decisions are saying out loud. Trimming a commission here, adding a tracking system there, quietly cutting a perk — none of it looks alarming on a spreadsheet. But your team is paying attention. Every one of those moves sends a message: you’re an expense, not an asset. Culture isn’t built through big speeches. It’s built — or broken — through the everyday choices people notice most. If you want to keep great employees, start by asking what your decisions are communicating.

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Why You’re Just One Event Away From Quitting Your Job

Even when quitting feels like a slow burn that dances around your mind for months—or even years—the truth is that finally leaving is caused by a sudden spark. Unexpected “jolts” drive us to rethink our work, often leading to impulsive exits, but we can respond more deliberately to make smarter career moves.

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5 Mistakes You Make When You Delegate

Great managers don't just get things done — they create others who get things done. Avoid five common delegation mistakes: unclear tasks, incomplete instructions, undefined success, skipping check-ins, and forgetting recognition. A little prep and a simple framework go a long way toward making delegation actually work.

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4 Questions to Ask to Decide If You Should Delegate or Do It Yourself

Before delegating, ask four questions: Does this task move the organization forward? Does it energize or drain me? Am I actually good at it? Can only I do it? Most tasks fail at least one test — and that’s your signal to hand them off, outsource them, or eliminate them entirely.

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These are the Perks People Want

Workers across generations and industries aren’t walking away from the table; rather, they’re renegotiating what matters. Many are willing to reconsider previously hard-won benefits—such as remote work—if it means gaining more long-term value in return, like upskilling opportunities, time autonomy, and roles that align with their values. It’s about reshaping the deal to reflect what talent sees as sustainable and future-proof.

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Want to Motivate Front Line Employees?

Not every manager controls the paycheck — but every manager controls the environment.

This article makes a straightforward case: when you can’t offer higher pay, you still have more motivational tools than you think. The big ones are recognition (a genuine “thank you” goes further than most managers realize), empowerment (let people solve problems without running to you first), and connection (the number one reason employees find work fulfilling is simply liking the people they work with).

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The Best Ways for Coaching an Employee in the Workplace

Effective employee coaching combines recognition, honest conversation, and collaborative goal-setting. The article outlines a ten-step process — from acknowledging strengths and identifying barriers to writing SMART action plans and following up consistently — with the goal of improving both individual performance and long-term professional development.

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6 Low Lift Ways to Coach Employees in the Flow of Work

Many leaders find coaching daunting. It feels time-consuming, intangible, and far removed from the hard metrics they’re used to managing. But coaching can be a flexible, everyday leadership behavior—not a rigid framework. There are six unconventional, real-world coaching practices that are quick, spontaneous, and deeply impactful: 1) Using in-the-moment nudges; 2) giving exposure; 3) connecting; 4) letting go; 5) coaching in context; and 6) modeling. Through spontaneous conversations, contextual feedback, and authentic human moments, leaders can build confidence, clarity, and capability in others.

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Our leaders and institutions are failing us, but it’s not always because they’re bad or unethical, says venture capitalist John Doerr -- often, it’s simply because they’re leading us toward the wrong objectives. In this practical talk, Doerr shows us how we can get back on track with “Objectives and Key Results,” or OKRs -- a goal-setting system that’s been employed by the likes of Google, Intel and Bono to set and execute on audacious goals. Learn more about how setting the right goals can mean the difference between success and failure -- and how we can use OKRs to hold our leaders and ourselves accountable.

5 Signs Your Team Isn’t Aligned

The illusion of alignment always has a cost. When people realize they’ve been working in different directions, frustration grows, trust erodes, and energy that should go into work gets wasted on fixing problems.

This happens because most leaders confuse agreement with alignment. They’re not the same thing. Agreement is what people say in a meeting. Alignment is what they do after. As the gap quietly grows, it creates alignment debt.

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What Leaders Get Wrong About Responsibility

Leaders default to answering questions rather than asking them, which quietly undermines the distributed accountability they claim to want. Research shows that how you frame questions matters: “I” questions center the leader, “you” questions isolate the individual, but “we” questions build shared responsibility. The shift is small—a pronoun, a pause before answering—but the cultural impact is significant. If you want your team to own problems, you have to stop performing as the person who has all the answers.

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Leaders, Consider Pausing Before Acting on Employee Feedback

Acting on employee feedback is essential to being a good leader. But a new study shows that how fast leaders change in response to this feedback shapes whether employees see them as authentic—and how likely they’ll be to share insights in the future. Across field and experimental studies, rapid shifts—especially on hard-to-change behaviors like listening—appeared disingenuous, dampening their willingness to give future feedback. Gradual change, however, was more often read as sincere growth. Before responding to feedback, leaders should pause, think deeply about the feedback, and communicate both intentions and process—verbally and nonverbally—to align visible behavior with signals of meaningful change. Managing the pace and explanation of change builds credibility and strengthens employees’ willingness to share valuable insights down the line.

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40 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said There’s 1 Simple Habit That Separates High Performers From Those Who Fall Short

I agree with this, but this only happens with feedback. We can’t just “find” these people. We have to use feedback (and coaching) to get them to this point.

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Successful teams rely on energy, resilience, and community—and middle managers need all three now more than ever. In this practical solo episode, host Damon Lembi shares game-changing strategies for navigating the toughest seat in business: the middle. Drawing inspiration from a chaotic day at his son’s nursery school, Damon unpacks the real-world stressors facing today’s middle managers and delivers three essential tips you can start using immediately. From protecting your sleep to reimagining meetings, plus a surprising approach to building your own peer support circle, this episode is packed with mental, physical, and tactical tools to help you thrive—not just survive. Damon also shares a bonus “book of wins” exercise to keep your motivation high against all odds.

3 Habits of Self-Directed Learners

Polymaths approach learning differently than most people. They maintain a running list of open questions that guide what they study, teach concepts before they feel ready (because explaining something exposes what you don't actually know), and deliberately read across fields to build a toolkit of mental models. The result is a self-directed relationship with knowledge—one where you're the author, not just the consumer.

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Why you’re overlooking your secret career strengths (and how to start recognizing them)

Many leaders overlook their greatest strengths because natural talents feel effortless. Tools like 360 feedback, peer conversations, and a “brag book” help uncover how others truly see you. Recognizing and intentionally leveraging those hidden strengths sharpens your personal brand and accelerates your career.

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In the face of rapidly-evolving business environments, the ability to make smart decisions quickly is one of a company’s greatest assets—yet the importance of decision making as an organizational competency is undervalued.

A 2019 McKinsey survey found that just 20% of respondents say their organizations excel at decision making. A poll one year later by Gallup echoed those results, with just 24% of U.S. managers strongly agreeing their peers make well-thought-out decisions.

While some organizations have taken comprehensive steps to improve decision quality, most do not yet treat decision making the way they do other competencies.

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Most leaders make dozens of decisions daily but rarely document why they made them. When key people leave, that reasoning walks out with them — forcing teams to relitigate settled issues and rebuild institutional knowledge from scratch. The article argues that a simple documentation habit (capturing context, options considered, decision criteria, the final choice, and expected outcomes) creates compounding organizational value: faster decisions, better team judgment, and protection against the knowledge loss that comes with turnover. The core insight is straightforward — five minutes of captured reasoning today saves your future team weeks of circular debate.

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Article 1

After his father’s death, the author — while proactively managing the estate — was contacted by a debt collection agency acting on behalf of the bank, days after he’d already called to settle the account. The bank’s policy had automatically routed the deceased customer to collections, with no human judgment involved. The leadership point: efficiency-driven policies, evaluated only by cost savings, can quietly destroy customer trust at the worst possible moments. The question every leader should ask is where in their organization customers are being treated like spreadsheet entries instead of people.

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Performance Expectations = Results + Actions and Behaviors

This is a bit long, but has some quality information in it.

To perform well, employees need to know what is expected of them. The starting point is an up-to-date job description that describes the essential functions, tasks, and responsibilities of the job. It also outlines the general areas of knowledge and skills required of the employee an employee to be successful in the job.

In discussing performance expectations an employee should understand why the job exists, where it fits in the organization, and how the job’s responsibilities link to organization and department objectives.

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The Importance of Setting Expectations as a Leader

Setting clear expectations is essential for team success. Leaders must tailor expectations to each individual’s skills and role, establish them early, and put them in writing. Providing context around the “why” helps team members understand how their work fits the bigger picture. Expectations must be measurable, ideally using the SMART framework, to avoid the three common gaps that derail performance: knowledge gaps, standards gaps, and satisfaction gaps. When expectations are clear, realistic, and well-communicated, the result is higher performance, better work quality, and greater employee confidence.

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One of the core tasks of team leaders is keeping motivation and inspiration high. This doesn’t mean all great leaders are charismatic and inspiring. In fact, the opposite is often true. Motivating employees isn’t about what you say to them, it’s about understanding what they’re seeking from work.

And while understanding the unique desires of each team member might take a while, there’s a proven model for understanding human motivation that just might help you uncover your team’s motivation mysteries faster. In the mid-1980s, researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan outlined a model of motivation called “self-determination theory.” Their theory posited that intrinsic motivation comes in three forms: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

5 Ways to Motivate Your Frontline Employees

Frontline employees are among the least motivated in the workforce — and the managers responsible for them often have limited tools to fix that. This article lays out five practical levers:

Mission clarity — people work harder when they know why their work matters. Recognition — a simple “thank you” boosts morale for 75% of employees, and peer-to-peer recognition is 36% more effective than manager-only praise. Feedback loops — employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to perform at their best. Better technology — outdated tools kill motivation faster than most managers realize. Ongoing learning — 94% of employees say they’d stay longer at a company that invests in their development.

The bottom line — motivated frontline workers aren’t a compensation problem, they’re a connection and investment problem. And most of those solutions sit directly in a manager’s hands.

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Article 1

This one has a reframe worth paying attention to.

The premise is simple but a little uncomfortable: it’s not your job to motivate your people. Motivation is internal. People motivate themselves. Your job is to create the environment where that can happen.

The authors make a distinction between doing and being — and argue that the best managers are remembered not for their programs or initiatives, but for who they were. They listened. They cared. They held people to high standards while believing in them at the same time.

The practical takeaway is almost counterintuitive: do less. Set people up for success, give them room to own their work, and get out of the way.

The bottom line — stop carrying the weight of your team’s motivation on your back. That’s not your burden and it was never your job. Your job is to build an environment where people want to bring their best. That’s a much more manageable assignment.

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Learn how to coach employees effectively, focusing on attention and acknowledgement, not just feedback. This video explores recognizing and amplifying employees’ strengths by reacting to their successes. Discover techniques to help them consciously build on what already exists.

What is the Future of Management?

The middle manager role is under fire. US employers advertised 42% fewer middle management positions at the end of 2024 than in spring 2022 deloitte, and companies are experimenting with “bossless” structures to cut costs and increase agility. But Deloitte argues that simply eliminating managers doesn’t work — it often creates shadow leaders and pushes decision-making back to the top.

The real answer is reinvention. The managers of tomorrow need to shift away from administrative task management toward three core capabilities: coaching and developing people, redesigning work in an AI-driven environment, and enabling agility and strategic problem-solving. The foundation for all three is judgment — the human ability to make nuanced decisions with empathy, context, and wisdom.

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7 Steps for Coaching Difficult Employees

The article presents a 7-step coaching model for handling difficult employees, with the goal of restoring performance — not punishing. The steps are: set a positive, private tone; describe the problem in specific, neutral terms; get the employee to acknowledge an issue exists; explore the root causes together; have the employee co-create the solution; appeal to what the employee personally values (their “WIIFM”); and close with a clear summary and next steps.

The core message is simple — how you make someone feel during a coaching conversation matters as much as what you say.

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Being heard at work has less to do with volume than strategy. And in the workplace, it’ll have a huge impact on whether you’re seen as competent, get credit for the work you do, and are able to get your job done. Here are a bunch of practical tips to improve your chances of being heard at work without having to yell.

Steve Jobs and the Rule of 3

Steve Jobs built his legendary communication style around one simple framework: the Rule of 3. Whether launching the iPhone, delivering a commencement speech, or choosing a washing machine, he organized ideas into three digestible points — because three is the sweet spot for human memory, pattern recognition, and attention.

But here’s the twist: Jobs didn’t always actually use three things. Sometimes two, sometimes five. “Three” was a rhetorical wrapper, not a math equation. He learned the rule well enough to break it on purpose.

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The middle manager’s Playbook for staying sane and moving up

Middle managers operate between executive expectations and frontline realities, often carrying heavy responsibility without matching authority. This tension contributes to high burnout and feelings of overwhelm. Yet the middle layer is also where strategy becomes action and culture is reinforced. To turn pressure into growth, managers can: build coalitions across teams to prevent misalignment; treat leadership as a practiced skill developed through small, repeated experiments; use AI-assisted coaching for real-time support with difficult conversations; and embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to learn and adapt. With these approaches, middle management becomes a powerful proving ground rather than a stress point.

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Delegation isn’t black and white, it has shades of gray. Jim Schleckser from The CEO Project discusses the levels of delegation

Article - How Can I Delegate More

Delegation feels risky, but the payoff is worth it. Beyond saving time and money, it builds your team’s skills and frees you for higher-value work. The key steps: create a clear written guide, walk them through it, have them repeat it back, then check in once before stepping away.

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Article - How to Delegate When You are a Die-Hard Perfectionist

Perfectionism feels like a strength, but it’s quietly killing your leadership potential. Hoarding tasks signals to senior management that you’re not ready for more responsibility. Start small by delegating low-stakes tasks, define the “what” and “why” but let your team own the “how,” and trust that they might surprise you.

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In this video, Quantum Workplace Product Manager Meghan Freeman shares how to embed employee development directly into the flow of work. Learn why traditional development plans fall flat, what’s holding employees back, and how HR can help every employee grow without burning out. Whether you’re leading HR, L&D, or people strategy, this 6-minute video shows how you can shift your culture—and your tech—to make growth continuous, personalized, and impactful.

Article - How This Dump Manager Reveals the Secret of Happy, Engaged Employees

Willie Shanks turned a dump job into community-building through “job crafting” — finding deeper meaning in work and reshaping daily tasks around that purpose. Research shows this approach makes employees happier, more engaged, and more productive. Leaders should give their teams room to do the same.

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Article - Managers are Too Tired to Learn New Skills

A new ATD report reveals that 90% of managers are too overworked and fatigued to participate in their employers’ development programs — even as they shepherd their teams through training. The problem is compounded by management layoffs that leave remaining managers overburdened. More than half of managers received “little or no training” for their first management role, and 63% said the job was harder than expected. Solutions include building accessible resource libraries, mentoring programs, and creating blame-free environments where managers can admit they need support without fear it signals weakness.

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The Benefits of Coaching in the Workplace

Too many managers make the mistake of thinking they don’t need to coach or it doesn’t provide value. Read this to bust those myths.

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Coaching strategies that work

Coaching takes time, but these strategies make it worth while.

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Blind spots are a huge impediment to making good decisions. This video not only defines blind spots, but helps give actionable advice on how to identify and overcome blind spots.

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Book - Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Annie Duke is a former professional poker player and now a professor at Duke University. She gives some of the best information on the psychology behind decision making.

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What is Decision Making

Decision making is simply the process of making a choice. But decision making often isn’t easy and can be particularly complex in an organizational context. This article by McKinsey is a great primer on decision-making.

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How to Strengthen Decision Making Skills for Managers

Points out the accurate statement that decision making is not an inborn talent. So what skills to managers need to learn to make good decisions? Read and find out.

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The Power of Asking For Feedback at Work. Here’s why you should ask for feedback at work and how to ask for feedback at work. Asking for feedback is one of the most effective things you can do to further your career and stand out as a true leader. Asking for feedback doesn’t have to be painful - if you ask for it the right way and ask the right people. Let me know if you ask for feedback and what the results have been? Have you found certain questions work better than others? Do you dread getting feedback or actively encourage it and look forward to feedback?.

Book Suggestion - The Upskilling Imperative: 5 Ways to Make Learning Core to the Way We Work

This book deals with much more than just feedback. But Chapter 5 is worth the price of the book alone.

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Article - How Effective Feedback Fuels Performance

I hear all the time from managers (before they join my program) that feedback doesn’t work. They quickly learn that the data is overwhelming that feedback not only works, it is one of the best tools they have to improve performance and get results.

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Article -A Manager’s Guide to Giving Feedback

Feedback is more effective when the employee knows it is coming from a place of positive intent - meaning you care about them and their success. This article gives several tips on how to create an environment where feedback is received in the positive intent with which you give it.

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Some of My Past Articles on the Topics

Simon Sinek is one of the great management thinkers of our time - even if that isn’t his main focus. Here he talks about the challenge managers have of not being the one who creates the strategy, but also having to implement it at the micro level. It is a challenge that all managers know too well.

Book Suggestion - Power to the Middle

I read this book over a year ago and find myself going back to it again and again. It is a great treatise on how we got to where we are (and these consultants do a nice “mea culpa”) and what we need to do now to fix things.

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Article - What Does it Mean to be a Good Middle Manager

From the authors of the book above, an interview they did that summarizes the book quite nicely.

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Article - A Management Anti-Fad That Will Last Forever

This isn’t revolutionary (keep your employees happy and they will work harder), but it lays out the case in a well-written fashion. The issue isn’t can we do these things (answer: yes), but are organizations willing to do it (answer: no).

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Some of My Past Articles on the Topics