Next Level Blog

MAY 23, 2023

Leaders need to be confident! Leaders should show vulnerability! Yes, and yes. In a LinkedIn pol l I conducted this week, 100% of the respondents at the time I wrote this post said it’s possible to exhibit confidence and vulnerability at the same time. So, how do you do it? I think it depends on what your confidence is based on. If it’s the force of your personality that you’re relying on, the sizzle more than the steak so to speak, it’s probably impossible to show both confidence and vulnerabil

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 4, 2023

Ideally, everyone who works for a company would act as an ambassador for that organization to the public at large. In the rare cases where you see that, it’s a triumph of a highly aligned corporate culture. And, as is true with any culture (good ones or bad ones), it starts at the top. When the senior executives act like ambassadors they also act as role models for everyone else in the company.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

In more than 20 years of executive coaching, I long ago lost count of the number of conversations I’ve been in about the challenges of personal time management. A quick count today of 15 years of my blog posts suggests that I’ve written on the topic at least a couple of dozen times. So, in the interest of helping you manage your time more effectively and saving you time while you do it, here’s my ultimate (for now) guide to personal time management tactics and strategies.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 3, 2023

How you start your day is predictive of how your day is going to end. And a consecutive series of good starts is predictive of not just how your year is going to start but also how it ends. Over the weekend, I saw a quote from country star and fellow native West Virginian Brad Paisley that inspired this post – “Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book.

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

A common dilemma for the leaders I work with is that, in spite of their best intentions to operate at a big picture strategic level, they find themselves regularly getting pulled into the weeds of day-to-day details that really aren’t the highest and best use of their time and attention. Honestly, sometimes they just go there – no pulling required. That leads to an age-old question: How do you stay out of the weeds?

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

Consider this post a public service announcement. If you don’t have a peer coach, you need to go recruit one. It will be one of the best things you do this year for yourself and your newly recruited peer coach. How do I know that? Because I’ve had scores of leaders tell me so. As I’ve written here before, peer coaching is an important component of just about every leadership development program we offer at the Eblin Group – whether it’s the Next Level Leadership® group coaching program, the Next

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 9, 2022

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 28, 2022

Between the leaders I’ve worked with in our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program and the individual executives I’ve coached over the last 20 plus years, I’ve delivered around 2,000 colleague feedback reports. And there’s one thing I’ve seen again and again in so many of those feedback conversations. High achieving, ambitious leaders want to blow right past the strengths that have enabled their success and dive right into what they need to “fix.”.

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Next Level Blog

MAY 16, 2022

Now it begins. After two plus years of working from home (or somewhere else), more and more folks are heading back to the office for at least a few days a week. And, guess what? They like it! That’s the story from the Wall Street Journal , anyway. In a feature article that details “the surprise joys of being back in the office,” the Journal reports that people are enjoying returning to the office and finding printers that work and people to talk to while they warm up their lunch in the break roo

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Next Level Blog

MAY 3, 2022

I love it when I learn from the people I’m coaching. Fortunately, that happens a lot including as recently as a few weeks ago when I was talking with Rishi, a country manager on a leadership team I’m coaching. In a prep conversation for an upcoming team coaching session, I asked Rishi what’s been working lately with the team he leads. Among other things, he mentioned that he’s been giving his team the latitude to make their own decisions and then own those decisions.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 15, 2022

The one thing that I think all of my clients agree on is that they’re sick of meetings. That tracks back to the quantity of meetings they have in a day or a week – way too many, and to the quality of the meetings they attend – too often, they’re tortuous and inconclusive. In other words, a painful waste of time. There’s a lot out there about how to run a good meeting so I’m not really going to get into that here.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

One of my favorite definitions of life purpose is that you find it when your great joy meets a great need. I think that appeals to me so much because it defines what I’ve been doing as a leadership coach for over two decades. I got started in this work because in my own career as a corporate executive I regularly found myself in high stakes situations where I really had no clue what to do or how to be.

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Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2021

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about when things have to be perfect and when “good enough” is good enough. It probably won’t be the last. As happened a couple of weeks ago, just about every time I work with a new cohort of leaders in our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program , someone ends up choosing the 360-degree feedback behavior, “Effectively differentiates between efforts that require perfection and those for which “good enough” is sufficient,” as a focal point for their pe

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Here’s something that might make your head spin. Next week will mark 20 months since the day we all learned that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were quarantined with COVID in Australia and the NBA shut down its season on a dime when a player was diagnosed with COVID during pre-game warmups and the arena was cleared of fans. In the United States, March 11, 2020 was the day the pandemic got real.

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

This past Saturday, I had the privilege of sharing an auditorium with dozens of motivated young college men from the HBCU North Carolina Central University and other institutions. I know they were motivated because they showed up at 8:30 am on a Saturday morning for the Durham Success Summit’s (DSS) annual flagship event. They then spent the day in conversation with President Obama’s former aide and “body man”, Reggie Love ; learning how to build their personal brands, getting career development

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 17, 2021

Well, it looks like a lot of us, including me , called the end of the pandemic way too soon. Remember those blissful few months in the late Spring and early Summer when we were walking into restaurants and stores without a mask? Making plans to go back to the office in the Fall? COVID case rates were falling. Vaccination rates were rising. And then the fun and optimism came to a screeching halt as vaccination rates plateaued, the Delta variant arrived, the masks went back on and plans for the Fa

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Next Level Blog

JULY 13, 2021

If there’s one topic that’s a common denominator in many of the conversations I’ve had with senior executives over the past few months, it’s how to handle the issue of employees returning to the office. Other than the ones who have said that everyone can work remotely, I haven’t talked with or heard of any companies that have really figured it out yet.

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Next Level Blog

MAY 11, 2021

Last week I wrote that as we quickly move to hybrid and remote work arrangements, leaders will need to be mindful, creative and deliberate in creating approaches to work that leave everyone feeling valued and essential. This week I want to build on that post by offering three strategies that foster what I could see us calling “connection equity.” By connection equity, I mean that everyone on a team or an organization has equal opportunities to feel connected to and included in the work no matter

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Next Level Blog

MAY 4, 2021

Back in the days when I lived outside of Washington, DC, I was always fascinated by the snow days that were so big they pretty much shut the Federal government down. The guidance broadcast on the television and radio stations on those mornings was that only “essential workers” should report to work and that “non-essential workers” should stay home. I always wondered what it felt like to be deemed “non-essential.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 2, 2021

It almost always happens. Whenever I work with a group of high potential leaders, we eventually get to the conversation about agency. Someone will start talking about all the organizational dynamics that seem to be getting in the way of progress and then others will join in. Before you know it, everyone is talking about what “they” need to do to make things better and by “they” the group usually means the more senior executives in the organization.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 12, 2021

Over the weekend, I saw a Tweet from preventive medicine doctor, James Hamblin that read, “This concludes the first week of 2021.”. Following a week of record COVID deaths and a deadly riot in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, Hamblin succinctly summed up the way a lot of us feel. It’s a new year but it feels like we’re in the same boat as we were a few weeks ago when it was still 2020.

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Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 1, 2020

The publication date of this post, December 1, 2020, marks the 20 th anniversary of our leadership development company, The Eblin Group. Over the past two decades, colleagues, friends and clients have often asked my wife, life and business partner Diane and me how we’ve grown the business over two decades and what we’ve learned along the way. There’s a lot to say and share about that for sure – more than one blog post can address.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 20, 2020

In case you’ve lost count, you may be one of the many of us who are in month eight of working from home. Based on the plans of companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Aetna, Mastercard and others, it looks like a lot of people are going to continue working from home well into 2021 and, in some cases, forever. That means this is a good time to take a look at where you can up your game as an online leader and communicator.

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

One of the things you read most often about the effects of the pandemic is that it has accelerated trends that were already in play by about 10 years. In certain aspects of work and life, it suddenly seems like 2030 instead of 2020. Working from home and in other distributed locations away from the office is probably the most prominent example. That trend was predicted for years and, now, suddenly, it’s a reality that will likely permanently alter the way work gets done in organizations.

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Most of the organizations I’m talking to and observing during the pandemic recognize the need to up their levels of innovation and agility. After all, if you need to pivot your business model and set yourself up to succeed in whatever environment presents itself next, you need to have those two qualities embedded in your culture. Some companies have been successful in pivoting quickly, while others have found it more challenging.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 27, 2020

What verb tense is your mind spending most of its time in – present, past or future? How about the members of your team – what time frame are their minds working in? You might consider those questions to be a bit weird or out there, but if you stop and examine the nature of your language and the quality of your thinking, you may find they’re more relevant than you’d initially think.

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 24, 2020

Over the past month, I’ve been running two or three online sessions a week with groups of leaders to provide them with some reference points and space to think about how to lead in our current environment. Leadership is always challenging. It’s more so during a pandemic when work routines and business plans are completely disrupted. It’s even more challenging during a much needed but very intense period of protests, conversations and consideration in service of establishing anti-racist policies

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 17, 2020

I’ve had a lot of conversations with corporate leaders over the past couple of weeks that have all focused on variations of the same question, “What can I do to help end racism?” This is one of those times when I’m glad that the conventional wisdom on how to coach others is that it’s more about the questions than the answers. I’m good at asking questions, but on the topic of ending racism, don’t have a lot of answers based on long-term personal experience.

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Next Level Blog

MAY 19, 2020

A few weeks ago, I received a nice comment on LinkedIn about one of my blog posts from David Hoey who shared that he’s been a regular reader since 2010 when I wrote about the leadership lessons offered by the Chilean mine rescue. I appreciated David’s note for both the kindness he showed and for bringing the memory of the rescue back to mind. In case you’ve forgotten, from late August and into early October 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped a half mile underground for 70 days when a collapse

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Next Level Blog

MAY 12, 2020

From my vantage point of speaking with around a dozen leaders from different industries every week since the pandemic began, I’ve concluded that we’re at the end of Phase 1 and the beginning of Phase 2 of what it means to live and work in this new world. Phase 1 has been the “reinvention” phase where leaders have been focused on figuring out new ways to keep their businesses running at some basic level.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 31, 2020

In times of crisis, complex decisions often have to be made and implemented quickly. It can be challenging to coordinate and obtain buy-in on those big decisions even when the stakeholders can get in a room together to hash it all out. In the new “Work from Home” (WFH) era sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, being in the same room isn’t an option. That can lead to some predictable conflict-management problems that you can avoid with a little foresight and creativity.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 4, 2020

One of the most memorable moments of my professional life was the first time I got to present from the Pit. (The picture that accompanies this post is me in that moment from 2013.). In case you’re not familiar with it, the Pit is the well at the bottom of an amphitheater style room that seats about a hundred people on GE’s Crotonville leadership development campus in the Hudson River Valley.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

For everyone who likes to get their leadership development through their ears instead of their eyes, I have good news. The audio edition of my book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success has arrived and is ready to stream through your earbuds. The new audio edition is available wherever you purchase your audio books including Amazon , Apple Books and Audiobook.com.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 5, 2020

Ever had a manager who told you they had an “open-door policy?” Who knows, maybe you’ve even declared that yourself. The open-door policy implies that your team members or colleagues can come to you with anything. That desire to be a transparent and open leader is admirable. The problem starts when people knock on the proverbial door (and knock and knock) and no one’s home.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 8, 2020

Life is better when you have fans – people who know and appreciate you, support you and can’t wait to see what you do next. It doesn’t matter if you’re not a rock star, Instagram influencer or a professional athlete. All of us need fans. Fanocracy. In a recent conversation with David Meerman Scott , co-author of the new book, Fanocracy: Turning Fans into Customers and Customers into Fans , I learned a lot about how to find and connect with your fans.

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Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 11, 2019

The best leaders I work with as an executive coach encourage open and honest dialogue. They’ve learned and understand why it’s so important for the people on their team and in their organizations to be completely comfortable with speaking up. First, you really want people contributing their best ideas on a regular basis because that’s how you win. Second, if your people aren’t contributing, speaking up and sharing the truth as they see it, you’re going to be flying blind as a leader.

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 20, 2019

A few weeks ago, I opened a post with a story about one of my favorite questions for leaders, “What is it that only you can do?” Since then, I’ve asked that question again in one of my last keynotes of the year and got an answer back that was so clear and succinct that I just had to share it with you. The answer I received back from an executive in the room is actually the title of this post, “Great leaders give direction, not directions.

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