Next Level Blog

MAY 10, 2023

At what point in your day or your week do you fully unplug? It’s an interesting and perhaps a challenging question since, for most of us, our phones and all the data streams they provide are almost always in reach. Without some sort of intentional interrupt scheduled into your day, it’s easy to stay plugged in from the time you wake up in the morning until the time you fall asleep at night.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 24, 2023

My son Brad’s girlfriend Renee is a brand new first grade teacher this year. In addition to her commitment to setting little kids off on a strong path for their lives, I’m really impressed by how much thought and effort Renee puts into her work every day. It takes a lot of planning plus improvisational skills to keep a roomful of six-year-olds engaged and learning from 8:30 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon.

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Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2022

It depends on the industry, but in most large organizations, a promotion to vice president is the entry point to the executive ranks. I’ve written before about what it takes to get promoted in general and have written a book on what’s usually expected of you once you reach the next level. Today, I want to write specifically about how high potential leaders get promoted to vice president or to whatever the entry level executive role is in their company.

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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

OCTOBER 18, 2022

One of the big differences between leaders who shape the bigger picture for a company and those that hit a ceiling and stay stuck in their functional roles is that the big picture leaders are way better at influencing their colleagues. I’ve had some amazing big picture leaders and influencers as executive coaching clients over the years and was talking with one of them last week.

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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

JULY 12, 2022

One of the leadership communications distinctions I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is the difference between communications that are episodic and those that are longitudinal. Back in January, I wrote a post about how leaders need to pull the thread through so their teams can see how their work fits into the longer arc of the work. Lately, I’ve been advising a lot of clients on how to frame their communications for C-Suite executives who, because of the nature of their jobs, are bombarded

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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 1, 2022

In over thirty years of either working for senior executives, being a senior executive, or coaching senior executives, I’ve come to a few conclusions. One of them is that, too often, there’s an overemphasis on strategy and an underemphasis on culture. When that’s the case, the outcomes usually aren’t the greatest. There’s a reason the late, great Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 4, 2022

In the last month of 2021, Wharton professor Adam Grant wrote a widely-read and quoted column for the New York Times titled There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing. As is his gift, Grant described something many were feeling but couldn’t quite articulate. The suspended animation aspect of the past two years and the feeling of a lack of control over our circumstances have left many of us in a state somewhere between depression and flourishing.

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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 23, 2021

Back in the days when I led leadership workshops in physical rooms, I would illustrate the power of transformational listening by having my leaders break out into groups of three and take five minutes each to answer the question, “What are you grateful for?”. Each person would take a turn speaking to that question while a second person listened not just with their ears but with their eyes, their smiles, their nods and, occasionally, a hand reaching out to touch the hand or shoulder of the speake

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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

OCTOBER 12, 2021

What does it actually take to get promoted to a bigger job? I’ve been in a lot of conversations about that question over the years. Often the question comes from a high potential leader looking for advice. Sometimes it comes up with a manager who wants advice on how to answer that question from an ambitious team member. As a public service to both groups, I’ll share my own observations drawn from a few decades worth of experience as an executive, executive coach and someone who’s written a book

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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

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 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

APRIL 26, 2021

A few weeks ago, I had an online Q&A session with a senior executive following a keynote presentation I did for her company’s annual senior leadership summit. Like a lot of organizations, this company has a senior leadership team conference at the beginning of the year – either fiscal or calendar – to lay out their themes, goals and plans for the next 12 months.

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 12, 2021

One of the things I’ve seen a lot of leaders struggling with during this extended period of leading from home is how to stay on top of all the communications they have to do with different stakeholders – their team members, their managers, their peers, other colleagues and external partners. This very topic came up last week in a small group coaching session in a program called Leading While Working from Home that I’m delivering for one of our client companies.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 30, 2021

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to coach the members of a couple of different corporate senior leadership teams. The coaching approach I use for leadership teams is a lot like the one I use for individual leaders. We start with self-assessment and colleague feedback for each team member to identify strengths that can be leveraged in new ways along with the one or two development opportunities that would make the biggest difference if the leader moved the needle on them in a positive

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 9, 2021

It was one year ago this week that COVID brought things to a screeching halt in the United States. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they were sick with COVID and quarantined in Australia. The NBA and other professional and collegiate sports leagues were suspended. Offices shut down and many of us started working from home. What we thought would be a few months of living and working on a restricted basis has turned out to be a year and counting.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

In the years that I’ve been coaching clients and audiences on creating their own Life GPS® personal planning strategy , I’ve learned that identifying the outcomes they want to help create in their communities is often the most challenging component for people. I get that because, for many years, it was the most challenging for me too. I think there are a number of reasons for that.

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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 22, 2020

What would you do if your customer base tripled almost overnight and their lives depended on you scaling up your leadership and your organization to meet the sudden surge in demand? That’s exactly the question that Los Angeles Regional Food Bank CEO Michael Flood and his team had to answer and act on this year. Their experience provides a case study that holds lessons for any organization in any sector.

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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

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

JULY 7, 2020

As I’ve been writing about the past couple of weeks, the allostatic load of the extraordinarily stressful period we’re living, working and leading through demands that we be more mindful about the routines that can help us be both effective and healthy. I’ve already written about physical and mental routines. This week, I want to talk about relational routines; the ones that address our basic need for love and belonging and that also help keep us alive.

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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 26, 2020

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post that made the case that we’re all at the beginning of Phase 2 in our response to the global pandemic. To recap, Phase 1 lasted for about 8 weeks, depending on where in the world you live and, for large organizations at least, was about quickly reinventing how work was going to get done with many people working from home.

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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

MAY 5, 2020

One of the bright spots for me of this life-changing era we’re all living through is the stories of human connection that I hear from the executives I speak with every week. Again and again, they share moments or emails that demonstrate how tough times can bring out the best in leaders and their teams. I’m struck by how the moments that matter most are the ones in which leaders share themselves as human beings and encourage their team members to do the same.

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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 19, 2020

Along with testing our public health and economic systems in unprecedented ways, the COVID-19 pandemic will test leaders at all levels in all organizations as never before. When I talk about the ideas in my book, The Next Level , one of the first things I usually say is that the next level is any leadership situation which requires different results.

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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 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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