Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Last week, I ran a poll on LinkedIn on one of the biggest things I coach executives about – making the shift from being the go-to person to building and leading a team of go to people. When I asked, “Which works better for you? Being a go-to person or building a team of go-to people?”, 84% of the respondents answered building a team of go-to people.

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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 28, 2021

You want to accelerate your development as a leader in your organization and think having a mentor to guide you could be a really good thing. You may be right about that but it can often be hard to find a good mentor. If that’s the case for you, what are your options? If you’re committed to getting better and better, I’d suggest you both get and be a great peer coach.

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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

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 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 19, 2021

One of the big themes I’m already working on with my leader clients this year is how to keep their teams energized and engaged as we all push through this pandemic. There are a lot of things that teams need from their leaders these days but to keep it simple, I want to boil it down to three common denominators that almost any team is going to need from any leader in 2021.

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Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 15, 2020

Last week I had a thoughtful client ask me a question I don’t get asked very often – What makes a great leader? Since, as an executive coach, I’m usually the one asking the questions, she caught me off guard with hers. What followed next was a quick real-time distillation of long-held thoughts and observations on the nature of true leadership.

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2020

A few years ago, around the time my book, Overworked and Overwhelmed was launched, I wrote a series of blog posts under the theme of Mindful Mondays. I left that theme when I felt at the time that I had said everything I wanted to say on being mindful. On this Monday before Election Day in the United States, it feels like a good theme to return to for a week.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 6, 2020

If you’re working from home, are you missing your commute? That kind of sounds like a stupid question. Who misses sitting in traffic looking at taillights? Not many people, I’d guess, but that’s probably not the part of your commute you’re missing. What you’re missing is the best part – the interstitial time between one place and the next or, to put it another way, between one now and the next now.

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 4, 2020

I’m observing (virtually, of course) more and more leaders who are short-termers. By that, I don’t mean that they’re not long for their jobs. What I mean is that they’re not looking far enough out into the future. At the beginning of the pandemic, this probably made sense. As I wrote back in May , the first eight weeks or so of the quarantine era were about reinventing work processes so people could work from home.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 21, 2020

Gary Burnison , the CEO of recruiting and leadership development firm Korn-Ferry writes a weekly email every week which I subscribe to. Not surprisingly, a lot of his notes the past several months have focused on leading during the pandemic. This past week, Gary offered a pointed metaphor to describe where he thinks we collectively are in the process.

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 3, 2020

As a white male, I’m reluctant to offer a lot of personal commentary in this post but would argue that a lack of empathy for the lives and life experience of others has been a significant contributor to where we are as a nation this week. Likewise, I believe that we’re not going to emerge from this ongoing tragedy without intentional deep work on empathy and the application of it.

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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

APRIL 14, 2020

As I write this, most of us in the United States are marking one month of stay at home and work from home orders to mitigate the public health impacts of the coronavirus. Those of us who are working from home recognize it’s a privilege to do so and have enormous gratitude and admiration for the health care workers, grocery store clerks, delivery people, first responders and so many others who are going to work so the rest of us can stay home.

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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

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

We all know that there are trolls on social media. Twitter is full of real people and bots generating a constant stream of mean tweets. What we sometimes forget is that trolls have been with us since long before Twitter was ever a thing and live on in three-dimensional form today. Trolls can show up on peer leadership teams, boards of directors and lots of other places where people need to work together to get things done.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 15, 2020

What do you want to accomplish this year? When you step back and look at your list are there any goals that scare you or just seem like a huge stretch? I’ve got a few of those myself this year. They’re based on some ideas that have been somewhere on the radar screen of my brain the past few years. They were there kind of nibbling at my attention but staying busy doing what I’ve been doing kept me from paying much attention to them.

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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

SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

If you’re in a leadership role, there’s a pretty decent chance that when you were a kid, you were one of the smartest kids in class. If that wasn’t you, you probably remember who was. You know the smartest kid routine. They always had the right answer and wanted to make sure everyone else – especially the teacher – knew it. In organizational leadership, being right is less important than being effective.

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 21, 2019

It was ten years ago this summer that I was diagnosed with MS. That first year or two was really scary. My thinking was frequently foggy. Most days my brain felt like a wet sponge inside my head. One way that showed up was that I was constantly letting our dog roam through the neighborhood because I thought I was pressing the button to close the garage door after walking him when I was really opening it.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 24, 2019

One of the stories I tell in The Next Level is about the CEO of a very well-known company who, in speaking to a meeting of the top 200 executives there, spontaneously riffed out loud about how “We could use more employees with the skill set and approach that Competitor X has.” Over the next six months, the CEO’s company had hired scores of employees from Competitor X and, as they did, unintentionally changed the culture of their own company.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 17, 2019

You may have seen the recent news that Mad magazine is ending regular publication. On the other hand, you may not have known it was still being published (I didn’t) or, depending on your age, have even heard of Mad. I definitely have. As a tweener and a young teen, there was a three to four year run where I read pretty much every issue. As a matter of fact, the copies of Mad in the photo that accompanies this post all belong to me.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 10, 2019

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may remember the post I wrote back in April after my dad, Jack Eblin, passed away. One of the things I mentioned early on in that post was that my mom and dad were together for a total of 69 years. They dated for seven years starting at age 14 and were married for another 62 years after that. So, not surprisingly, I’ve had a lot of friends and readers ask me over the past few months, “How’s your mom doing?”.

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 12, 2019

When you stop and think about it a big part of leadership is about convincing people to do things differently. It could be persuading customers to buy your product or try your service. It could be getting employees or vendors to raise their game. It could be convincing regulators and other rules makers to support what you want to do. In each of these examples or a dozen others that you could come up with, success depends on getting people to change their behaviors.

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Next Level Blog

MAY 15, 2019

A lot of us grew up with the idea that if you just do good work, it will speak for itself. That’s not true in large organizations full of busy people all focused on their own agendas. If you’re a leader in that kind of place, the work doesn’t speak for itself; you have to speak for the work. How do you do that without coming off as an annoying braggart?

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 24, 2019

How do you measure the success of a leader? How do you even define what it means to be a leader? After spending a good part of my life in leadership roles and the past 20 years coaching, educating and writing for leaders, the death of my father, Dr. Jack Eblin , 10 days ago has me considering those questions anew. My dad was a dentist for 46 years. He and my mom met at a church youth group in Huntington, West Virginia when they were 14 years old, dated for seven years and were married for sixty-

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 20, 2019

The title of this post is the core of a few of my favorite questions. The one I want to focus on today is, in my experience, foundational to effective self-management: What are the top five words that describe me (you) when I’m (you’re) living and leading at my (your) best? That’s the first of three core questions in the Life GPS® personal planning framework that my wife Diane and I created for our own use 20 plus years ago and that we’ve since shared with thousands of clients and tens of thousa

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 3, 2019

So, welcome to the first work day of 2019. By the time you read this, we may be into the third or fourth day or beyond, but as I write this, it’s January 2. And, by writing this, I am following through on one of the habits I set out for myself in my annual planning period between Thanksgiving and the end of the year. The particular habit I’m talking about is to write at least 500 words a day Monday through Friday in 2019.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 2, 2018

There’s a hero myth that can build up around leaders. The great leaders stand alone, indomitable in the face of adversity, accomplishing their goals in the face of all obstacles. The last thing they need is help from anyone else. Their strength, wisdom and resolve brought them to this point and will, of course, carry them forward. There at least two problems with myths.

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Next Level Blog

MAY 15, 2018

One of the things I love about leading our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program is hearing leaders’ stories about how they’re following through on their most important development opportunities. As I’ve written here before, when they’re mapping out how to follow through, I always encourage them to look for repeatable actions that are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference.

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 9, 2018

If you’ve spent any time thinking about your retirement account or other investments you may have, you’re probably familiar with the concept of asset diversification. The idea is to not over-invest in one particular company or class of investments but to balance your portfolio across different types of assets. As a simple example, it makes sense for many people to invest in both stocks and bonds since when one of the two is up the other is often down.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 6, 2018

Earlier this year, I was talking with an executive coaching client about everything that was going on at once in his business life. The short and incomplete list included integrating an acquired company, moving his company’s headquarters to a new location, the annual planning process and addressing some significant new competitive threats. After hearing his list, I said to him that it reminded me of that list of stressful life events where you add up the scores of each event that is going on in

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 6, 2018

In some organizations, this is the time of year where individual performance from the previous year is summarized and communicated in annual reviews. (Which, by the way, is an abysmal practice that does nothing to develop people and has at least an 80% chance of causing them to feel disengaged.). One of the reasons annual performance reviews suck so much is that they too often deal in data points, not trends.

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Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 29, 2017

This is that wonderful week when things slow down and we do a little relaxing, reading and reflecting about what worked this year and changes we want to make for a successful next year. In that spirit, I want to share five of my favorite posts from 2017 that offer simple, practical and immediately actionable ideas on leading and living at your best.

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