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

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 29, 2022

One of my favorite things I do as an executive coach is sharing with my clients the progress they’ve made as demonstrated in the closing colleague feedback I solicit for them at the end of the coaching engagement. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately for both individual executive clients and for the high potential leaders in a couple of cohorts of our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program.

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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 11, 2022

It’s interesting to me how trends come in waves when I coach executives. Lately, the trend has been leaders asking, “How do I get my team to think like me?” The question has come from members of senior leadership teams, individual senior executives, and mid-level leaders. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what level the leader is operating at, pretty much everyone lately is asking the question.

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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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Books Creativity Commitment Report 239

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 28, 2022

One of the impacts of the shift to working virtually is an increase in the number of topics we find ourselves dealing with on a daily basis. The ability to log in and out of one meeting after another without the friction (or the respite) of having to move our physical bodies from one place to another has made it easier to pack more meetings and conversations into a day.

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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 22, 2022

The question in the title of this post isn’t about you as the reader. You’re awesome. However, “What have you done for me lately?” could be the question your senior executive is asking about you. That’s never a good thing. In the absence of real information, people tend to fill in the blanks by making up a story about what must be going on. You want to avoid that because the story that gets made up is hardly ever a good one.

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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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360-Degree Feedback Tactics Project Team 246

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 5, 2021

A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with a group of senior managers when one of them told a story that put what has come to be known as The Great Resignation in sharp relief. A colleague of his had recently received a text message out of the blue from a valued employee who had suddenly quit their job three months earlier. In the text, the former employee wrote that if any effort had been put into conveying why and how they and their work mattered, they would have stayed.

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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

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

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 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

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

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

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

JULY 1, 2020

As I wrote last week , we’re all dealing with a lot. And, when there’s a lot to process – work, family, health, the world and life in general – the mind can understandably flit and flutter from thought to thought. It’s called mental chatter and it can make it really challenging to get anything in particular done. Mental chatter is endemic for people whose days are filled with back to back Zooms that are even more challenging to our focus than an equivalent schedule of in-the-room-together meetin

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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

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

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

APRIL 7, 2020

We all know by now that leaders must communicate in a crisis. It’s approaching the point of cliché because it’s true. The benchmarks for effective communications from top leaders are honesty, transparency, frequency, facts and empathy. Judging by the acclaim and appreciation he’s been receiving the past couple of weeks, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has been providing a great example of how an effective leader checks all of those communications boxes.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 11, 2020

Do you ever find yourself stuck in the same argument or stand-off with co-workers, family members and others? Most of us have experienced that. The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, the author of a great new book, Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home and in Life.

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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 12, 2020

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s presidential primary season. There are any number of reasons to pay attention to primaries, one of which is you can learn a lot about leadership communications strategies and tactics by watching how the candidates do what they do. The most successful ones tend to go both broad and deep with their communications. They send messages to very large groups of people while at the same time try to establish personal connections with individuals.

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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

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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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 23, 2019

This is the time of year when a lot of the leaders I work with are buckling down to write up annual performance reviews for the people on their team. This is a process that almost no one enjoys – neither the reviewer or the reviewee. Seriously, do you know anyone in any role who looks forward to an annual performance review? There are a lot of reasons why annual performance review processes usually suck.

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

One of my mentors, Harvard professor Ron Heifetz, likes to say that leaders can either be on the dance floor or on the balcony. In the fast-paced world that we live and work in, it can be all too easy to spend most of your time dancing and not enough up on the balcony observing what’s working, what’s not and what adjustments you need to make to live and lead at your best.

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

When I speak to groups of leaders I regularly ask them, “How many of you think it’s important to your professional success to grow and maintain a healthy network?” Pretty much every person raises a hand. Then I ask, “How many of you think you’re doing a great job at managing your network?” Hardly any hands go up. Then I ask why there’s such a big gap between what they know to be important and what they’re actually doing about it.

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Long-term Engineering Marketing Goal 21