Next Level Blog

JANUARY 21, 2025

Have you ever found yourself frozen by too many choices? When they all seem to have their merits, its easy to become bogged down and even paralyzed with indecision. So, how do you keep from getting stuck in analysis paralysis when you have to make a big decision that turns on choosing one option out of many? I suggest a five-step process: Step One: Make a list of the criteria that are most important in making a decision.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 1, 2025

Here we are again the start of another year. What do you want from 2025? How are you going to make it happen? Let me suggest that your outcomes are going to depend on the factors you can control and that, when you get real about it, the only factor you really control is how you show up throughout each day of the year. While Ive yet to hit perfection (and who among us has?

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 19, 2024

Have you noticed how hard it can be to stay curious, creative, and innovative? I’ve noticed that in my own work and the leaders I work with certainly notice it in theirs. They often express concern about a perceived lack of curiosity, creativity, and innovation in their teams. When those characteristics aren’t in play, stagnation results. You, your team, and your organization end up doing the same old, same old.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 17, 2024

As a leader, you have a ripple effect. Like throwing a rock into a pond, your actions create energetic waves that influence your organization’s outcomes. Whether positive or negative, the energy of those ripples spreads. Your people pick up and act on it one way or the other. If it’s positive, you can generally expect good outcomes. If it’s consistently or dramatically negative you can expect bad outcomes.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 1, 2024

Repeatedly answering the same questions or dealing with recurring requests can prevent you from tackling high-value strategic work. If this sounds familiar, you’re likely applying temporary fixes to broader, systemic problems. Take it from a recent coaching session I had with an executive, an attorney turned strategist, overwhelmed by daily interruptions from staff with “legal issues”—many of which weren’t legal issues at all or were minor enough not to warrant escalation

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 17, 2024

Years ago, when I was writing the first edition of The Next Level , I interviewed a very wise senior executive named Lucien Alziari. Lucien is currently the CHRO at Prudential and has served in comparable roles at Pepsi, Avon, Maersk, and other companies. One of the ideas he shared that really stuck with me was that the most successful executives are those that approach their work with a business first, function second mindset.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 9, 2024

Last Monday, I experienced something extraordinary in an unexpected place: unreasonable hospitality on jury duty. Typically, reporting for jury duty is a mundane and often dreaded task, but my recent visit to the Durham County Justice Center was different. Here’s how a jury services clerk named Lorrine transformed an ordinary morning into a memorable experience.

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 11, 2024

As a senior executive coach, I get to work with a lot of really smart people who have serious processing power upstairs. Smart, however, doesn’t always mean wise. In a nutshell, intelligence is usually about generating or acquiring knowledge while wisdom is about exercising good judgment in applying that knowledge. There are other simple distinctions between intelligence and wisdom that you can use as a guide to determine in which direction you lean or, better yet, what it looks like to strike a

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Next Level Blog

MAY 15, 2024

Three Common Feedback Challenges There probably aren’t many people in the world who are more involved, more often in giving and receiving feedback than executive coaches. As a two decade plus coach myself, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve prepared, delivered and supported my clients in receiving colleague feedback. It’s easily over 2,000 times.

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 30, 2024

Lead long enough and it’s eventually going to happen. Your team is going to come up against a tough run. Things were going great and then, suddenly, they’re not. The tough times could last for weeks, months, or even a year or more. The causes can be varied – competitive pressures, customer service challenges, a financial squeeze, uncontrollable externalities – and aren’t mutually exclusive.

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 16, 2024

One of the constants in my more than two decades of executive coaching is the desire and need to build the muscles required to develop and execute competitive and innovative strategies. It came up with a client again as recently as this month. With a few modifications, here’s the quick outline I offered him on five ways to build your strategic muscles.

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Next Level Blog

APRIL 4, 2024

The picture that accompanies this post was taken this morning, Thursday, April 4, 2024. It’s the photographic record of my fourth annual birthday handstand. So, this is me at age 63. My yoga teachers would certainly point out ways that I could improve my form, but I’m happy enough with this one. Honestly, if you had told me on my 43 rd birthday that I’d be doing handstands on my 63 rd , I would have politely told you you were nuts.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 18, 2024

The picture that accompanies this post will forever be my reminder that life is about savoring the moment. It was taken just shy of three months ago during the first Christmas we spent in our new home in Durham, NC. The woman in the center of the picture with the look of pure joy on her face is my mom, Judy Eblin. She’s framed by her grandsons and their life partners, Andy and Donna on her right, and Brad and Renee on her left.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Over the course of this year, I’m going to develop the agendas and facilitate around a dozen strategic offsites for C-Suite executives and their senior leadership teams. Most of these will be day-long offsites for client company leadership teams to help them make sure they step back from the day-to-day swirl three times a year to set a course, assess their progress, and ensure that their time and attention are focused on the things that matter most.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

In a phone conversation with a senior executive last week, he greeted me by exclaiming, “Happy January 39 th !” He’s not the only one that feels like the beginning of 2024 has been overstuffed with things to do and deal with. Pretty much every senior leader I work with has a plate that is overflowing with big issues – return to office initiatives, higher performance goals, huge investments, achieving operational excellence, you name it.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 23, 2024

This is the time of the year when I spend a day with my C-suite clients to give them some space to get up on the balcony to consider what success will look like 12 months from now and what they and their teams need to focus on to make those outcomes more likely. While the process varies and is customized for each executive, there are some core questions that I almost always pose.

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Lately, it’s felt like “I’ve got a new boss,” season in the coaching conversations I have with executives. I’ve had several of them in the past few months and there are some patterns I’ve noticed in the conversations. First, getting a new boss is anxiety inducing, especially for more senior executives. The further along you are in your career, the more likely you are to have carved out a lane for yourself and established a track record of success.

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Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

One of the most powerful quotes I’ve ever read has stuck with me for years. It’s from Robert Greenleaf in his book, Servant Leadership , where he wrote, “The most difficult question to ask oneself is, ‘Does what I have to say improve upon the silence?’” The fact of the matter is that a lot of people in leadership roles talk too much. The impact of that is multi-faceted.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 31, 2023

How often do you stop what you’re doing to step back, pull up and look at the patterns of what’s going on in your environment, and ask questions like what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next? The most effective senior leaders I work with take the time and make the effort to regularly engage in a practice of pattern recognition and analysis. Doing that puts them ahead of competitors who don’t by identifying new opportunities to leverage and avoiding being blindsided by emerging trends.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 17, 2023

The number one complaint I hear from my senior executive coaching clients is the number of meetings they find themselves in every day. Their calendars are so racked and stacked they feel like they’re stuck in a spin cycle of conversations which leaves little to no time for strategic thinking or action. If this condition sounds familiar, here are seven simple steps you can take to get yourself out of the executive meeting spin cycle: Demand Clear Objectives : When you’re asked to attend a meeting

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

There was a period in my blogging career when I created a side gig as a vocal critic of former Washington NFL football team owner, Dan Snyder. It started in 2009 with a post I wrote about how leaders could succeed just by not doing what he did. That one led to an appearance on the local TV news in D.C. I wrote three more posts about Snyder ending with one in 2014 about how when you find yourself in a hole you should stop digging.

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Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

Like a lot of my executive coaching clients, I believe that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. When it comes to leadership development, measuring your progress doesn’t have to be complicated or burdensome. You can drive a lot of change and hold yourself accountable by creating a simple leadership scorecard for yourself. Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve identified two or three leadership behaviors that if you moved the needle on them in a positive way over the next six months, would mak

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 22, 2023

Very few of us wake up in the morning with the goal of making someone else’s day more difficult. On the other hand, I doubt many of us wake up with the goal of making someone else’s day great. My guess is most of us wake up with the goal of taking care of whatever is on the to-do list for the day and then get on with our business. That’s kind of a shame because that extra intention of making someone else’s day great is a force multiplier.

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 2, 2023

During the ten years that I taught leadership coaching at Georgetown University, one of the biggest points all of us on the faculty wanted our students to learn was that coaching isn’t about offering answers or advice. It’s about asking the kinds of questions that help leaders come up with their own answers and insights. As an executive leadership coach, I often see the same dynamic playing out with my clients.

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Next Level Blog

JULY 11, 2023

One of my sources of entertainment on a recent trip to Los Angeles was watching a traffic cop masterfully manage a very busy Melrose Avenue intersection while a work crew replaced the stop lights. Wearing her white gloves and a bright yellow vest, the traffic cop exuded grace, authority, intelligence and confidence all at once. Seriously, how much of all of that do you think it takes to stand in the middle of a multilane, four-way intersection with pedestrian crosswalks on every corner and keep

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Next Level Blog

JUNE 14, 2023

The words we use have power. The power to clarify and inspire as well as the power to confuse and annoy. When it comes to generating confusion, annoyance, and a lot of other negative emotions, commonly used corporate buzzwords have a special power all their own. Here are five buzzwords that I’d like to nominate for banishment in favor of plain English alternatives.

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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

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

APRIL 25, 2023

One of the things I occasionally get to do as an executive coach is help a client who’s stuck in their story get unstuck and move on. You, the reader, may or may not be an executive coach yourself, but my guess is you likely have a colleague or two or ten who are stuck in their stories too. How do you help them get out of the mud and move on to a more productive place?

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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

MARCH 22, 2023

For a number of my executive coaching clients, it’s the time of year when they’re wrapping up annual performance review conversations. As is usually the case, some of those are easy and fun, and others are hard and stress-inducing. Whether they’re part of an annual cycle, or much more useful, a timely pull-up on recent performance, performance management conversations are a fact of corporate life.

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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

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

One of the great truths of life is that things never stay the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good thing or a bad thing; it’s going to change. It’s just as true in your professional life as it is in your personal life. For instance, you can work really hard to build a great team and then things change. Someone leaves or someone joins and the dynamics change as a result.

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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

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

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 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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