Author: Rachel Hanson

Fortune happens to you. Good fortune is the weather being perfect for your birthday party. Unfortunate is layoffs at your company. Little to no control over either. Tina Seelig (in her book What I Wish I Knew About Luck) argues that luck is the result of the choices we make and the chances we take. … Continue reading Fortune vs luck

Cultures of excellence are grounded in both high performance and high levels of care. Most go too far toward one side or the other. If you envision this as a 2x2 grid, in the lower left corner you have toxic cultures - low performance and low levels of caring. These companies don't tend to last … Continue reading Culture of excellence

David Brooks has written about resume vs eulogy virtues. The norm for most of us is to spend most of our focus and our career years building resume virtues. I.e. the skills you build up and bring to the marketplace. The ones you would list on your resume. Most of us focus our efforts here. … Continue reading Eulogy virtues

Some leaders are conquerors by nature- business builders, mavericks, quick to make decisions and a lot of them. Some are more rulers by nature - consensus builders, good at building alignment across branches, bringing people together. Every great leader needs a bit of both, or at least the ability to flex to the other style. … Continue reading Conquerors vs rulers

“I’m known for being a coach who goes harder after winning. If it isn’t broken, break it. Because comfort is the death of teams.” – Emma Hayes Comfort is the death of teams. You could also say comfort is the death of excellence. Great coaches, great leaders, get a little itchy when things get comfortable. … Continue reading Break it

High achievers are often (usually) drivers. Drivers of productivity. Drivers toward a goal. Drivers of meetings and agendas. What’s the risk if you’re always driving? No one else is given the space to drive, or even to learn how to drive. High achieving leaders must learn to step back, encourage, and even challenge others to … Continue reading Drivers

Trust (and thus leadership) is like a bank account - you're constantly crediting or debiting (thanks for the analogy, Andy). Either making a deposit by building trust through your reliability, care, communication, etc., or debiting by commission or omission - failure to be reliable, making an unnecessarily harsh critique because you're in a bad mood, … Continue reading Trust accounts

A client of mine is true polymath by nature. Loves to understand and pursue mastery in a wide variety of domains. AND...everything comes with a tradeoff. Overcooked, that same impulse leads to news scanning, fractured attention, and going down random rabbit holes to understand things that aren't actually important, interesting, or relevant to this client's … Continue reading Overcooked