Terry Conway shares his advice for operating a generational business.
Today’s post is by Terry Conway, author of Business is Simple: From A Family Cottage Business to World Processing and Markets.
I’ve always admired generational companies. There is a certain bond among the family shareholders; they pull together to preserve family values. Family shareholders have a certain enthusiasm about caring for their enterprise and seem determined to continue its success. In a word, they are proud. I thought to myself, “If ever own a business, it will focus on longevity.” Before that dream day comes, I need to figure out what it takes to make a generational company work.
Whenever an opportunity existed, I asked, “How did your family make it work for generations? What problems were overcome? What advice do you have?” Proven leaders had won the battle for generations. Their advice was pragmatic with clear dos and don’ts.
The ownership did come, and on the first day I assembled my curious associates. My presentation was short – I’m all about trust as the cornerstone of everything we will do, and our overriding principle is longevity. I’m in it for the long haul. There will be no shortcuts. We will be the best no matter how long it takes!
Now was the time to make a generational plan work.
1. Protect against estate tax shock
One advisor had some strong words. “Why let your life’s work be gobbled up by onerous estate taxes? There is no guarantee that your family will have the funds to pay estate taxes. Without planning a sale will be inevitable and could result in just a few dollars left over for the family. You must make plans now before your enterprise gets too valuable. Procrastinating could evaporate most of what you’ve worked for.
My tax advisor suggested a variety of plans including gifting non-voting shares to so called “100-year irrevocable trusts” where the estate tax would not become due until existing generations has passed on, approximately 100 years, and keep the percentage of voting shares low as they would be subject to estate tax. There were other suggestions such gift programs, preferred stock, and life insurance.
2. Restrict ownership to family bloodlines
Every generational owner emphatically gave me the same advice – whatever you do “restrict ownership exclusively to the bloodlines of the original owners.” Bloodlines in this context means limit stock ownership and subsequent sales to direct decedents of the founding generation. No wives or husbands of direct descendants. No family members outside the bloodlines who had become company executives. No adopted family members. No exceptions.
That policy seemed harsh at first. The advice was “you’ve got to protect yourself.” Divorces and poor performing executives outside the bloodlines can create costly and unusually long delays to resolve. Price per share is almost always in contention when the board seeks an involuntary buyback from shareholders outside the bloodlines. “A divorce brought our company to the brink of bankruptcy,” one owner told me.
3. Focus on business first
“Business first” is the battle that must be won every day. One saying I heard was, “When business is first there’s enough for all family shareholders; when the business is not first there is never enough for any shareholder.” It did not make sense at first until I understood that some families have long-term financial needs. Who decides the necessity for some and not others? My solution was a shareholder redemption plan, subject to board and lender approvals, that allows for redemptions in exchange for dilution of ownership.
I noted that every generational change needs a well-regarded leader to operate the business as a professional enterprise, keep the family focused on business first, and balance family needs with a board approved dividend program. The board, as part of its responsibility for succession planning, needs to develop such leaders.
4. Governance
To keep “business first,” I started with a combination of outside board and family members, including an all-important compensation committee. I kept hearing that directors prefer small boards because they want a chance to engage in meaningful discussions with management and family owners. “Limit your board to five members with two insiders who are working in the business and three outsiders.” Another advisor added, “I like outside directors to be active or retired CEOs with experience in your industry. They have the best perspective.”
5. Share the vision
How does a multi-generational vacation or family camp fit into a company’s longevity plan? It provides a relaxed environment that fosters communication among stockholders in a fun-filled environment, develops more interest in the progress and prosperity of the family enterprise, and, most importantly, builds relationships of trust that every family and family company will need someday.
6. Plan early
Early planning provides a generational enterprise with a better chance of working. Later, it may not be the best option for the family to continue, but it’s an option that may be the best choice.
Looking back after 25 years
The early plans worked out. We’re still enjoying the benefits of a generational company.
Terry Conway acquired sole ownership of Handy Seafood in 1981 and built the small cottage business into a prominent multinational brand with sales reaching $60 million in 2024. He has been Executive Chairman since 2016, when he transferred voting control to his five adult children. He lives in Salisbury, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore with his wife of 63 years. Since his recent retirement, he is Executive Consultant to the Board. For more information, please visit www.terryconway-bis.com.
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Our reader poll today asks: Which dynamic best describes your organization’s approach to written communications?
We focus purely on the message and don’t worry about the aesthetics around it. – 31%
We balance our focus on the message while putting a lot of work into aesthetics. – 51%
We focus mostly on aesthetics of the communication and worry less about message. – 18%
Form over function? 69% of you report putting substantial effort into the aesthetics of your presentations – sometimes to the detriment of the actual content or message (18%). This is an alarming response. Sure, you can make presentations look slick and beautiful with high-resolution photos, AI-generated images, and complex graphs but if your audience doesn’t walk away with a clear message, all that effort at creating an elevated design environment is wasted effort. You’ve wasted your time and theirs. Start with the message. Have a clear, concise action you want them to take and explain the benefit they’ll receive from doing so. They don’t care why the action benefits you. They want to understand the benefit to them. While this may leave less time for beautifying slides and making them “slick” it gets them to take action. While a visually “boring” presentation doesn’t seem cool, getting the audience to do what you want them to do is the coolest outcome you can hope for.
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Passive-aggression is really challenging to deal with, because it’s so hard to see until it’s too late.
Sometimes people will say they agree with you. They love your idea. They say they’ll do whatever you need and give you all the resources you need to move forward. Then, they simply do nothing and passively resist your efforts. They might not give the resources they commit to or take the actions they said they’ll perform. When you’re dealing with this type of behavior, get written commitments that are then shared and followed up on publicly.
I know one chief operating officer who was involved in a major cost reduction project. He didn’t like the program’s direction, but he had to look committed to it. Especially because it was the CEO’s top priority. The COO said he’d provide teams to do analysis. He said they’d contribute ideas for cost savings. But he always came up with other priorities and excuses for why his folks weren’t contributing time or ideas for the project. To look committed, he spun-up a bunch of meetings to try and drive the cost reduction effort forward. The problem was all those meetings did was waste time, create new work, and actually slow the project down.
When dealing with the situation, the project manager sat down and got public commitments from this COO in terms of the time their teams would spend, and the ideas that the team was responsible for delivering. Those public commitments eventually got the behavior to change.
When you’re dealing with this situation, pay attention for patterns of failed commitments. Passive-aggression is hard to spot at first. So, by looking for where people are coming up short, it might be an indicator that you’re dealing with this type of behavior.
When you’re dealing with it, get public commitments from this person in terms of resources. Also ask this person to provide public updates, so everyone can hear how they’re moving the project forward. And when there’s a shortfall in terms of a commitment, make them explain it. It’s not up to you to make excuses for them.
Passive-aggression is really challenging to deal with, because it’s so hard to see until it’s too late. By paying attention to commitments and seeing when people are falling short, it gives you an opportunity to call the behavior out publicly and get things back on track.
Want to learn more about navigating politics as a senior leader? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to develop your leadership philosophy. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Learn the benefits of paid leave and how men and women can create a more equitable workplace together.
Today’s post is by W. Brad Johnson, PhD and David G. Smith, PhD, co-authors of FAIR SHARE: How Men and Women Can Create a More Equitable Workplace Together (HBR Press, June 30, 2026).
From World War II through the end of the twentieth century, the workplace was increasingly composed of women. Labor force participation rates for women peaked at the end of 1999 at 60.2 percent. By the end of 2024, women’s labor force participation was slightly lower at 57.3 percent, while the participation rate for men was 67.9 percent. Since the mid-twentieth century, changing attitudes about gender roles—including the acceptability of women working outside the home, increased levels of education for women, and technology-facilitated changes in the demands and skills required in the workplace—there has been compelling economic motivation for both women and men to engage in the workforce.
With more women and mothers in the workforce, we would expect a rebalancing of unpaid work at home, especially caregiving. However, in dual-earner couples and even those where women earn more than their husbands, women are doing two more hours of caregiving and three to four more hours of housework each week than their partners. The proverbial “second shift” lives on.
Here’s the good news: when fathers have equal access and take paternity leave for durations similar to mothers’, women are more likely to stay in the workforce and their earnings increase faster. And leave-taking fathers are more likely to retain shared childcare responsibilities and increase their housework—long after paid leave ends—which can indirectly improve mothers’ employment outcomes. The personal, relational, child development, economic, workplace, and societal impact of gender equality in paid leave is far-reaching and presents an incredible opportunity. When fathers have paid leave access and use all of it, there is a systemic economic impact on women’s earnings and careers, family budgets, business profitability, and national productivity.
So, how are we doing when it comes to gender-fair paid leave? Currently, only one country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among thirty members, doesn’t offer any statutory paid family leave; you guessed it, it is the United States (one of only six countries globally without national paid leave). In 2024 there were thirteen US states with paid parental leave, and outside these states, roughly 27 percent of employees had access to paid parental leave through their employer. Across OECD countries, the average paid paternity leave is 2.3 weeks, average paid maternity leave is 18.5 weeks, and average paid parental leave is thirty-nine weeks (parental leave in many OECD countries is the total combined amount of leave available to the mother and father). In the United States, women have access to an average of ten weeks of maternity leave and fathers, a paltry single week of leave. Because maternity leave is typically inclusive of the medical leave mothers need to recover from childbirth, it reinforces the need for fathers to be present for the baby’s and the mother’s care. The inequality doesn’t end with access to paid leave. While mothers in the United States report taking a median eleven weeks of leave, most fathers take a week or less, and 70 percent are back at work within two weeks. As Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All, notes, “Paid leave isn’t a women’s issue, it’s not a social issue, this is an economic imperative. And it impacts men.”
Parental, maternity, and paternity leaves are a focus of much of the advocacy and policy work for caregivers as they support long-standing research on infant and maternal health. However, the supply of informal caregivers—unpaid individuals who care for family and friends—is shrinking, even as demand continues to grow due to an aging population and the increasing rates of chronic illness. This widening gap is driven by societal shifts such as more women participating in the workforce, lower birth rates, and families living farther apart. Roughly 45 percent of men and 56 percent of women identify as informal caregivers, and the top reasons reported for not doing more informal caregiving were financial strains and not being able to take time off from work. Generous caregiving leave is vital to the health and vitality of society and requires the commitment of organizational leaders.
Communicate the Benefits of Paid Leave for Fathers and Families
Inclusive leaders dedicated to a gender-fair workplace must become informed evangelists for the evidence-based benefits of equitable and generous caregiving leave. Although the health and wellness benefits of paid leave for mothers are well established, fathers who use longer periods of parental leave also experience positive and transformative outcomes. Fathers who identify more closely with being involved parents and partners take a more equitable role performing unpaid domestic labor, which has a positive impact on women’s participation in the labor force, wages and careers, and the family’s overall wellness.
Equal paid parental leave is the secret to creating real gender equity at work and at home. The following efforts are a few ways leaders can voice the benefits and opportunities to men in their organization.
Leverage Paid Leave for the Transition to Fatherhood
Parental leave helps expecting and new fathers transition to this crucial role. Ben Reyes, lawyer at Blank Rome LLP, shared that when taking his parental leave, his wife was ramping down from her five months of maternity leave. He used that time to transition their daughter away from breastfeeding to bottle feeding, developing new habits, and sleep training, so that they could have her ready for daycare at six months old. Reyes said, “My leave paved the way to do that. It was crucial to our family dynamic and plan.” Co-parenting with an infant while managing two careers helps dads develop planning skills and builds a foundation for full engagement in decision-making, and equitable distribution of domestic responsibilities moving forward.
Developing caregiver competence and confidence is another salient benefit facilitated by generous caregiving leave for men. Mothers connect to the child over the first few months, bonding and learning to understand the child’s needs in a way that creates caregiver competence and confidence. Brad Harrington, formerly at the Boston College Center for Work & Family, told us that “if the father never has solo time with children, that caregiver skill set won’t develop, casting mother and father into traditional gender roles and exacerbating career and wage plateauing for mothers due to longer caregiver career interruptions.”
Fathers who take extended parental leave share more fairly in solo care of children and care of sick kids, spend more time on domestic labor over the long term, and have a stronger sense of ownership and competency for parenting than fathers who do not take extended parental leave. The impact of men taking paid leave in the first year has positive ripple effects across children’s lives. And fathers’ proficiency at home during the first year equates to more time and flexibility for women to focus on their careers over time.
Talk with Men About Positive Health Benefits
Leverage the compelling research on health outcomes to motivate men to take all their paid leave. One of our favorite strands of research addresses the buffering effects of paternal paid leave on risks to their partners’ mental and physical health. When fathers take leave and lean in as full caregiving partners at home, mothers have better mental health trajectories, including greater overall well-being, lower stress, and fewer symptoms of depression. One study found that when fathers take parental leave, their partners were less vulnerable to postpartum depression and reported fewer parenting struggles. And the health outcomes don’t stop with mothers; there’s a lot in this for fathers taking paid parental leave too, including greater overall well-being, and lower stress and fatigue.
How about mapping caregiving leave and gender-fair parenting to better brain health? To better understand the research, we turned to one of the leading researchers in developmental psychology, Darby Saxbe at the University of Southern California, who said, “There’s evidence that father’s brains remodel from preconception across pregnancy and into the postpartum period in a way that supports greater efficiency in parts of the brain that are linked with social cognition and accurately imagining other people’s mental states. And there’s evidence that those areas are tied to stronger bonding with their baby.”
The benefits of paid leave extend to relationships with partners and children. Fathers who use paid leave reported improved relationships with their partners, an experience reciprocated by partners who report that the increased support maps to a stronger partner bond rooted in shared parenting during leave. There’s even evidence that this improved relationship connected to shared caregiving leave correlates to couples staying married longer. And don’t forget the opportunity for closer relationships with children. Caregiving time with children in their early years allows fathers to nurture a lasting bond with their kids. In one study on father-child relationships, paternity leave-taking was associated with children reporting higher parent involvement, father-child closeness, and better parental communication. Increased time for caregiving leave creates an opportunity to experience daily activities with children in those critical early months and years that echo in stronger father-child bonds years later.
Show Men How Leave-Taking Provides an Economic Boost
We love the health and relationship outcomes of parental leave, but let’s get back to the dollars and cents of paid leave within families. Nothing does more to reduce the family gender wage gap than paid parental leave. When fathers take on more unpaid work at home, enabling mothers to return to work and more rapidly, mothers’ wages improve. Research shows that for every month of parental leave a father takes, his partner’s income increases by almost 7 percent. In fact, paternity leave has a larger effect on mothers’ future earnings than maternity leave.
Paid parental leave for fathers improves household income as well as general family financial well-being. And when men share in taking caregiving leave, we see the maternal wall (aka, motherhood penalty) come tumbling down. When both parents utilize paid parental leave, it allows both partners to remain engaged at work and minimizes gender disparities in career progression.
The most gender-fair and forward-leaning employers are even creating positive indirect impact on employees’ partners. In our conversation with Molly Moon Neitzel of Molly Moon Homemade Ice Cream, she shared that the company has conversations with employees about Washington state’s paid family leave for men and women when they have a child, including how it will save their family money on childcare if the baby’s father also takes his full twelve weeks of leave. Moon Neitzel said, “This is a financial equation that benefits our employees. I hope there are a lot of men motivated to take parental leave because they’re partnered with an employee of our company, though not necessarily working for us.” We find this to be a terrific example of a company using its influence for the good of its employees.
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Internalizing these four aspects of leadership is a great first step in developing your personal leadership philosophy.
When articulating your leadership philosophy, you need to think beyond the leader led diad. A lot of times we get focused on, “Well, this is how I interact with a person and that’s what leadership is about.” As a leader, you need to look at yourself more completely as an individual in a variety of domains. As I’ve looked at leadership and tried to be more complete in the thinking about it, there are really four aspects of leadership that I invite you to think about:
Leading Yourself
First is leading yourself. Where are you going? What’s important to you? What are your personal ethical standards? What are the beliefs that underpin how you’re going to interact with the members of your team?
Leading the Thinking
Next is leading the thinking. As the leader, you need to set the direction for where the team is headed. You need to articulate behavioral standards for what you will and won’t stand for from the members of your team.
Leading Your People
Next is leading your people, and we need to lead people as individuals. You can’t treat them as faceless cogs in the machine because that won’t inspire them or get the best performance out of them. Leading your people is all about understanding what their personal wants and needs are and what motivates them.
Leading a Balanced Life
The last aspect of leadership is leading a balanced life because if you’re burned out, you’re worthless to the members of your team. Additionally, as a leader, you set the tone, so you’re going to set an example on balance. Making sure that you stay in balance is important to making sure the team stays in balance.
Developing Your Leaderships Maxims
Now, a maxim is a principle or rule of conduct. Across these four aspects of leadership, you’re going to articulate your personal leadership maxims. A maxim is a short, pithy statement that serves as a reminder for how you want to behave. They need to be emotionally resonant for you. They need to stir up strong feelings because those strong feelings are going to drive you to behave in a certain way.
The maxim needs to be simple enough that you can explain the story behind it to the members of your team because you’re going to give them a window into what’s important and exciting and inspiring to you. It’s going to help them understand how you behave. You were in a situation previously that led to this set of feelings, and if you’re in a similar situation, you’re going to behave in that consistent manner. No buzzwords, no consult-o-speak, and they’re going to be a reflection of you at a specific point in time.
Your maxims should grow as you grow and have new experiences as a leader. In terms of where you can find your maxims, you already know all the answers. I’m just here to give you the tools to be able to pull them out. Maxims can come from situations where you interacted with somebody important to you. It can be a boss, a family member, or a coach who said something so profound and so inspiring to you that you say, “There’s real emotional resonance for me in that.”
Maxims can come from situations you found yourself in as a leader or a member of a team that really meant a great deal to you. Maxims are sometimes found in stories, in song, in poetry, in scripture, things that moved you, and you don’t even have to be sure why it moved you. It just did move you, and it became a fundamental belief that you have.
Maxims are all around you. You need to go back inside. Go back into your prior history and think about those situations that really meant a great deal for you. Then, create the trigger that reminds you of that situation or the phrase or the words that were actually used by that person who was meaningful to you. That phrase and that situation is what’s going to guide your behavior going forward. You’re then going to create your leadership maxims across all the aspects of leadership, and the sum of those maxims becomes your personal leadership philosophy.
Want to learn more about developing your leadership philosophy? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to develop your leadership philosophy. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Stress does more than wear on leaders, it undermines them. What the research on nonverbal cues reveals about trust, and how to close the gap.
Today’s post is by Don Gregori, author of The Emergent Leader: A Guide to Brand Building, Leadership, and Self-Mastery.
The quarter was rough. I was just about to get in front of the team for a town hall, and some bad news was dropped in my lap. It threw me off my game. Business can be tough. I knew we would get through it. At the moment I was internalizing the stress and distracted by thinking of ways to lead through the challenge. As I spoke to the team my voice flattened. I was less animated, and the audience could sense a disconnect between how I was feeling and what I was saying. I could tell they weren’t buying it. I wasn’t lying to that room. I was stressed, and stress had changed the meaning in the words that I was saying.
Researchers who study non-verbal behavior under pressure have a name for that. It’s called the “flat affect.” Bergun and Kopper describe it as a pattern that shows reduced facial expressions, and speech that loses its dynamism and goes monotone. Interestingly, from a distance it looks like composure. Up close it reads as rigidity and detachment.
This isn’t about style and entertainment. What leaders should focus on is that people trust the non-verbal signal over the verbal one. Keep in mind that upward of 80% of our communication comes through non-verbal signals. People judge inconsistency between message and delivery as a sign of untrustworthiness, regardless of whether the words themselves are true. Unfortunately, we don’t get judged on what we meant or the words alone.
Researchers at Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence found that people calibrate to their manager’s mood within about seven minutes of interaction. They are unaware that they are even doing so. A leader’s emotional state shapes the performance and creativity of their team, not just their immediate mood. I didn’t simply lose credibility with the team at that town hall. Whatever confidence drained out of that meeting was carried back to other teams and perhaps to clients by people who had no idea they were carrying it. I unintentionally gifted them my stress.
I was standing in the gap between the quarter I’d expected and the reality of what was delivered. That gap is where the stress was really coming from. The distance between the two is where the anxiety lives. We set the expectation and as such, we are, quite literally, the primary source of our own suffering. That gap is wider right now for a lot of us than it used to be. Nobody can say with real confidence what skills will matter in eighteen months, what AI will and won’t touch, or what the market looks like two quarters out. Projecting certainty we don’t actually have is exactly the kind of incongruence our team can sense.
Two things would have served me better that day. First, narrowing the beam. Instead of trying to sound composed about a far-off uncertain future, I should have been specific about what we controlled and what we could have done right now. Certainty about the next ninety days beats vague confidence about the next year, every time. The second thing I could have done was to speak about the uncertainty out loud. Naming our fears takes some of the power away from them. The vulnerability that would have been demonstrated in that statement would have built so much more trust with the teams. It would have closed the gap between the message and the delivery that the room was picking up on.
If I could take that stage today, I’d throw away the artificial composure. I’d level with the room and say, “Sometimes business is hard. Sometimes work is a four-letter word. These tough times will pass, and when we come together to get through them. The satisfaction we will get on the other end will be so much sweeter. Let’s dive into what we can do right now.”
A stressed, rigid version of myself could have never delivered that message convincingly. Authenticity beats an artificially perfect veneer every time.
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Our reader poll today asks: What is your biggest motivational challenge related to your work?
I don’t like the subject matter/tasks I work on – 16%
I don’t like my manager – 10%
I don’t like my team/teammates – 7%
I don’t get paid enough – 13%
I don’t like my company’s culture – 13%
I’m not rewarded or noticed for my efforts – 17%
Something else – 24%
No shortage of motivational challenges. There’s no clear leading reason driving motivation challenges. Pay, management, culture, recognition, and many other drivers impact your motivation. As leaders, the takeaway here is there is no silver bullet that magically unlocks team member motivation. Wile a change you make might motivate a portion of your team, that change might fall flat with others. The implication is you need to spend time with your team members as individuals and uncover their personal sources of motivation. Once you understand those better, you can take targeted actions to motivate them. Sure, this takes time and effort but that’s what you’re paid for as a leader. Spend the time getting to know your people. The results will speak for themselves.
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Seven practical steps to become a more confident presenter through preparation, mindset, body language, and storytelling techniques anyone can apply.
Today’s post is by Andy Freed, author of Lead Like The Boss.
There are a handful of conferences I attend every year, and over time I’ve seen every kind of presenter imaginable.
Some speakers are true subject matter experts, yet they struggle to communicate their expertise effectively. Their presentations feel strained, the audience disengages, and the message gets lost. I’ve even seen evaluation comments that read something like, “Don’t put someone on stage who clearly hates being there.”
Then there’s the opposite extreme. The people who seem to command the room the moment they walk on stage. They appear relaxed, confident, and completely at ease. We often describe them as “naturals.”
But is that really the difference?
I think that’s a bit of a cop out. It suggests that strong communication is something you’re born with rather than something you can develop. It gives struggling presenters permission to say, “I’m just not a natural speaker,” instead of focusing on getting better.
The reality is much more encouraging. Most confident communicators aren’t relying on talent alone. They’re applying a set of habits and techniques that anyone can learn.
Here are seven that can make a meaningful difference.
First, remember that a great presentation starts long before you take the stage.
Before you open PowerPoint or create a single slide, think about your audience. One of the most useful frameworks I’ve encountered is the “Think, Feel, Do” model. Grab a blank sheet of paper and write down what you want your audience to think, how you want them to feel, and what you want them to do after hearing you speak.
That simple exercise shifts your mindset from focusing on your performance to focusing on your audience’s experience. After all, success isn’t measured by how you think you did. It’s measured by what your audience takes away.
Second, pay attention to your opening.
NFL teams often script the first several plays of a game, especially when they have a young quarterback. It helps establish rhythm and settle nerves.
The same principle applies to presenting. When you know exactly how you’re going to begin, and you’ve practiced it repeatedly, you remove uncertainty from the moment when anxiety tends to be highest. A strong opening builds confidence and creates momentum.
Third, be intentional about your breathing and pace.
When people get nervous, they almost always speed up. The result is a presentation that’s harder to follow and more exhausting to deliver.
Slow down.
A deliberate pace helps your audience absorb the information. Just as importantly, it helps you maintain steady breathing and manage your energy throughout the presentation.
Fourth, lead with your main point and avoid unnecessary qualifiers.
Confident communicators don’t spend ten minutes circling their recommendation. They state it clearly.
Compare these two approaches:
“There are a lot of factors to consider.”
“This is what I recommend.”
One creates clarity. The other creates uncertainty.
The same principle applies to language. Phrases like “I think maybe,” “I’m no expert, but,” or “This might be a crazy idea…” undermine your credibility before you’ve even made your point. If you don’t sound confident in your message, your audience won’t be confident in it either.
Fifth, be intentional with your body language.
I’ve watched countless presenters spend an entire presentation staring at their confidence monitor, their notes, or the slides behind them, rarely making eye contact with the audience.
Communication is not just verbal.
Make eye contact. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Use purposeful gestures rather than nervous movements. These small adjustments influence how your audience perceives you, and they often influence how you feel as well.
Sixth, don’t be afraid of silence.
Many presenters treat silence like the enemy and rush to fill every second with words.
That’s a mistake.
A brief pause after an important statement allows the audience to absorb what you’ve said. It also gives you a moment to reset, collect your thoughts, and maintain control of the room.
Used well, silence conveys confidence and authority.
Finally, there is no substitute for preparation.
Practice your presentation out loud. Listen for phrases that feel awkward or unnatural. Refine them until they sound like you.
For example, I occasionally present to medical audiences. There’s a particular medical term that I consistently struggle to pronounce correctly. Rather than fighting it every time, I simply use a different phrase that communicates the same idea.
I only know that because I’ve practiced.
Today, every one of us carries a high-definition video recorder in our pocket. Record yourself. Watch the playback. Identify opportunities to improve. Then practice again.
It won’t be perfect the first time, and that’s fine. Improvement comes from repetition.
Some presenters undoubtedly have a natural gift for communication. For them, many of these habits may come easily.
For the rest of us, confidence is built, not born.
The good news is that there’s a roadmap. Follow it consistently, put in the work, and you’ll become a stronger communicator than you are today.
See you on stage.
I’ll be the bald guy sitting in the back watching you master the room.
Andy Freed is a leadership speaker, author of Lead Like The Boss, and Chairman and former CEO of Virtual, Inc., where he focuses on helping leaders communicate with clarity and impact.
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https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/20260713-Lecture-Hall-Presentation.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2026-07-14 08:02:382026-07-13 23:25:43Seven Steps Toward Confident Communication
Our reader poll today asks: Which option best describes your involvement in your team members’ work?
I stay out of their way and let them keep me updated with relevant information – 44%
I involve myself in major work products and ask for regular updates – 47%
I involve myself in much of their day-to-day until they push me out – 5%
I get involved in every element of what they’re working on so I can help them – 4%
Can you? Yes. Should you? Maybe not. 56% of you report being involved in regular daily aspects of your team members’ work. While supervision is required and you need to know what they’re working on, you might want to ask yourself if your involvement in their work is advancing their efforts or taking away time from them getting things accomplished. Are you meaningfully contributing to work getting done or are you simply asking for updates and questions so you can answer questions if your manager or a stakeholder asks? When helping them with tasks, it’s not a question if you can perform the task yourself (the answer is likely ‘yes”). The more relevant question is whether or not you should be performing or contributing to the task. If you take a step back, look at higher level tasks you can be performing, and which is the best use of your time (and theirs!), you might change where you exert your effort.
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Assembling a high-performing team involves more than just finding great talent. Follow this 7-step formula to develop the team of your dreams.
As a leader, one of your most critical responsibilities is to turn your team into what can be considered a high-performing team. And to do that, there are seven elements that you need to bring together to turn your team from one that just exists to one that’s considered high-performing:
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/20260708-Number-7.jpg?fit=1920%2C1097&ssl=110971920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2026-07-08 06:30:142026-07-08 02:00:53The 7 Aspects of High-Performing Teams
Fear in leadership rarely looks like fear. It looks like responsibility, caring, and high standards. Here is how to tell the difference before it costs you.
Today’s post is by Erika Alessandrini, author of Maybe It’s Me: Looking Inward to Create Real Change Through Conscious Choices (Amplify Publishing, 2026).
It didn’t look like fear.
It looked like a leader who cared. Someone who stayed late, caught the details others missed, and never let a ball drop. From the outside, it looked like excellence. From the inside, it felt like the only way to make sure things went right.
That feeling – the urgent pull to step in, to take over, to handle it – rarely announces itself as fear. It arrives dressed as responsibility. As caring. As high standards. It sounds like “someone has to do this” and “I can do it better” and “it’s faster if I just take care of it myself.” It feels like competence. It feels like investment. It feels, honestly, like leadership.
But underneath those reasonable-sounding thoughts is something else entirely.
Fear doesn’t make you careless. It makes you controlling.
Not controlling in the obvious sense – not domineering or demanding. Controlling in the quieter sense: reaching for certainty when uncertainty feels unbearable. Narrowing the space when the space feels too open. Taking on more because letting go feels like a risk you can’t afford. Control – or the illusion of it – is what provides the security fear is craving in those moments. It works, too. Just not for long, and not without cost.
The problem is that fear wearing the costume of responsibility is nearly impossible to detect from the inside. You’re not lying to yourself. You genuinely believe you’re helping. You genuinely believe the stakes require your involvement. And you may even be right – in the moment. But the moment is not the whole story.
Here is what accumulates over time when fear has been running the show dressed as leadership: the team that stops bringing you problems because they already know you’ll solve them. The colleague who defers to you not because they trust your judgment but because they’ve learned that resistance costs more than it’s worth. The relationships that look functional and feel hollow. The leader who appears indispensable and is, slowly, becoming a ceiling for everyone around them.
The cost isn’t always loud. It doesn’t arrive as a crisis. It arrives as a quiet contraction – in the people around you, and eventually in you. And because it accumulates slowly, it’s nearly impossible to calculate in real time. You don’t see it coming. You just wake up one day and something has broken – a job, a marriage, your health – and you’re left trying to trace it back to a pattern that never felt like a problem because it always felt like leadership.
Here is what this is not: a case for doing less, caring less, or lowering your standards. The goal isn’t to step back. It’s to carry exactly what’s yours – no more, no less – and allow others to do the same. One hundred percent responsibility. Not ninety, where you’ve checked out. Not one hundred and fifty, where you’ve absorbed what belongs to someone else. Just yours. Cleanly, clearly, fully yours. And theirs, fully theirs.
That distinction matters because it changes what leadership feels like from the inside. Not lighter in a diminished way. Lighter in the way that comes from finally setting down what was never yours to carry.
So what do you do with this?
You don’t need a new system. You need a single question, asked honestly, in the moment before you step in.
Is what I’m about to do creating capacity in someone else – or dependency on me?
Capacity looks like someone growing, deciding, struggling productively, learning what they’re made of. Dependency looks like someone waiting for you to tell them what to do next. Both can feel like help. Only one of them actually is.
That question won’t always give you a clean answer. But it will slow you down long enough to tell the difference between a choice made from genuine leadership and a choice made because fear handed you a to-do list and called it responsibility.
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Our reader poll today asks: How do you handle someone going around your established process and doing things their way?
I let them do their thing and don’t worry about it – 14%
I mention the process and ask them to use it in the future – 71%
I tell them they need to start again and follow my process – 10%
I take over the effort and drive it through my process – 5%
Follow the process. The vast majority of you who are process owners will gently push people to follow the process when you see them deviate from it. Processes have purpose – consistency, traceability, quality, etc. That said, if you’re seeing people circumvent your process, there might be a few reasons they’re doing so. Either the process is not well-communicated, the process is overly cumbersome, or the process is no longer adding value. Look for trends related to which processes people are avoiding and why. Ask them their view of the process when you find them going around it. Your real issue might be a need for a process redesign, elimination, or communication. Consider yourself as the owner of the result and the process is simply one way to drive that result.
Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
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Terry Conway acquired sole ownership of Handy Seafood in 1981 and built the small cottage business into a prominent multinational brand with sales reaching $60 million in 2024. He has been Executive Chairman since 2016, when he transferred voting control to his five adult children. He lives in Salisbury, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore with his wife of 63 years. Since his recent retirement, he is Executive Consultant to the Board. For more information, please visit www.terryconway-bis.com.
