Strategy – Page 4 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

When Everything Is Important, Nothing Gets Done

May 18, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When everything feels urgent, nothing gets done, and your team pays the price.

Today’s post is by Liane Davey, PhD, organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author.

The following is an excerpt from the title Thoughtload: Manage The Madness and Free Your Team To Do Great Work by Liane Davey, PhD.

A leader I worked with, let’s call her Rebecca, was struggling profoundly with prioritization. She was smart and ambitious, but that made the task of winnowing down activities difficult because she could make a compelling case for why every investment mattered. As a result, her team was stretched across multiple priorities and working nonstop with no results to show for it. Everyone but Rebecca could see that they needed to do fewer things at once: to focus, get traction, work to completion, then move on to the next priority.

For months, this was the crux of our coaching conversations. But each time we made progress by deleting, delaying, or de-scoping an initiative, one of her team members would call me afterward to ask if I was aware that Rebecca had added multiple initiatives since our last session. I would broach the issue with Rebecca and remind her that her job was to help the team make the hard trade-offs and focus on a small set of the most valuable actions; doing one or two things at a time and then moving on to the next would be much more productive than trying to do everything at once. To her credit, she took the message to heart and stopped adding initiatives. Unfortunately, her compulsion to do more led her to start hiding three projects under one initiative heading, like a mom hiding vegetables in the lasagna. To be fair, I don’t think she even realized she was doing it.

At some point, the dilution of the team’s resources across so many activities meant nothing worked, and the situation reached a breaking point where Rebecca’s job was on the line. Only then did she switch into crisis mode and pick one initiative that would save the team. If they could resolve an urgent supply chain issue, they would solve a lot of problems for the company and rehabilitate their image. The supply chain project became the first and only priority. A couple of team members kept the lights on, but everyone else worked tirelessly to implement the project. It became nonnegotiable. Anything anyone needed to progress became top priority for everyone. I’ve never seen her team more productive, more ingenious, or more energized. What they accomplished in six weeks would have taken them at least a year in their former diluted and distracted state. Even two years later, when new challenges emerged, someone would often mention the supply chain project as an example of what was possible when they were all aligned on one clear priority. I won’t say that Rebecca is cured of her pernicious predilection for piling priorities, but now she knows that it’s an issue she needs to continually manage.

Being a manager is a big responsibility, at least if you care about being a good one. For your employees, you are the key connection to the organization and the primary source of intel on what belongs in their thoughtload: what is important, what is legitimately worrisome, and what is worth the effort. If you abdicate that role, your team members’ thoughtload will run rampant, as it did in Rebecca’s team. However, if you embrace your role in helping your employees direct their attention, process their emotions, and use their energy wisely, you have the opportunity to not only reduce their thoughtload but also increase their productivity and decrease their stress. Said more directly, you have the chance to transform the experience of work for your team.

Liane Davey has spent more than 25 years researching and advising teams on how to perform at their best. Known as the “teamwork doctor,” she works with teams from the frontlines to the boardroom, across industries and around the world, from Boston to Bangkok. Through her work with hundreds of teams, including 26 Global Fortune 500 companies (and counting), she has developed a practical, research-backed approach to solving the challenges that prevent teams from working effectively together. She is also the author of Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work, which tackles today’s most pressing management challenges: over-burdened systems, burned-out teams, and plateauing results.

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Break Big Problems Into Small Problems

May 13, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Big problems can be easier to solve when you break them into smaller problems.

At one point, I worked with a financial services firm and we had a program where we were making offers to consumers. And when that program first launched, we were making about $5 million a year. The problem was, after a few months, we started losing $5 million a year. So this was a huge issue, and there were a lot of things that could contribute to it.

So we used the problem-solving process to get a better understanding of what issues were really driving the problem before we rushed off to solve it. We broke it down into what’s called a logic map. We looked at technology, we looked at training, we looked at systems, we looked at hiring, we looked at processes. Now, the good news is, once we broke the problem down, we identified the core issue, followed the rest of the problem-solving process and turned that program around from losing $5 million a year to actually making $20 million a year a few years after that.

So let me walk you through what a logic map is and how you can use it to breakdown your own problem solving. Let’s imagine we have a problem where profits are down. So, in the logic map, what we’re going to do is take profits and break it down into its component parts of revenue and cost. And by doing so, what we’ve done is taken a larger problem and broken it down smaller.

But those are still large issues to try and solve, so let’s use the logic map to break it down further. We’ll break revenues down into volume and price and further break down our volume into current customers and prospective customers. And by doing so, we’ve taken a really large item that we wouldn’t be able to solve easily and broken it down into smaller parts that are going to be much easier to figure out.

Now, you need to make your logic map complete. You can’t just stop there because we want to identify what all the possible issues are. So we need to look at the cost side of things. In terms of costs, maybe we’re buying more or we’re paying more for the things that we’re buying. And in terms of paying more, potentially that’s an issue where we’re getting fewer discounts or base prices have gone up. So, by breaking that logic map down and saying we had a profit issue, and really walking it all the way through the smaller and smaller components, the problem gets a lot easier to solve.

Now, there are multiple ways that you can break your logic maps down. It’s not always about revenues and costs. Sometimes you’ll break it down and it’s a sales problem. We have product A, B and C and that may be the first level of your logic map. Or you may break things in terms of short-term, medium-term and long-term challenges. There are going to be multiple ways that you can break your logic map down, and as it’s called, just break it down logically. Blow it out to a level where you can start seeing some of the smaller solutions emerge.

So, what I’d like you to do is take your personal problem, your personal challenge, take that pinned problem statement that you generated in the first step, and then generate a logic map that starts identifying what all the issues are that are contributing to your particular problem.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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!

Define Your Problem to Solve Your Problem

April 29, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

The first step of the problem solving process is defining your problem.

The first step of the problem solving process is penning the problem and this is where you’re going to come up with a really robust problem definition statement. You cannot skip this step. I’ve seen more problem solving go off the rails because people think, “Oh we know what the problem is.” They answer a couple quick questions and they immediately rush into the solution. You’re going to get in trouble if you do that.

So in the exercise files that accompany the video, I want you to look at all of the questions and understand you have to answer all of the questions. This isn’t a pick and choose. There are about 18 questions here in four major sections. So those four sections are first answering focusing questions, what are the stakeholders, what are the goals, what are the metrics you’re going to use to determine if you’ve been successful in your problem solving.

Second is evaluating prior efforts, trying to get some insights from the last time we tried to solve this or solve something similar. So have we had similar problem solving efforts in the past? Who was involved in those efforts? Let’s learn from experience.

The third is deriving insights from new lenses, looking at the problem from different angles. So what’s the perspective of the CEO versus the frontline? What’s the 10,000 foot view versus the 50 foot view? We always come at problems from our own perspective. It’s your default, it’s the way you look at things. By looking at it through different lenses you might come up with a different set of solutions.

So let me offer an example in the one of looking through a different lens. As a manager, you may say, “Well this is a training issue, my people aren’t trained.” When you look at it as the CFO she may say, “Well it’s a budgeting issue, we haven’t budgeted the training dollars.” So by looking through those different lenses you may find different possible solutions for your problem.

And then lastly, understanding relevant causality. We don’t want to solve symptoms. You need to dial the problem back to understand what are the root causes and in terms of causality. If you solve the problem, you need to think forward in terms of what are some of the knock-on impacts. If we solve this problem with our products, are there competitive repercussions we need to think about?

As you go through this step of penning the problem, go through that exercise file. Answer every single one of these questions and document your answers because that’s going to give you a really nice well bounded problem statement that’s going to drive the rest of your problem solving.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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!

Be a Social-Media-Ready Leader

April 28, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger, Social Media, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

You can’t control every post, every image shared, every story that someone decides to tell the masses. But there are steps you can take to help limit the risk of opening your phone to a notifications jumpscare.

Today’s post is by Melissa Swift, founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, and author of Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World.

Today, there are so many places where people can go to talk about their jobs, workplaces, employers, and bosses. From LinkedIn and Reddit to Instagram and TikTok to Glassdoor and Blind, there is no shortage of discussion of work on social media.

And much of it’s pretty negative – which can have a range of impacts from hurt feelings to people getting fired to companies actually losing value or failing. I remember vividly getting called out on a consulting platform for perceived sins around some employee engagement awards. The poster didn’t quite have their facts right, but they weren’t entirely wrong about some of the underlying issues, either. And I went from feeling a bit awkward already to feeling downright terrible. Who wants to be that person getting complained about as hordes of people watch?

So what’s a leader to do? (other than avoiding Coldplay concerts, of course)

You can’t control every post, every image shared, every story that someone decides to tell the masses. But there are steps you can take to help limit the risk of opening your phone to a notifications jumpscare. You don’t need to have a perfect profile or an immense following yourself, but you do want to protect your own professional image (and your company’s) from unwanted shocks. Let’s look at some ways to do so.

A good place to start is how you communicate and operate at work. A number of executives have recently highlighted to me the role of coherence – being consistent and logical in what you say and do. This is a fantastic example of something that’s “simple but not easy.” Every day, a million imperatives push us in a million directions. Even the most focused leaders can find themselves all over the map on a bad day.

But coherence is critical in a world of pervasive social media. Think about what triggers someone to post…so often, it’s frustration. And frustration is frequently triggered by a moment of “I just don’t get it” – someone’s words don’t make sense checked against their actions, or their words don’t make sense in relation to their other words, or their actions to their other actions. Or maybe it’s all just a hot mess from the point of view of someone not inside that leader’s head at that particular moment. In any of these scenarios, frustration can very easily turn into a public statement.

So coherence is your friend. To the extent that what you say and do makes sense with all of the other things you say and do, you avoid triggering the co-workers in your vicinity and limit the risk of being publicly shamed for a perceived inconsistency. You may not always have this perfectly under control – many organizations are incoherent beyond what any one leader can impact – but it’s a worthwhile guiding aspiration.

It’s not just what you do and say, though: it’s how you do and say it. Emotional appropriateness is another key ingredient in staying out of the social media hot seat. Simply put, as experts on emotion in the workplace like UVA’s Jim Detert will tell you, conveying a type of and level of emotion that matches the situation you’re in helps put others in the conversation at ease. This doesn’t mean always damping down emotion: if something terrific or something terrible is happening, and you display a fairly flat way of communicating, that can cause further emotional arousal in your audience…just as if you started yelling or crying during an unremarkable meeting. That emotional arousal looks for an outlet – which could be a sympathetic spouse or a social media post seen by millions. You can’t always count on it to be the former. Particularly in trying moments, like layoffs, emotional appropriateness is particularly critical. Think of the number of posts you’ve seen on executives conveying job losses robotically vs empathically; when a leader displays emotions that match the moment, there’s less pithy fodder for a 30 second takedown.

Finally, be smart and measured about your own social media presence. Consider private accounts for political or otherwise sensitive content, as you cannot reasonably know what your co-workers’ most deeply held beliefs are. Be scrupulous about placing content on the right platform – no one on LinkedIn wants to see your bathing suit photos! And when in doubt, less is more. A measured quantity of social media content is far less likely to set someone off – and get them responding in ways that are damaging to you – than a wildly unpruned garden of random thoughts.

Social media at work can feel absolutely impossible to navigate. It’s not completely uncontrollable though – and much of what you can do to manage it, such as being coherent and emotionally appropriate, pays huge dividends far from just the social media realm.

It’s a highly transparent world, but you can show it a leader worth seeing.

Melissa Swift is a leading voice on how organizations, teams, and individuals can succeed in an ever-more challenging world of work. As founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight, she is a practicing consultant and keynote speaker. She has held consulting leadership roles at Capgemini, Mercer, Korn Ferry, and Deloitte. She is also the author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace (Wiley, 2023).

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The Five-Step Business Problem-Solving Process

April 22, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Have you ever had a business problem that you’re not sure how to solve? This five step problem-solving process is a great place to start.

At one point, I worked with a financial services firm, and we had this really cool program that, when we first launched it, was doing really well, both from a customer standpoint and from a financial standpoint. The problem came up when, all of the sudden, the financial numbers started tanking, and everybody started freakin’ out. We didn’t know what was going on, and it was pretty important for me to solve it because it was a program I was responsible for. So given the complexity of that problem, I used the five-step problem-solving process, and the steps of the process are really simple and straightforward.

In the first step, you pin the problem. You define what the issue is, what the goals of the stakeholders are, what previous efforts looked like, and you come out of that first step with a really clear definition of what the problem is. You can’t just rush ahead into solving a problem if you don’t know what the issue is.

Next is identifying all the issues that could be contributing to that problem. A lot of times, at first glance, you may say that’s the issue, but you’ll find, if you go through the process from there, you’re really solving a symptom. So this step of creating a logic map helps you expand what all the possible issues are that are contributing to the problem from the first step, and what that’ll enable you to do is find the real root cause that you’re going to solve for.

The third step of the process is identifying your best guess. So once you have all those issues listed out, starting to identify small solutions that could solve each of those and then prioritizing your efforts because you don’t have time, I don’t have time to go out and chase every single one of these solutions. So this step is really about homing in on that’s the one solution that seems like it could be the biggest, and we’re going to chase that one first.

The fourth step of the process is taking that one idea, that one hypothesized answer, and then doing your analysis. If your organization is anything like the ones I’ve been part of, you need a lot of data and a lot of support to take these big ideas and prove your case. So this fourth step of the process is doing that analysis, getting that in-depth information to say yes, that’s really what’s causing this, and that is the size of the prize.

The fifth step of the problem-solving process is taking that answer, turning it into a recommendation, and pitching it to your stakeholders. You have to convince people that this is the right answer, and the resources I’m asking for to go out and solve it are resources you should give me because I’ve proven my case.

So with that financial services firm, we walked through that five-step problem-solving process. We found the root cause. We found what the issue really was, and it wasn’t what we initially thought, and we were able to prove that case with analysis, make the recommendation to our stakeholders, and make the required changes and financial performance turnaround, and everybody was happy with the result because we used that five-step process.

So as I go through this course, what I recommend is you pick a business problem you’re trying to solve. Pick something you haven’t been able to crack before, something that’s ambiguous and confusing, and then apply the five steps of the problem-solving process to your problem, and hopefully, on the back end, you’ll come out with a clear, concise recommendation that’s really going to be the solution.

Want to learn more about solving business problems? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to solve business problems. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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!

Communicating, Executing, and Measuring Your Decisions

April 15, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

As you prepare to execute your decisions, think through your communication plan, identify the sources of risk and how you’re going to mitigate them, and think through how you’re going to measure and adjust.

Once a decision has been made, it must be communicated, executed, and then you have to measure it. Additionally, you need to adjust once you get new information.

Communicating

In terms of communication, be sure to articulate what the decision was, who made the decision, and why the decision was made. Let the organization know the goal of the decision was to drive this metric. Also tell them, “Here’s how we’re going to measure the success of this decision.” And to the extent you’re able to, identify events or information that might lead you to reverse the decision you’ve already made. Put in place those trigger points to say, “We need to go back and rethink this thing.”

Executing

Second, think through execution and the risks that come along with it. Just because a decision has been made doesn’t mean it gets executed by the organization. Sometimes you’ll see passive aggressive behavior where people aren’t doing the work. Or it’s been a bad decision and we get new information, saying we should change course, or new events that we didn’t anticipate. Put that decision at risk.

Measuring

Last, you have to measure and adjust accordingly. Set clear metrics in place that tie back to the original goal of the decision. If we’re trying to make a decision that will grow our business, we may want to have a metric that says we’re going to evaluate sales growth, and you can see that direct linkage between the metric and the original goal. Also react to ambiguity and new information as you resolve that source of uncertainty. And be ready to change that decision as it becomes clear, an incorrect decision was made in the first place.

I know an example where a company was making a very large technology investment and the decision was made that we were going to implement this new software platform. About $2 million into the project, it started becoming clear that this may not have been the right decision, but the executive who made the call up front said, “Well, we have a deadline and we’ve already communicated we’re making this change, so go figure it out.”

And the only way to figure it out was to spend more money. So more money was spent. And at $5 million, it became clearer that we shouldn’t be doing this. At 10, it was very clear, but this executive said, “I’ve made my decision. We need to figure this out.” $25 million later, it became abundantly clear that this was absolutely the wrong decision. And yet that executive still wouldn’t make the call to reverse course.

Ultimately, the CEO stepped in and said, “We’ve made an incorrect decision. We need to write the project off, and we need to move down a different path.” It is critical to measure and adjust and be willing to say, “We made a bad decision in the first place, let’s make a different one.”

So as you prepare to execute your decisions, think through your communication plan, identify the sources of risk and how you’re going to mitigate them and think through how you’re going to measure as well as adjust if it becomes clear that that first decision wasn’t the best one.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Making a Big Decision

April 8, 2026/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Before you move forward and take that final action, make sure you pause, spend some time considering these questions, and document your answers so you can be sure to make the best decision possible.

As you get ready to make a decision and take action, there are some critical questions you need to ask yourself before you move forward. Take the time to think this stuff through. As you get ready to move forward, ask yourself:

How big is this decision?
Can I break that big decision into smaller ones to reduce the risk that I face?
How irrevocable is this decision?
Can you roll it back if you’re wrong, or is it you have to get it right on the first shot? You should know the difference.
What’s the cost of being wrong, and what’s the value of being right? And is that an appropriate trade-off that you’re making?
How long do you have to make the decision? Many times, we impose a deadline on ourselves which isn’t real. What’s the real deadline for making this call and moving forward? What’s the cost of waiting, and what’s the value of acting now? For example, I had a decision I had to make, and if we acted sooner, we would save a lot more money. And if we waited, those savings were going to be gone. Understanding that trade-off of time is critical.
What are my personal biases that might be affecting this decision? Perhaps in the past, you made a decision and it didn’t go well, and this decision feels a lot like that last decision that didn’t go so well. You should know that you have a bias that might be affecting your decision to move forward.
How do I mitigate the biases that I might have to make clearer decisions? Can you bring somebody in as a sounding board to help push you on those biases?
Who do I need to involve in the decision, and how do I need to involve them?
And lastly, who needs to know I made a decision, and how should I inform them? Some decisions, it’s fine to send out an email. Other decisions, that would be highly inappropriate. And you need to think through the communication plan for how you’re going to get the message out there.

So before you move forward and take that final action, make sure you pause, spend some time considering these questions, and document your answers so you can be sure to make the best decision possible.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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!

3 Ways to Reduce Decision-Making Risk

April 1, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Learn three ways to reduce decision-making risk.

You face risk in all decision-making. And a goal of yours should be to reduce that risk as much as is reasonable. There are three primary methods for reducing risk.

First, involve more people in the decision-making process. They’re going to give you additional information and offer perspectives you may not have thought of. Additionally, by involving them early, you’re reducing execution risk on the back end. You’re getting people to buy into the decision now so when it comes time to execute, they’re onboard.

The second way to reduce risk is take more time. Today, the future may be completely uncertain. A month from now, maybe you’ve resolved some of those sources of ambiguity. A year from now, you have even better information as to the environment you’re going to make your decision in.

The third way to reduce decision-making risk is break big decisions into smaller decisions. If you’re trying to decide whether to relaunch the entire company website, perhaps you break that decision down and you make a smaller decision today of launching a pilot website, gather some additional information, and then make the bigger decision down the road.

Now, there’s a balance between gathering information and making a decision in a timely manner because gathering information takes time and money. And yes, you’re reducing uncertainty by doing so, but remember, there’s always new sources of uncertainty entering the equation. So find that balance between having enough information to make your decision.

As you look at ultimately reducing decision-making risk, remember, involve more people, take more time in making the decision, and break those bigger decisions into smaller ones.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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!

Three Critical Perspective Shifts Every New Leader Must Make

March 30, 2026/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Learn three critical perspective shifts you must make when stepping into a new leadership role.

Today’s post is by M. Nora Bouchard, MA, PCC, author of Hidden Metrics: The Coach’s Secret to Success that Really Matters.

Congratulations on your promotion! That moment when you get the news is exhilarating. The recognition of your hard work, the validation of your skills, the excitement of new opportunities—it’s a professional milestone worth celebrating. But here’s what they don’t tell you in the congratulatory email: that feeling of success? It’s fleeting.

The Leadership Reality Gap

As you step into your new leadership role, whether it is your first promotion or your fifth, you’re entering territory filled with unspoken expectations. These aren’t typically outlined in your job description or discussed in your onboarding. Instead, most new leaders discover them through trial and error—sometimes painful, always enlightening. Why does this happen? Because leadership requires a fundamental shift in perspective. The lens through which you viewed your work as an individual contributor must now widen dramatically. Your focus needs to expand, and your thinking must evolve.

Three Critical Perspective Shifts Every New Leader Must Make

From Tactical to Strategic

One of the most challenging transitions for new leaders is moving beyond the day-to-day. While you may have excelled at executing tasks and meeting deadlines, leadership demands that you lift your gaze to the horizon. Strategic thinking means: – Understanding how your team’s work connects to broader organizational goals – Anticipating market changes and industry trends – Considering the long-term implications of today’s decisions – Balancing immediate needs with future opportunities Your organization isn’t promoting you to continue doing what you’ve always done—they’re investing in your ability to see the bigger picture and guide your team accordingly.

That’s not to say you won’t have tactical responsibilities, too. One of your new challenges will be to balance short and long-term commitments. To help, be rigorous about those tasks that you must own and those you can delegate to others.

Speaking of tasks…

From Tasks to Relationships

As an individual contributor, your success was measured by your personal output and accomplishments. Leadership success, however, is measured by what you achieve through others. Your value now lies in your ability to: – Build and nurture meaningful professional relationships – Inspire your team to perform at their best – Connect with peers across the organization – Develop networks that support your team’s objectives – Communicate effectively up, down, and across the organization The relationships you form as a leader will become your most valuable currency and the foundation of your effectiveness.

From Clarity to Ambiguity

Perhaps the most unsettling shift is the increasing ambiguity you’ll face. The higher you climb on the leadership ladder, the fewer clear-cut answers you’ll find. Leadership requires: – Getting comfortable with uncertainty – Making decisions with incomplete information – Continuous learning and adaptation – Creating clarity for your team amidst the fog While you navigate this ambiguity personally, your role is to translate it into clear direction and purpose for those who look to you for guidance.

Setting Yourself Up for Leadership Success

Imagine how much smoother your leadership journey could be if you approached it with awareness of these hidden expectations! Instead of stumbling through these perspective shifts, you could intentionally develop the mindset and skills needed to thrive in your new role. Leadership growth doesn’t happen overnight, but understanding these unspoken requirements gives you a significant advantage. It allows you to be deliberate about your development and to recognize the areas where you need to expand your capabilities.

M. Nora Bouchard, MA, PCC is an experienced leadership coach and author of Hidden Metrics: The Coach’s Secret to Success that Really Matters. Inspired by her clients’ desire to grow, Nora provides practical insights and intuitive questions to move them toward the goals that really matter. Nora specializes in helping leaders envision incredible futures, then she guides them to achieve that vision through their own values and strengths. Nora has invested 30 years in growing leaders through her workshops, coaching, and speaking engagements.

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!

Decision-Making Strategies: Choosing a Type of Decision

March 25, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Learn the three types of decisions and how to choose the right type based on your situation.

There are three different types of decision that you can make.

The first is no downside. You would take this action no matter what the possible future environment is.

The second is favorable odds. Based on your certainty around the way the future’s going to play out, this decision should have a positive outcome. However, there’s a possibility it could have a negative outcome.

And the last type of decision is going for broke. The future is uncertain. Being right could bring huge upside, but being wrong could cause a lot of problems.

So for example, a no downside decision is hiring a new administrative assistant. This is no doubt, you need the help. The cost is low and the risk is low. And you could further reduce that little bit of residual risk by doing some job interviews, perhaps checking out the individual’s references, and even running a trial period where the individual comes on, does the job, and you see how they do.

A favorable odds example is reorganizing your entire department. It’s favorable odds that you’re going to have a good outcome because you have a good sense of your people, and the decision is reversible. Additionally, it’s a very small investment to make, to move people around and change their responsibilities. You still face some risk here. So the way you can reduce that is get input from other people on the way you’re going to reorganize, maybe get some of the team members input, and you can still reverse that decision.

Now, a big bet decision, a going for broke type of opportunity is spending $5 million to completely rebuild your company’s website in a rapidly changing and highly competitive market. This is a big bet. $5 million is a huge cost. You don’t know how your customers are going to react. The payoff is uncertain and you have a lot of risk because you don’t know how your competitors are going to respond. You need to reduce this risk as much as you can. So maybe you do some market research or launch a pilot website to see how your customers respond.

So remember a goal in all decision-making is to make the best decision while reducing the ambiguity and risk you face as much as possible. And by reducing that ambiguity, gathering more information, you’re going to reduce risk, and make better and safer decisions.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Decision-Making Strategies: Managing Unpredictable Outcomes

March 11, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Learn how to make a decision when you face a situation with completely unpredictable outcomes.

The fourth state of ambiguity you might find yourself in is one with completely unpredictable outcomes.

Let’s look at a situation where I give you a card and it’s the seven of clubs. And then I give you another card and it’s the queen of diamonds. The next card is an UNO card. And then I give you a joker from a deck of cards. The next card I give you is a credit card, then a greeting card, then a baseball card, then a SIM card.

It’s not clear what the next outcome is going to be. You have no way to predict what the next card is that I’m going to give you. It’s impossible. Even with a lot more information, you would be hard pressed to even construct a scenario where you would be able to figure out what that card is going to be.

Let’s imagine I said, “Hey, would you bet a hundred dollars on betting what that next card is?” Would you take that bet? What if I told you you could win a thousand dollars on that bet. Or a hundred thousand. Or a million. At what point do you take that bet? The uncertainty is too high in this situation. And the value of incremental information is going to be extremely high.

So when you’re facing situations with complete ambiguity, the value of spending the time to gather additional data, construct possible scenarios, is going to help you make a much better decision. And sometimes the way you can eliminate some of that ambiguity is to actually move to a phase decision-making approach, where you make a decision, you gather some additional data, and you make another decision. So breaking those big decisions down into smaller ones will reduce that risk.

Let me offer an example of what this might look like. Let’s say your company is based in California, and you’re looking at expanding your service offerings. So you decide you’re going to expand into India. Now there’s a lot of ambiguity in this situation.

First, you don’t know how customers are going to receive your new service. Your service has never been offered in that geography before. You have no idea how your competitors are going to react. There may be regulators who are going to govern how your service is offered, and you have no idea how those regulators are going to decide whether your service is offered or not. You don’t know what the employee capabilities are in that market. Is there a talent pool that can actually deliver your service? You may be unsure about the economic environment long-term in the Indian market.

So as you look at this very large decision, there are so many sources of ambiguity that you are really facing a situation with completely unpredictable outcomes. Given all that uncertainty you face, it’s critical that you reduce that ambiguity. So what are some ways that you could do that?

Well you could run a small pilot of your service in the Indian market to gauge true consumer receptivity to your service. You may have conversations with regulators and ask them what decisions might they make about your service. What regulations do they plan on putting in place? You could look at your competitors and see how their offerings fare in the Indian market. Maybe pick up your competitors annual report and look at their strategic plan. See what reactions have been in the past when they’ve had somebody go head to head with one of their service offerings. You could look at the Indian economic forecast and understand what are some of the trends that could affect your service, positively or negatively? The value of gathering all this additional information as you go to make a major decision of entering a new geography is critical.

So if you find yourself in a situation of complete ambiguity, complete uncertainty, remember, the most important thing you can do is gather additional information in order to reduce that ambiguity which is going to reduce the ultimate risk that you face when you make your decision.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Decision-Making Strategies: Considering a Spectrum of Outcomes

March 4, 2026/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

Learn how to make a decision when you face a spectrum of outcomes.

The third state of ambiguity you might face is one where there’s a spectrum of outcomes.

Let’s imagine you’re playing cards and I give you four cards, eight, nine, 10, and Jack of clubs. And you see your opponent’s hand and they have five cards, two of which are nines. Now there’s 44 Cards remaining in the deck. And there are 22 of them that might beat your opponent’s hand if I give you that card.

Would you take that bet?

Would you bet $100 on your hand and the outcome of that next card if you knew it might beat your opponent?

The value of additional information in a situation where there’s a spectrum of outcomes is very high. Knowing what that next card is, knowing what one more of your opponent’s cards is, can fundamentally alter your bet in that situation. Gathering more information from multiple sources is highly valuable and helps you reduce the ambiguity you face.

The corollary here is in a situation at the office where you have a spectrum of outcomes, gathering additional input from multiple stakeholders is going to help you arrive at a better decision because you can reduce that ambiguity.

Allow me to offer a situation. Let’s say you have five open positions on your team, and you’re trying to figure out how many candidates do you invite to come onsite to interview for those five roles? How many should you invite? Because it’s costly to invite people in to interview. Some of the sources of ambiguity you might face are what percentage of candidates will pass the interviews, from 25 to 75% might pass, that’s a standard range, but it’s a very broad range.

And if they pass, what percentage of them will actually accept the role? Let’s say you knew that’s between 25 to 100% are going to accept the job offer. And as you look at all of these variables, it’s still not clear how many people to invite onsite for those five roles.

What are some ways that you can reduce all this ambiguity you face? You might do some rigorous resume and phone screening of these candidates. You could pre-screen candidates for knockout factors. You may do a background check on them. You would hate to make a job offer to someone, only to find out on the back end that they have something in their past that will prevent them from taking the role.

You might ask candidates if they have other job offers that they’re pursuing, because that’s going to help you reduce that uncertainty around how many are going to accept the job offer. You could even ask people what their salary requirements would be if they received an offer from you. Again, trying to reduce that ambiguity around how many people will accept the offer if you make it.

The value of additional information in this situation is very high. There’s a spectrum of outcomes, 25 to 75% might pass, 25% to 100% may accept the offer, but those are very broad ranges. And the value of that additional information that you can gather during the process is going to help you make a better decision on the front end, in terms of how many people to bring in.

So if you face a situation where you have a spectrum of outcomes, remember, the value of additional information is very high and it’s very worth your investment in gathering that data.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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!