Most leaders are genuinely committed to clear communication. They also consistently overestimate how clearly they've communicated, and the part that rarely gets examined is how fuzzy the intent was to begin with. This 'fuzziness' between what we truly want, what was communicated and what actually gets translated travels through every layer of the organization. As it picks up momentum and excitement (ideally), it also picks up new interpretation at every stop, shaped by each person's read on...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Every leader on your team will make dozens of decisions today and most of them will happen without a second thought: Who to loop in. Who to leave out. Whether to say something in the meeting or hold it for later. Whether to push back on a timeline or absorb it quietly. Whether to use the data already sitting in your shared drive or start from scratch, because it feels faster. The mindbogginging this is that none of these show up on a dashboard, and none of them get flagged in a quarterly...
14 days ago • 3 min read
I was in a hot yoga class last week, moving through a flow we had already practiced twice. The sequence felt familiar and the rhythm was established. The instructor gave a verbal cue while simultaneously opening her arms to demonstrate the move, easy! However, given where she was standing and the direction she faced, if you were following her physical cues exactly, you'd turn the wrong way. As you can imagine, half the room pivoted in the wrong direction. The other half, the ones who followed...
21 days ago • 4 min read
We've all been on both sides of the same failed exchange. You finish explaining something, ask if there are questions, and receive confident nods all around. Three days later, your inbox is flooded with the same question asked 12 different ways. Or the reverse: someone walks you through a process, you nod along because stopping them feels awkward, and the moment they leave, you think...THAT could've been a shorter meeting. Do they think I don't know what I'm doing? The miscommunication runs...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Earlier this month, I was mid-conversation with Manolo Paez, COO of the Global Good Fund, when he said something that made me put my coffee down & lower my eyebrows... "In my mind, the ROI of professional development is two years." Two years! In a world where we expect everything to show results by next quarter, this felt almost...radical. An immediate reaction I noticed in myself. Manolo and I met through the global NALA Program & SIBF network, and over the past year, he's become a real...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
If you're anything like me, you've spent years oscillating between wildly overestimating how long something will take and dramatically underestimating the same thing the very next week. You're either 20 minutes early with nothing to do or 10 minutes late with a perfectly rehearsed excuse...that damn traffic, am I right?! A few weeks ago, I attended a workshop on time management, and while the calendar audits and priority matrices were useful, the real shift for me came many hours later. I was...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Burnout has become a catch-all for something most organizations don't have language for. The slow drain of capacity that no one names until it's already a problem. I was in a debrief conversation with a client last week, and we were talking about team performance. The word "burnout" kept coming up. When we dug into what was actually happening though, the perception of burnout and the reality of output didn't match. The team wasn't necessarily burned out; they didn't have a full grasp on their...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
A friend recently shared this sports event with me because it's so relevant to the work we do at The Venned Group. During the 2005 Japanese Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso found himself wheel-to-wheel with 7x Champion, Michael Schumacher, at the infamous 130R, a corner taken at over 180 miles per hour with walls on either side. Rather than back off, Alonso stayed flat on the throttle, and it was Schumacher who hit the brakes. When asked about it later, Alonso shrugged: "At times like that, I...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
I was reviewing my notetaker’s notes the other day after a meeting. They were immaculate. Perfectly sorted, action steps clearly highlighted, even the smallest contextual details captured accurately. We use Motion, which meant those action items had already been translated into tasks and offered to be placed into my calendar before the call had officially ended. The efficiency was undeniable and so was the feeling that followed. Irrelevance is the closest word I can find, although...
2 months ago • 3 min read