Tomorrow, I’m having surgery on my wrist. It is strange to write that sentence. For a long time, the pain was simply part of the background: something I worked around, adjusted for, and explained away. Then I fell down the stairs while packing. My wrist and knee were injured, and the pain became harder to ignore. At the specialist’s appointment, he looked at the X-rays and asked whether I had really been in pain for only two months. He could see that this had been going on for years. I...

A model can help us notice difference. It cannot tell us what another person’s difference means. A leadership model can teach us to listen more carefully. It can also teach us to sound empathetic while deciding who someone is before they have had the chance to tell us. That is the line I kept feeling during a one-hour talk I attended earlier this week. My skin was crawling, and at first I couldn’t explain why. I believe culture shapes us. I teach leaders to notice how culture influences what...

Courage is where leadership starts. Influence is what we learn to stack on top of it. A note on privacy: this article grew out of a real Boost coaching session. I have deliberately changed enough facts, circumstances, roles, timing, organizational details, and identifying information to protect the privacy of the person involved. The leadership patterns and teaching are real; the identifying details are not. Some coaching sessions are about helping someone solve the problem they carried into...