“I’ve hired a team of stars, but I really need them to work like a constellation,” a CEO once said to me. It’s a great line and captures a frustration I’ve heard so often over the last 20 years of coaching the world’s top teams. This particular CEO did what most leaders think impossible: he was chasing down a moonshot 10x growth goal while freeing up 30% of his time. The breakthrough came when he realized that despite hiring exceptional talent, his hub-and-spoke leadership style was creating a bottleneck.

How good are you at decisions? Here’s how to up your game. Making decisions is a key function of leadership. Leaders must make complex decisions that affect the lives of their teams, businesses, and communities. Expertise in the fine art of making decisions can empower you to make good ones while creating a culture that fosters collaboration and innovation.

John was a talented engineer, quietly excelling in his role at a large tech company. His managers appreciated his efforts, but few saw him as anything more than a skilled individual contributor. That all changed when the company implemented a comprehensive leadership potential assessment program. To everyone’s surprise, John’s results revealed exceptional leadership traits—learning agility, tolerance for ambiguity, capacity to problem-solve, and strategic thinking.

Since the introduction of modern education systems, leaders have approached development as a series of chapters, or even a collection of short stories, rather than a lifelong learning journey that starts in infancy and continues through adulthood. Think about it. We all progress through early education, primary schooling and beyond, leading to various opportunities such as higher education, workforce entry, or skill development.

In a crisis, the knowledge and experience of the people in the room is always smarter than any one single person in it. This collective, networked intelligence—what we might call “the wisdom of the room”—is a critical resource for teams navigating high-stakes, complex, rapidly adapting problems. However, the wisdom of the room is not something that teams can automatically use, especially during chaotic situations. Teams are often more productive and creative when they add cognitive diversity and include different skill sets, backgrounds, and perspectives.

While most of us accept that artificial intelligence isn’t going to take over the world just yet, there’s a growing recognition that businesses and their employees are going to have to adapt their skills pretty swiftly. According to the 2024 Global CEO Survey from consulting firm PwC, seven out of 10 CEOs believe that AI will significantly change the way their company creates, delivers, and captures value over the next three years. On the plus side, 41% believe it will increase revenue.

As hard as it is for me to believe, it’s been more than three decades since Stephen Covey wrote his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The book was a smash bestseller and had a positive impact on readers for many years after it was published. While Covey honed his list of habits down to just seven, there are many other things that highly effective people do to become successful. Here are 21 that you can put to work in your own life right now.

Ready to transform how you use AI tools? Learn how to refine your prompts, avoid common pitfalls, and maximize the potential of generative AI tools. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot can be powerful. Even though generative AI is a fairly new technology, a powerful limitation on its use dates back to the 1950s or earlier: GIGO. GIGO means "garbage in, garbage out." If you ask AIs the wrong questions or don't ask them correctly, you're pretty much guaranteed to get nonhelpful answers.

As we approach the end of the year and begin planning for Q1 2025, it’s the perfect time to focus on boosting employee productivity, well-being, and engagement. According to the 2024 Global Talent Trends report by Mercer, a staggering 82% of professionals feel stressed, overwhelmed, and at risk of burnout. This is not just a personal challenge—it’s a critical business issue.

Most of us have an inner dialogue, that little voice in our heads that crystallizes what we think about what’s happening around us, or to us. And for years, researchers have found benefits to using positive self-talk, that is, optimistic and encouraging phrases that help you reframe the way you view a situation. For example, when a group of researchers systematically analyzed 47 studies on the relationship between self-talk and performance.

As a leader, how do you approach challenges in your organization? Do you see them as problems to be solved, or puzzles to be pieced together? In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, this distinction could be the key to unlocking innovation and thriving in uncertain times. The shift from problem-solving to puzzle-solving isn’t just a change in terminology – it’s a fundamental shift in mindset that can transform how your team tackles complex issues.

I didn’t set out to start a gratitude ritual with my colleagues at Jotform. A few years ago, as the holiday season approached, I was overwhelmed by the number of tasks left to complete. The stress was so distracting that it made it hard to focus. To break the cycle of rumination, I grabbed a pen and wrote a quick note to one of our directors. She had been balancing family commitments and work projects yet still managed to bring her enthusiasm to a recent team effort.

Young managers aren’t just using AI to boost efficiency — they see it as a tool to become better leaders. A new report from Google Workspace, conducted by the Harris Poll, surveyed more than 1,000 “knowledge workers ages 22 to 39 who are employed or self-employed full time and currently hold or aspire to hold a leadership position.” Of these workers, 86 percent believe that AI “can help current leaders become better managers,” per the report, and 79 percent are interested in using it to become a better manager themselves.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill, the iconic British Prime Minister who led his nation out of the dark days of World War II to victory. Most often, Sir Winston expressed his inspirational leadership with the oratorical skills he exhibited in the more than 2,500 speeches he gave over his lifetime. In a prior blog, you read how you can adopt the five principal elements of content and delivery Churchill deployed in his speeches in your own presentations.

My company, Jotform, was not an overnight success. I didn't wake up one day to find myself the darling of TechCrunch or attract massive funding rounds from VCs ravenous to get in on the form-building action. I probably don't have to tell you that a form-builder is not the world's sexiest basis for a startup. But that doesn't bother me one bit. Jotform became successful not because it's flashy, but because our products work.

If there was something that 81% of people spent time at work doing, yet 84% of people also agree that it's not working — wouldn't that be a strong incentive to make critical changes? According to Asana's 2024 State of Workplace Innovation report and data shared in Asana keynote speeches, that exact scenario is playing out in businesses worldwide. What is this broken activity? Collaboration. In fact, 90% of workers rely on informal networks, friends, and unspoken understandings to get things done.

Ask people if they’re on track for a good retirement, and many will immediately start talking about their finances. Do they save enough? Have they diversified their portfolio properly? What will happen if they experience some unexpected crisis? All of these are worthy questions, of course. But according to a new study out of Japan, saving enough to enjoy your golden years is only the first step to a good retirement. If you really want to feel happy and fulfilled after you step back from work.

Once the soaring leader in the aerospace sector with a stock price of around $430 per share and a market capitalization of almost $240 billion, Boeing has dropped far from its heyday. With the BA stock price down by more than 60% and market capitalization losing billions by the day, the corporation is today a shell of its past. This sharp drop did not occur by accident; rather, it was the outcome of a sequence of strategic errors, leadership decisions, and cultural changes costing Boeing not only financially but also reputationally.

Digital transformation is now an inevitability, focusing on the approach rather than the decision to proceed — and at the heart of this evolution lies artificial intelligence (AI). In today's fast-paced digital landscape, companies are turning to AI as a game-changing asset that fuels growth, enhances efficiency, and sparks innovation. Successfully embracing AI goes beyond mere technology; it necessitates forward-thinking leadership that comprehends both its possibilities and its obstacles.

The brutal reality is that today, AI is worse than it will ever be. As it improves, the employment picture will grow darker. Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will cause 300 million jobs to vanish by 2030. This includes the full spectrum of human endeavor. At the “greatest risk of task replacement,” in Goldman’s view, is everything from administrative support positions, at 46 percent, followed by legal positions.