Why capable people can appear hesitant when they are responding intelligently to the conditions around them Most people have two jobs at work. The first is the one in their job description. It is the work they were hired to do: solve the problem, serve the customer, lead the team, make the decision or deliver the result. The second job is rarely named. It is working out how to stay safe while doing the first one. It is reading the room before disagreeing. Deciding who needs to be copied into...

One of the most significant shifts in my thinking has been recognising that human beings are not simply experiencing the world. We are constantly constructing narratives about it. Most of those narratives are never spoken aloud. They emerge quietly in the space between an event and our response. A delayed email becomes evidence that someone is disappointed in us. A difficult conversation becomes confirmation that a relationship has changed. Silence in a meeting becomes proof that an idea was...

For a long time, I believed organizations succeeded or failed because of the decisions people made. Better decisions created better results. Poor decisions created poor ones. Leadership, therefore, was largely about improving the quality of decision making. I no longer think that is where the story begins. Every decision is made through the lens of perception. Before we choose how to act, we first decide what we believe is happening. That interpretation occurs so quickly that we rarely notice...