If meetings have been a drag in 2021, and you're resigned to the fact that there are too many, the five tips below will help you make your meetings more productive and efficient so you can have fewer of them.

The amount of information coming across your screen every day probably makes your head spin. It can be overwhelming just to decide which emails need your attention and which do not. And then, with all of that information in front of you, it can feel impossible to focus and get any actual work done.

You can't prevent every miscommunication. You can't make everyone get along. You can't please everyone. You can't plan every step of the way perfectly because you can't predict the future. Your to-do list will never be complete. You can't read everything. You can't have all the answers.

You’ve heard of emotional intelligence. You have a good sense of what that means. Let’s dig deeper into one of the ways emotional intelligence shows up: in a leader's ability to transcend their own “either/or” thinking.

Your team exists to achieve a mission. Hopefully, everyone on the team is clear and aligned with one another on what that mission is. And your team has a secondary mission, intricately interconnected with the first: to make itself the best team possible.

We all have experienced someone on our team who plays the role of Debbie Downer or Pessimistic Pete. They may complain about what's not working, voice fears and hurdles they see in the future, or simply exude resistant energy through their body language. It can feel like these teammates hold the group back.

There’s this one intersection in the next town over where I run a lot of my errands. You can go straight through the light, or you can turn slightly and loop around. If you know the light cycle well, you can “cheat the system” and save on wait time.

I’ve been using the Enneagram with several clients lately. Although I’ve been using this model for years, I continue to marvel at how well it resonates when someone learns their type, and how helpful it is for taking steps toward growth.

Clients often bring to coaching dilemmas involving other people. What those other people might think, what they did that was absurd, how to have a conversation in which the other person will actually listen, etc. In his book, Reboot, Jerry Colonna devotes a whole chapter to “the irrational other.”

If you want to truly find out what your people are thinking about something, open-ended questions will get you there fastest. Even though you may feel like you’re meandering, the person answering the question is steering where they want it to go.