How does the concept of leverage translate to your leadership world? High-leverage leadership actions are quick actions you can take at the right time that will create bigger results later.

In The Trusted Advisor, David Maister talks about some of the fundamental principles of trust that leaders need to know. Given that trust is such a hard thing to define concisely, his principles help shape the concept and give it dimensions. Here are three of the principles that will support you in your leadership endeavors.

We often hold our work time and our "time outside of work" in tension. It's easy to see them as competitors, each leeching time from the other and experiencing both as less satisfying than we'd like.

I invite you to shift the paradigm, away from work and life in a tug of war, to energy cycles of performance and recovery. Of putting out energy and then recharging.

Consciously adding coaching skills to your management repertoire can enable you to more effectively engage and empower the people you lead. That's because the central premise of coaching is that the person you're coaching has the wherewithal to solve their own problems. Coaching helps bring clarity, organization, conviction and focus to their thinking in order to support progress.

I recently traveled to Montreal with my family and we had dinner at a great bistro called Vallier. As the waitress handed us the check and said goodbye at the end of our meal, she asked how much longer we were staying. Upon finding out that we were leaving in the morning and this was the end of our stay, she said, "Oh! Well, thank you for choosing our city."

I was on the phone with a client recently who is in a leadership position in which their primary focus is the performance of their people. The performance issues my client was articulating came down to a simple list, which I've flipped into the positive below.

Someone has asked you to a meeting. You know what it’s about and you know it is going to be tough — emotionally tough.

Here are some tips for how you can lead yourself through that conversation.

"Let's just have an open discussion!" This is a well-intentioned statement that we hear a lot in teams.

There are a couple ways it could go wrong, though.

Let’s start with this: what do we even mean by 'open'? The intent of calling an open discussion “open” is to encourage participants to share openly. But it also tends to refer to the process, or way the forum is conducted, like 'open mike,' and there’s rarely full openness in what is shared.

Goals — those specific, measurable achievements that you can check off your list and relish in the accomplishment of. Why bother setting them? What's the point? 

I'm going to tell you something you might not believe. The purpose of having a goal is not to achieve that goal. 

What is the purpose of a goal then?

A big part of leadership development is building the courage to authentically and constructively speak our minds in order to build and maintain alignment with others. Effective leaders highly value the need to maintain alignment. That means asking early for clarification and greater understanding, before the little unclear things are allowed to fester.