One sunny autumn afternoon, I was tossing a football with my two sons. I stood on the deck overlooking our yard, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, heaved the ball high, and watched them maneuver to win the catch. It was great fun. The phone rang. It was a client, the CEO of a manufacturing company. Her question punched me in the gut: “Are you on your way?” It was twenty minutes past the hour I had agreed to lead a training session for 38 managers who had left work early a

If you cannot disappoint people, you cannot lead them with clarity and honesty. It's not that you go around trying to disappoint people. It's that doing what makes sense, having the important conversation, and making the hard decision, will inevitably disappoint your boss, direct reports, adult children, parents, and spouse. Most of us know this in principle. In practice, three forces make it remarkably hard to do. 1. Delusion: What people ask for is not always what serves th

Infants enter the world wrapped tightly in their mother's arms, nurse and bottle-feed their way into chubbiness, and spend their first years under vigilant eyes, protected from real and imagined dangers. An intense desire to protect and defend the helpless child does not end with infancy. It can get out of hand. For many, the tendency to over-care has become an unthinking habit. Parents suffocate their children through worry, unsolicited reminders, unreasonable expectations,