A collection of reflections, tools, and leadership insights to help you communicate more clearly, navigate change more confidently, and lead with greater generosity.
New insights are added monthly, including expanded versions of Shannon’s LinkedIn articles and fresh content designed to support your growth.
How to Prepare Your Team for Fast Growth
Like the video that goes viral, fast growth can lead to some unintended consequences, both good and bad. How your team reacts in moments of upheaval and change is entirely a reflection of the leadership. Fast growth can reveal tremendous opportunities and also major flaws. You and your team need to be ready for…
5 Common Mistakes People Make When Giving a Presentation
You’ve been working for days on a presentation for the C-Suite, or the shareholders. Or perhaps you’ve been honing the text of a speech you hope will result in a standing ovation. Keep these words in mind, however: “The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are…
3 Ways to Create a Happy Team at Work
Workplace happiness has a valuable ROI Asking your team to look for gratitude in their every day can feel a little forced at first, but encourage them to persist! You, and they, will find that it makes a difference! We all want to be helpful at work but sometimes it takes a conscious act…
The Keys to Strong Leadership
You can’t just talk the talk. Talking tough is not leadership. It’s bluff and it usually masks a whole host of insecurities and issues of self-doubt. Being tough: that’s a true foundation of strong leadership. This doesn’t mean being tough in the sense of coming down hard on other people, but an inward strength that…
LOL: Why Humor Is Good for Teams and Business
There’s no contradicting the fact that a little laughter can lighten any situation. We’ve all been in one of those situations: a tense disagreement between team members or a stressful day with a deadline looming. How these times get handled is very important to the overall well-being of a team. One way to handle them…
5 Benefits of Executive Coaching
Coaching need not end when at high school graduation or when you land that first job. It need not end no matter how many years you’ve worked. Learning is a lifetime exercise. Therefore, a coach is never out of date, and the benefits of executive coaching are numerous. Executive coaching can make all the difference…
How Creating Margin Can Foster Effective Leadership
Effective leadership takes time, intentionality, purpose and strategy. It also means making the choice to create margin in your life. Just like a well-written, typed paper needs margin around the edges to be a source of communication and efficiency, leaders need margin in their lives to perform at peak levels. But leaders are often driven, which can…
Micro-Managers – The Good, The Bad and How Not To Be The Ugly
In 1966, Clint Eastwood starred in a movie titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” This spaghetti western told the story of three men searching for gold. The last scene is a famous three-way shootout, leaving the Good (Clint Eastwood) alive, the Bad dead and the Ugly barely surviving. In the world of business,…
10 “Be”-haviors to Gain Respect
As a manager, respect is essential to building a successful, productive team. While many managers struggle to gain respect from employees, respect can actually be earned and maintained with simple behaviors that let people know you can be trusted to lead effectively. Adopt the following behaviors and watch employee respect for you grow: 1.…
Putting Your Best Interests to Work
“Stay hungry, stay foolish.” This was advice that the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs gave to the Stanford University Class of 2005 during their commencement speech. In his speech, Jobs in effect said that you will do your best if you do work that you love to do, not what other people think…