Leadership is a noun. It names a position, an ability, or sometimes a group of people. What a leader actually does is lead, and that is a verb. This distinction explains a lot about why well-intended change efforts stall. Are your plans stalling?

The Leader Within Naive Realism / George Carlin once observed, "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" This applies greatly to leadership. read to find out how.

Three Hills of Leadership - Early in my career, I told my superintendent I felt like I was standing in a valley surrounded by three hills. On one: the community — students and parents, their wants flowing down to me. Understanding who you are make all the difference when climbing your hills.

I've read more self-help books than I probably should admit. I've also spent my entire career as an educator, which means I genuinely love learning something new. But I keep running into the same problem: reading a book and learning something new is not the same as putting it into practice. Knowing and doing are two vastly different things. At Managing Leadership we know this all too well so we build in training that helps bridge this gap. I'm currently reading Practicing th

Socrates said the unexamined life isn’t worth living. He said it in a courtroom, defending his life’s work to a jury that would sentence him to death for it. That’s not a man being clever. That’s a man who meant it. I think about that line more as a former superintendent than as anything else. Because here’s the truth about the job: you learn to hold your cards close. Boards are elected. Communities are political. The confident, everything’s-under-control face isn’t vanity —

I spent twenty years being the person with the answers. That's the job. A staff member has a problem, a board has a question, a parent is upset — they come to the superintendent's office because they expect someone in that chair to know what to do. So when I started building an executive coaching practice, I assumed the switch would be simple. Trade one kind of expertise for another. Instead of answering “what do we do about the boiler,” I'd answer “what do we do about your l

There’s a book called Eat That Frog, by Brian Tracy. The idea is simple: find the task you least want to do, and do it first. Eat the frog before breakfast, and the rest of the day gets easier. I built a real practice around this years ago. Frogs get deferred, delegated, or deleted — deliberately, never by accident. It made me more productive than almost anything else I’ve tried. There’s an older adage about a different frog. Put it in tepid water and raise the heat slowly en