When employees feel overwhelmed, leaders need to help restore the conditions under which people can do their best work.

Hope is not optimism or wishful thinking—it’s a goal-oriented motivational force that links present action to a desired future, even amid uncertainty. Leaders often fail to inspire hope effectively because they don’t recognize that hope varies depending on the level of aspiration articulated and the credibility behind it.

Purpose-driven organizations create an implicit promise that employees will be able to make a meaningful difference, but when rules, metrics, and processes prevent them from doing so, that promise is broken. This “thwarted impact” is widespread and especially acute for front-line workers, who see customer needs most clearly and feel most constrained by bureaucracy that prioritizes efficiency, risk reduction, or scale over judgment.

In the past year, emotional labor at work grew for nearly 59% of women. It’s taking a toll on them and their employers.

Last week, I gave a keynote talk at Agile Manchester, based on a previous blog post. The talk was more detailed and had a new framing; this post summarises what I shared.

So many people (and some teams) work under mandates to “use AI.” While I am a fan of these two functions for the current LLMs: The ability to create fast prototypes for human assessment and judgment. And the ability to gain new insights into you, your team's, or your organization's data. (This often requires a […]

AI isn’t eliminating engineering jobs – it’s redistributing them, and the companies navigating this well are hiring for judgment, not output.

As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle…