Tag: leadership development

Always Be Coaching

In sales, there’s an old saying that has echoed through offices and training rooms for decades.

Always be closing.

It’s meant to keep the salesperson focused on their end goal. Keep the deal moving forward. Stay alert to opportunity. Maintain momentum.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe leaders need a different version of that advice.

Always be coaching.

As a leader, your mission is to develop the people who will come after you. You lift others through quiet, daily work that helps them grow. Your job is to bring out the best in yourself and in the people who will eventually step into your role. Coaching drives growth and keeps it moving forward.

Coaching your team is a way of saying, “Your future matters to me.” Coaching your children says, “I believe you have more inside you than you can see today.” And coaching yourself acknowledges the simple truth that growth must continue throughout life, especially for the leader.

Great coaches do more than explain ideas. They create space for practice. They help others turn new knowledge into muscle memory. They offer challenges sized just right for the moment. They ask questions that change how a person thinks about a problem. They reveal a new angle or a new path forward when something feels unsolvable.

Coaching takes learning to the next level. You learn something. You put it into practice. Then you pass it on. Teaching anchors the lesson. It deepens the insight. It turns wisdom into a gift you can hand to others.

Coaching doesn’t require perfect knowledge. It requires humble generosity. Share the insight you gained from yesterday’s challenge. Share the questions that helped you see an issue more clearly. Share the perspective that lifted your confidence when you needed it most.

Leadership is a relay. Someone handed the baton to you. One day you’ll hand it to someone else. The best leaders prepare the people who will run ahead long after they’ve finished their leg of the race.

Who have you coached today?
This week?
This month?

This is your responsibility. Your opportunity. Your mission.

Always be coaching.

Photo by Sylvain Mauroux on Unsplash – who are you helping to climb their next mountain?

Measuring the AI Dividend

In the early 1990s, the term Peace Dividend appeared in headlines and boardrooms. The Cold War had ended, and nations began asking what they might gain by redirecting the resources once committed to defense.

Today the conflict is between our old ways of working and the new reality AI brings. After denial (it’s just a fad), anger (it’s taking our jobs), withdrawal (I’ll wait this one out), and finally acceptance (maybe I should learn how to use AI tools), the picture is clear. AI is here, and it’s reshaping how we think, learn, and work.

Which leads to the natural question. What is our AI Dividend?

Leaders everywhere are trying to measure it. Some ask how many people they can eliminate. Others ask how much more their existing teams can achieve. The real opportunity sits between these two questions.

Few leaders look at this across the right horizon. Every major technological shift starts out loud, then settles into a steady climb toward real value. AI will follow that same pattern.

The early dividends won’t show up on a budget line. They’ll show up in the work. Faster learning inside teams. More accurate decisions. More experiments completed in a week instead of a quarter.

When small gains compound, momentum builds. Work speeds up. Confidence rises. People will begin treating AI as a partner in thinking, not merely a shortcut for output.

At that point the important questions show themselves. Are ideas moving to action faster? Are we correcting less and creating more? Are our teams becoming more curious, more capable, and more energized?

The most valuable AI Dividend is actually the Human Dividend. As machines handle the mechanical, people reclaim their time and attention for creative work, deeper customer relationships, and more purpose-filled contributions. This dividend can’t be measured only in savings or productivity. It will be seen in what people build when they have room to imagine again.

In the years ahead, leaders who measure wisely will look beyond immediate cost savings and focus on what their organizations can create that couldn’t have existed before.

Photo by C Bischoff on Unsplash – because some of the time we gain from using AI will free us up to work on non-AI pursuits. 

Bring Them On the Journey

You can tell people what to do, and sometimes that’s the right call. Yet, direction without participation creates compliance instead of commitment.

When people understand the purpose, see where they fit, and have a voice in the direction, they’ll take emotional ownership.

The best leaders invite that ownership by asking questions that open doors to insight. What are we missing? What would you try? Where do you see the risk? These questions are invitations to shape the work and the results.

When a product manager asks her team, “How would you approach this?” instead of presenting a finished plan, the solutions that emerge are sharper, and the team building them gets stronger.

Humans are built for both independence and belonging, desires that often pull in different directions. Wise leaders guide this tension well. They give people space to grow while connecting them to something larger than themselves.

To bring others on the journey is to build together. Growth is shared. Trust expands. When the path gets steep, they’ll keep climbing with purpose.

They remember the reasons, because they helped shape the path.

Photo by Powrock Mountain Guides on Unsplash – Unsplash has a ton of amazing hiking photos, mountain climbing photos, pictures of maps, legos, and winding paths. All would have represented the themes of this post admirably. But this photo caught my eye.

How do you see it connecting to this post? What makes this photo stand out? How hard do you think it is to hike across to that gleaming white mountain in the distance?