Articles

First, let’s make sure we’re talking about difficult people, not different people. When asked to think about difficult people we work with, we often think about people who have different goals, values, approaches, methods, styles, and (sadly) even appearances. Those folks aren’t necessarily difficult; they are just different. Strong leaders not only recognize them as…

In our last blog, we drew a connection between dealing effectively with difficult people and working relentlessly on knowing who you are as a leader, where you are going, and who you want to take with you on that journey. We’d like to follow up and talk about a related leadership challenge — resistance to…

We Love ConsistencyAccording to David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, our brains are hard-wired to like consistency. Consistency helps us understand the world so we can make good predictions about what will happen next. If we consistently burn our fingers every time we touch a flame, for example, we learn to keep…