The Leaders' Lens

Written for the top leadership team

Essays and tools for CEOs, VPs, Chiefs, Health Commissioners, CNOs, MOHs, Medical Directors, Executive Directors and Administrators, on the nuances of leadership that shape how senior leaders think, decide, and mobilize their teams.

Senior leaders rarely get a room where half-formed thinking is safe. This page is my attempt to build one, and to hold myself to the same standard I ask of the teams I coach. Some of what you'll find here is settled, and some of it is me thinking out loud: ideas I am still testing against the work, and questions I am carrying into my next engagement. Leadership at the top is less about being right than about being ready. These essays are where I work on readiness.

Featured

Psychological Safety · 18 min read · Oct 6, 2026

Safe for Whom? The Case for Equitable Psychological Safety

Psychological safety scores can show that a team is broadly safe while still missing the person for whom speaking up carries the highest cost. This article explains equitable psychological safety, the price of candour, and five practical ways leaders can look beyond the average, read the spread, and lower the cost of speaking up for the people whose information the team may need most.

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Strategy execution · 11 min read · Sep 29, 2026
Involvement in Strategy Is Not Authority Over Delivering It
Middle managers carry accountability for strategy execution without always having authority over delivery conditions. Learn what senior leaders can do.
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Leadership assessment · 15 min read · Sep 22, 2026
When capable healthcare leaders become less effective under prolonged change
How the Hogan Development Survey and HDS surface the leadership tendencies that grow louder under prolonged change and AI adoption in healthcare, and what to do once you can name your own.
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Emotional intelligence · 12 min read · Sep 16, 2026
Composure May Be the Most Expensive Way to Manage Your Emotions
Composure and emotional regulation are not the same. Why composure may be costly for senior leaders, and how situation design may help before hard conversations.
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Emotional intelligence · 22 min read · Sep 8, 2026
Does Emotional Intelligence Shape Strategic Foresight?
A proposition about executive judgment under pressure, the evidence that makes it plausible, and what remains to be tested empirically.
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Enterprise leadership · 12 min read · Sep 1, 2026
The bridge is the job, and it changes shape at the top
Boundary spanning gets rising leaders promoted, then quietly caps them at the executive level. Here is how the discipline changes as you move from indispensable bridge to system builder.
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Physician leadership · 14 min read · Aug 4, 2026
Establishing psychological safety in the first ten seconds
A clinical team’s silence can look like alignment. It can also mean people have learned that speaking up is too expensive. Here is what physician leaders can learn from Toyota’s Andon Cord about making voice ordinary, safe, and consequential.
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Paramedic leadership · 16 min read · Jul 7, 2026
The hallway isn't yours, but the leadership still is
Ambulance offload delay is visible on someone else’s floor, but its consequences land in your service. Here is how Paramedic Chiefs can lead across system boundaries, using evidence, framing, and social capital, when the problem is urgent and only partly within their control.
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Executive communication · 12 min read · Jun 20, 2026
The day you say it out loud
For senior leaders, communicating a decision is harder than making it. Here's how executive communication preserves trust, dignity, and your leadership legacy.
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Executive communication · 9 min read · Jun 2, 2026
The executive presence trap and where the real leverage is
Executive presence is vague feedback with real career consequences. Here is why senior leaders should focus on charisma, communication, calibration, and trust instead.
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Change strategy · 4 min read · May 16, 2018
How to create widespread change with minimal strategic effort
If you prefer the article video, click here When you go bowling, you want to land a strike. But do you actually aim to hit every single one of the bowling pins? No. You are aiming for the kingpin because you know that if you get the…
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Difficult relationships · 3 min read · Apr 27, 2018
Changing relationships with people you really don’t like
Click here if you prefer to watch the video. We all have one or more people in our lives that we really don’t like. We feel they drain our batteries and deplete our energy. But disliking them also comes at a cost, often leaving us…
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Motivating change · 2 min read · Mar 29, 2018
Motivating change in the workplace
If you prefer the article video, click here A common narrative in change management is that if you give somebody a compelling reason to change, what’s in it for them, they will then be much more likely to adopt the change. What can be a more…
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Mindset shifts · 4 min read · Mar 28, 2018
How to change mindset?
If you prefer the article video, click here It appears that changing mindset is top of mind for a lot of people, both in organizations and outside of it. So how do you go about changing something that is so much deeper, a part of who you…
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Change experiments · 3 min read · Jan 30, 2017
Do you experiment with change?
Over the last year, working with multiple coaching/advisory clients, I noticed how a common suggestion might not result in consistent outcomes across clients. Clients usually hope for a surefire way to obtain desired changes, but several…
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Training ROI · 3 min read · Jan 29, 2017
Three ways to maximize the benefits of the training for your change initiative
So, your whole team or even entire organization completed training on the upcoming changes, and yet the lessons didn’t stick. Sound familiar? Sometimes even when an organization provides training as part of a deliberate change management…
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Middle management · 5 min read · Jan 3, 2017
Managers matter
In a post in the Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini purported that “excess management is costing the U.S $3 Trillion per year.” They noted that there was one manager for every 4.7 employees based on the occupational…
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Digital disruption · 6 min read · Dec 27, 2016
How to keep up with the pace of changes in technology?
In October 2016, you might recall, major Internet services including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and GitHub got hacked. In fact, “hundreds of thousands of cameras, routers, and DVRs [got] hijacked by malware for use in massive denial of…
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Personal change · 7 min read · Dec 16, 2016
New year. New me. New you?
Like all fresh beginnings, the new year offers us opportunities to reflect on the past year and to create an inspiring, energizing, and an optimistic view for the year ahead. Like most people, at this time of year, I find a wealth of…
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Performance management · 6 min read · Oct 27, 2016
Are you managing your employees’ performance as well as you can?
Four employees on Peter’s team, Mona, Alex, Rob, and Sam, didn’t meet their sales targets this month. But this isn’t the first time it’s happened; their performance has been inconsistent for the past few months. Managing employees’…
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M&A integration · 5 min read · Oct 27, 2016
Microsoft is in: six strategies for LinkedIn’s continued success post-acquisition by Microsoft
2015 set the highest record for the mergers and acquisitions (M&As) volumes in transactions globally. That trend is expected to continue strong in 2016 as per Deloitte’s annual trend report on M&As . As such Microsoft’s purchase of…
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Psychological safety · 4 min read · Apr 13, 2016
Psychological safety essential to successful change implementation in organizations of all sizes
“The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.”, Touchstone in As You Like It The nobility in Shakespearean plays often employed fools or court jesters that were licensed to speak up without fear of…
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