I had a fascinating conversation with executive coach and author Lisa McLeod during her recent LinkedIn Live presentation, Why You Feel Insecure at Work (and How to Fix It). To a certain extent, we define ourselves by our work, and we spend a lot of time thinking of ourselves as someone in a particular job or role, so it’s hardly surprising that there are many reasons a person could feel insecure at work!  First of all, if you tend toward feeling anxious or unsure in your personal life, you probably also feel uncomfortable at work—after all, workplace protocols include deliberately judgi ..read more

This post originally appeared on Forbes. What does it take to do a good job here? How will I know if my work is valued? What do I need to do to move up? These are typical questions for anyone new to a workplace. But it’s not typical to get concrete answers to these questions, particularly if you’re a young Black woman who isn’t familiar with the mores and hidden expectations of corporate America. In a recent conversation, Lauren Wesley Wilson, founder and CEO of ColorComm Corporation and author of What Do You Need?: How Women of Color Can Take Ownership of Their Caree ..read more

Last week I was laughing with one of my CEO clients about how good leaders often feel more guilty than other people do. This is a real thing: it’s even been written about in Harvard Business Review! The actual subject of our conversation was how to deal with an executive he knew he needed to fire. She had been blocking progress and disrupting the worklife of less senior employees since the CEO arrived on the job a few years before—but he kept raising reasons why it might not be a good idea to cut ties with her. I’m as big a believer as the next person in guilt as a moral and workplace value ..read more

This post originally appeared on Forbes. Leaders are only as good as their relationships with their teams. But it may not feel that way when you’re standing up at the front of the room issuing directives and setting policy. That’s because we’ve been socialized to deliver independently, starting with school. “Who takes the test? You take the test. And when you get your first job, we ask, ‘How did you deliver?” says Joe Davis, managing director and senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and author of The Generous Leader: 7 Ways to Give of Yourself for Everyone’s Gain ..read more

One of the reasons I like being a consultant and coach is that my own preferences aren’t particularly relevant; what’s important is what my clients want to accomplish. The flip side of that, though, is that it’s hard to be my own client, so when I have to make decisions for myself, I can feel uncertain.  I relearn this every time I do a big project myself—a rebranding, a new website, my TEDx, and now my animated miniseries, Better at Work with Liz Kislik. (More information follows below—the third episode drops this week!) When I’m working with a client, what that client wants to accompli ..read more

This post originally appeared on Forbes. In the face of truly competing needs and the polarizing conflicts on both local and global scales, it’s become incredibly difficult to bring people together in most situations. But in a recent conversation, William Ury, expert negotiator and author of Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict, describes several approaches to help us navigate conflict skillfully and achieve the best resolution for all parties. Operate From Your Most Effective Zone The biggest obstacle to getting what you want in a conflict is not your di ..read more

One of my COO clients is a consistent champion for positive organizational culture. He invests both time and money in hiring strong people and supporting them to do their best work. But he’s facing a significant challenge in the form of a longtime incumbent executive who consistently behaves badly toward him and her colleagues. Not long after the COO started in his job, he became aware that this executive was trying to challenge his authority and lording her clout over more junior employees. He recognized that this pattern of behavior was likely to continue because she’d had a close working r ..read more

“You’re in here every day! Why didn’t you know we weren’t on track?!” This was the accusation a project head launched at a founder when she spoke to him about his insufficient performance. “There’s too much going on in here for me to keep track!” the disgruntled employee continued, throwing the responsibility for his underperformance back at his boss. Shortly after this exchange, the relationship collapsed completely and the founder had to let the employee go. But things hadn’t been smooth for a long time, as their conversation makes obvious. It’s a real problem when a midlevel manager can’t ..read more

This post originally appeared on Forbes. Some people seem to know instinctively how to get along with others at work: how to make other people comfortable yet get their own points across without friction. This skill can seem elusive to most of us. But Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, believes that anyone can learn to be a supercommunicator. “It’s not that people who are supercommunicators are particularly charismatic or are uniquely extroverts,” he says in a recent conversation. “It’s j ..read more

“Can’t they tell I’ve changed? Why don’t they give me credit for it, or at least acknowledge it?” Sometimes when I’ve worked with a client for a while and they feel they’ve made a real change to their behavior, they get frustrated when people treat them the same old way. Other people seem to view them as if they’re still how they were pre-coaching—not listening enough, not kind enough, not decisive enough, or still indulging in whatever troubling approach or behavior we’ve been working on. It’s very hard to hear that people don’t perceive you to have changed, particularly when you’re a good p ..read more