Everyone. I mean literally everyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment has asked themselves a version of this question at some point in their life. I know because I have spent 15+ years inside companies large and small, non-profits and startups, C-suites and graduate programs, across Europe, Asia, the Americas. Everywhere I go, there is an expectation to behave a certain way that is far removed from who people actually are. It is presented as a natural and necessa

“Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet,” a leader said to me. Words innocent enough, we’ve all heard them a hundred times. Except he said it about working with a toxic executive and biting the bullet meant accepting narcissistic, childish behavior from a grown man with major influence in the company. Some years ago I would have said, “Yes, of course.” If we want to get the work done, get the project going, we just need to take one for the team and engage with him in spit

Most leadership development is broken. Not because it lacks ambition, or rigour, or well-meaning facilitators. It's broken because it's built on a fundamentally flawed premise: that leadership is primarily a skill set. Communicate better. Delegate more effectively. Manage performance. Drive results. Tick the boxes, collect the certificate, get back to your desk. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the human part of leadership — not just in how leaders relate to others,

Working in corporate settings come with a specific burden not many people openly talk about. The mental effort of the game. The constant background calculation that runs underneath the actual work: What is the right thing to say here? How do I position this? Is now the right moment, or do I wait? Who is in the room, and what does that change? For the full article, click here.