Accountability is the glue that holds coordinated efforts together. 

When multiple teams and individuals are working toward a shared strategic goal, accountability is a magical force that keeps everything aligned and moving forward. Without it, even our best plans can unravel into missed deadlines, finger-pointing, and confusion about who is responsible for what. 

Accountability is often thought of as something that flows from the top down—a manager setting goals, checking progress, and ensuring results. But in reality, the most effective accountability happens between peers. When teams hold each other accountable, work moves faster, problems are solved more collaboratively, and people are more motivated to deliver.

Accountability, in this sense, isn’t about oversight—it’s about commitment. It’s what ensures that when one person completes their piece of the puzzle, the next person is ready to pick it up and keep going.

When it comes to early communication about change, getting the message right is critical. Change inherently stirs emotions—uncertainty, excitement, fear, and hope. Our message must address these emotions head-on, guiding our audience from resistance to acceptance. 

One of the most critical steps is clearly explaining the Why behind it. Why is change necessary? Why now? Why is this the right path? Without a compelling and well-articulated “Why,” even the best strategies will face resistance.

Over the years, I’ve developed a framework I call “Hook / Scare / Comfort / Inspire” to craft a message that answers these questions. It connects the logic of the change to the emotions of the people who will execute it.

Failing to prioritize well is one of the greatest disservices leaders can do to their teams. But prioritizing effectively is also one of the hardest things to do. 

Prioritization is the bridge between clarity and capacity. Without a clear focus from leaders, teams drift, resources are wasted, and strategic goals slip through the cracks.

Why Stack Ranking Matters

To effectively allocate resources, you have to do more than identify a list of important initiatives—you need to stack rank them. This means putting your initiatives, projects, or tasks in a clear order of importance where there is only one #1, one #2, and so on. Regardless of any specific methodology you use to help determine importance—whether it’s impact assessments, ROI models, timeline sequencing, or other sophisticated approaches—stack ranking remains critical. It ensures that your team knows exactly where to focus their energy, empowers them to make decisions, and aligns their efforts without constant guidance.

Imagine if every decision you made could make or break your company's future. Every day, employees at all levels are bombarded with decisions that shape the organization's trajectory. Each choice, no matter how seemingly small, has a ripple effect. Are your decisions propelling your company forward, or are they holding you back?

According to McKinsey, companies make tens of thousands of decisions daily, yet only 20% of them are considered high-quality decisions. How can we ensure our decisions are among the high-quality ones? Executing a strategy involves navigating a sea of choices, big and small. Leaders can’t possibly oversee all of them. In fact, most decisions happen far from the executive suite, carried out by people on the front lines. As Matt O’Connell, CEO of Vistaly, told me, “On the ground, it’s the day-to-day, nitty-gritty stuff where you need to make quick decisions. The executives don’t care about the details—they just want the problem solved.”

Making good decisions quickly is critical, but it’s not easy. Decision-making is influenced by a number of factors—ranging from cognitive biases to stress and emotional pressures—that can cloud judgment and lead to inconsistent or rushed choices.

Imagine you and your competitors all enter a pact: share your biggest revenue streams, pool your marketing, and match payrolls dollar for dollar. Everyone sells the exact same product. You'd think your companies would perform similarly, right?

This is what the NFL tries to achieve—an even playing field, where teams share profits, keep payrolls capped, and have a level shot at success. Yet, what has actually happened? Some teams rise year after year, while others (like my beloved Cleveland Browns) consistently struggle. Why?

Is it just luck? Or are there deeper lessons here—lessons for any business trying to understand the true costs of change?

Saying “No” is hard, especially if you’re an optimist like me. It can feel awkward, even risky. Saying “Yes,” on the other hand, feels great—it’s productive, optimistic, full of possibility. So it’s tempting to say “Yes” to everything that seems promising. But here’s the paradox: saying “Yes” to too many things often overwhelms your team, scattering their focus and preventing them from dedicating their best efforts to what truly matters.

Over the years, I’ve discovered that the most powerful tool for success isn’t saying “Yes”—it’s learning to say “No.” For leaders, this is one of the most essential skills to master if you want to maintain focus and drive meaningful results.

I’ve found a simple trick that makes it easier to say “No”

Let’s face it: nobody likes constraints at first. We all want freedom—more resources, more budget, more tools. But here’s the twist: constraints are actually our friend. Knowing what you can’t do helps you laser-focus on what you can do. Instead of chasing every possibility, you zero in on what really matters.

When a new strategy is on the table, there’s often a push for “more”—more money, more people, more time. But guess what? Adding more tends to makes things messier. More complexity, more decisions, more things to manage. The real magic happens when it’s clear that more isn’t coming. That’s when everyone rolls up their sleeves and figures out how to make it work with what they’ve got.

One of the most frustrating pitfalls in communication is something known as the Curse of Knowledge. It happens when we're so familiar with a subject that we speak in jargon, acronyms, or insider language—and confuse the heck out of our audience. This is a dangerous trap, particularly when presenting new strategies or analyzing performance. We think we’re being clear, but our audience is left bewildered and unsure of what to do with the information we’re conveying.

The Ladder of Abstraction, a concept coined by linguist S.I. Hayakawa and recently highlighted in an article by Big Think, provides a useful tool to avoid this trap. It helps us shift between high-level, abstract ideas and specific, grounded details that ensure our message is not just heard but understood.

What is the Ladder of Abstraction?

Did you know that we humans can’t walk in a straight line without visual cues to keep us focused on our path? Not only can’t we walk straight, we actually walk in circles if we can’t clearly see where we’re going.

It seems we also drive our businesses in circles if we don’t have strong focal points like clearly defined visions, goals and strategies.

It’s easy to see the parallels in our business environments. Without a clear vision of where we’re going, it’s easy veer off course. In the business world, we’re constantly bombarded by internal and external demands for short-term change. Those demands are often driven by overly narrow data analysis (such as daily or even hourly comps), emotional reactions, gut feel, wild ideas, competitive shifts, and more.

So what do we do about it?

I’m ignorant. And so are you. Frankly, we’re all ignorant. It’s not an insult. It’s just an acknowledgment that none of us can be all-knowing.

I recently learned about the concept of the Iceberg of Ignorance, a term popularized by a 1989 study by Sidney Yoshida. Yoshida’s research revealed a startling disparity in awareness of problems within organizations: frontline workers were aware of 100% of the floor problems, supervisors were aware of only 74%, middle managers knew about 9%, and senior executives were aware of a mere 4% of the issues.

While this concept was initially targeted at executives, it’s a universal truth. Any small group, or even individuals, experiences this iceberg effect. The notion that senior executives are the most ignorant of the problems is striking, but let’s be honest: ignorance permeates all levels. Supervisors miss out on what frontline workers know, corporate managers don’t fully grasp the supervisors’ challenges, and even frontline workers don’t everything going in their environments.

But what can we do about it?

One of the most critical jobs of a people leader is building a high-performing team.

I like to think of it like a General Manager of a sports team who is assembling a group of players who can compete for the championship. It’s important think about how the group as a whole will function together versus focusing on each role in a vacuum where you could end up with a team of superstars (or “A players”) who are individually great but collectively disappointing.

I love this quote from basketball legend Sue Bird:

"I've been on extremely talented teams that just don't click, and I've also been on teams with a little bit less talent, but they clicked, and because they clicked, they did better than other talented teams I've been on."

When hiring to build a winning team, I like to focus on three Cs: Character, Critical thinking, and Chemistry.

Experience is important, but I find it’s far less predictable than those three Cs. More on that in a bit.

But first, let’s explore the Cs.

In my experience, the most important factor for success in business is the ability to interact well with other people. Leadership skills, financial acumen, and technical expertise all matter a lot, but they don’t amount to a hill of beans without solid people skills.

The reality is none of us can be successful completely on our own. We need the help of other people — peers, staff, managers, vendors, or business partners — to successfully accomplish our tasks and goals.

Human relationships are more complicated than Wall Street financial schemes, but we often take interpersonal skills for granted. We rarely study them to the degree we study financial or technical skills. After all, we’ve been talking to people all our lives. We’re experienced. But I’ll argue there are subtleties that make all the difference, and they’re worth studying.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking. We spend such a large portion of our days reacting to issues flying at us from all directions that we can easily lose sight of where we’re headed and why we’re going there. We’re so busy that we don’t have time to think, and failing to allot time to think is ultimately counterproductive. Taking time (and even scheduling time) to reflect on past actions and consider future courses of action is more important than we often realize.

Consider this quote from former Intel exec Dov Frohman in his book Leadership the Hard Way:

“Every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. Until you do so, you will never be able to develop the detachment required to identify long-term threats to the organization or the flexibility to move quickly to take advantage of random opportunities as they emerge. Only when you have substantial ’slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such  free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem.”

What does it really mean to create a customer-centric culture ? We hear companies say it all the time. Almost every claims to have it. But what does it really mean and how do you know if you really have it?

Culture is a powerful and interesting beast. I’ve had the opportunity to observe and operate within many corporate cultures. I’ve learned that corporate cultures cannot just be decreed from the top as cultures get their power from all of the people within them. While CEOs and other leaders can be influential in culture development, they can also be completely enveloped by powerful cultures that are driven from all levels of the organization and formed over many, many years.

That said, I believe there are certain dynamics that drive cultures, and we can influence and shift cultures by focusing on these key areas.

Without further ado, here are what I believe are the four key facets of a truly customer-centric culture:

Focusing and delivering on all layers of the Employee Hierarchy of Needs can lead to the type of employee satisfaction that leads to customer satisfaction and big profits (investor satisfaction?). But there’s no question that it takes constant focus and a lot of hard work.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” —George Bernard Shaw

I read that quote the other day, and it kind of blew me away. How often, as managers, executives, marketers and team members do we send forth messages and assume effective communication has taken place? I know that I personally have been guilty of spewing forth my thoughts and directives in ways that were clear to me but were not nearly clear enough to my audience.

Over the weekend, I did a bit of reading on communication. As I read Wikipedia’s article on communication, I was reminded of the technical breakdown of communication I learned in my college Organizational Behavior class. While those explanations are useful, I really wanted to think about communication in more practical terms. While communication between individuals is very important in business, effective one-to-many communication can often be extremely challenging.

Technology may impede quality.

“We tried that before and it didn’t work.”

Man, I’ve heard that phrase a lot in my life. And truth be told, I’ve spoken it more than I care to admit.

But when something fails once in the past (or even more than once) should it be doomed forever?

I was once lucky enough to hear futurist Bob Johansen speak, and he said something that really stuck with me:

“Almost nothing that happens in the future is new; it’s almost always something that has been tried and failed in the past.”

Most of us are experts in something. Our expertise and experience are usually significant advantages that allow us to deal effectively with complex problems and situations. But they can occasionally be Achilles’ heels when they breed the type of overconfidence that causes us to overlook simple solutions in favor of more complex and costly solutions. Injecting a little naiveté into some problem solving sessions can spur new thinking that results in more effective and efficient solutions.

In my experience, experts tend to skip right by the simple solutions to most problems. Groups of experts working to solve a problem are even more likely to head directly to the more complex solutions.

We have immediate access to loads of data in today’s world, but just because we can access lots of data in real time doesn’t mean we should access our data in real time. In fact, accessing and reporting on the numbers too quickly can often lead to distractions, false conclusions, premature reactions and bad decisions.

I remember a time I switched on CNN and saw — played out in all their glory on national TV — the types of issues that can occur with reporting too early on available data.

CNN reporters “monitoring video” from a local TV station saw Coast Guard vessels in the Potomac River apparently trying to keep another vessel from passing. They then monitored the Coast Guard radio and heard someone say, “You’re approaching a Coast Guard security zone. If you don’t stop your vessel, you will be fired upon. Stop your vessel immediately.” And, for my favorite part of the story, they made the decision to go on air when they heard someone say “bang, bang, bang, bang” and “we have expended 10 rounds.” They didn’t hear actual gun shots, mind you, they heard someone say “bang.” Could this be a case of someone wanting the data to say something it isn’t really saying?