When it comes to mental health and your organizational culture, storytelling reduces isolation, creates community, and reduces the stigma of mental health. Revealing details of your life and experiences can be uncomfortable, but it can have a profound impact.

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Why You Need a Culture Assessment

As a creative leader, you need candid feedback on how people experience their workplace. How do you get this intel when people aren’t exactly transparent with the boss? In this leadership video, we’re breaking down the what, who, and why of culture assessments.

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Why Purpose Matters

Leading human teams is about much more than simply managing resources. There’s the transactional aspect of overseeing resources + workflow. There’s also a crucial relational component to managing people. In this leadership video, we’re getting relational. Let’s talk about how sharing purpose, or “the why,” with your people can lead to better work experiences and more sustainable results over the long term.

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Whether you call it career design, career mapping, role planning, or professional development, it is essential to map out how your people can gain the skills, experience, and expertise to grow toward a particular role, responsibility, or outcome. We call it Career Pathing.

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Are you unclear about the direction of your career and current job role — and do you expect your boss to figure that out for you?

If so, I have a different perspective to share. Let me show you how to take your future into your own hands through Career Pathing. Read more…

The job title “director of culture” is relatively new within the past five or so years. But we’re seeing more and more smaller to mid-size, entrepreneurial companies creating this role within their organizations.

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What gets you from A to B isn’t what gets you from B to C. As a creative leader, what brought you early career success is not what you need to grow and sustain a career over the long haul. Read more…

You’re great, Creative Executive. But how do you elevate and continue to grow?

Here are three steps to be the best version of you. Read more…

Transformative….dynamic….amazing….empowering…powerful…these are just some of the adjectives used by our Spring Immersion group to describe their experience. While we think it’s a great way for successful women to get clarity on your professional and personal goals, and get insights on how to go forward into 2016, don’t take our word for it.

Need a reason to come to our three-day C/E Immersion Experience in November? Here are five! Read more…

I want you to remember the last time you felt really creative.

Perhaps it was… Read more…

“Inspiration” isn’t some nice-to-have bonus at your office.

It’s essential to doing the kind of work you want to do. We’d place it up there with electricity and good coffee.

As a Creative Executive, you can’t put off inspiration until after all the “real work” is done. (Tweet+Share) (And when does that ever happen anyway?)

It has to be at the top of your mind. Every. Single. Day. Inspiration has to suffuse your leadership and the work culture you put into motion. (Tweet+Share)

Inspiration can take all kind of forms: Read more…

I was honored to be chosen to speak at SXSW this year.

Writing Your Next Act was a full session attended by a diverse audience of restless, successfuls looking for the next step in their career. A great reminder that we all experience transitions in our work, passions, and focus. The question is – are you leveraging your transitions to get you where you want to go?

We’ll share the video when it’s ready, but if you are curious about the specific content, you can click here for a summary.

Here’s something you probably didn’t predict about your career when you started out: Midway through, with plenty of success behind you, you’re still looking for your path.

The secret that no one tells you? It’s totally up to you to figure it out.

The landscape of the work world is a lot different than it was when you first started out. Companies that still lay out succession paths of how you can move up are few and far between.

Who you are — and what you need to do to keep succeeding — is different, too. At this stage, your success is less about how you execute and more about how you manage relationships and make things happen.

So you’re in charge of the path. What does that mean for you now? Read more…

We like to talk a lot about following our passions. What we mention a lot less, though, is that passion can mean suffering.

I was recently watching Todd Henry’s talk “Be Creative Under Pressure” from the 3% Conference. The whole video is worth a watch, but one part especially stuck with me: He talks about the Latin root for the word passion: to suffer or to endure.

Think about people, things and ideas you’ve been passionate about in the last few years. Now, can you think of the suffering that accompanied those passions? Read more…

Sometimes we think we have to do a lot or change a lot to get where we want to go. But lately a different approach has made a big impact for both me and my clients. The best part? It doesn’t involve looking outside of yourself for solutions.

I decided that 2015 would be my Year of Refinement. And I’m talking about refinement in all its meanings. Read more…

It’s December.  The holidays are here in full force.  How do you feel?  Is the gratitude practice working?  Still feeling pulled in a million directions?  Like there isn’t enough time to catch your breath, let alone do all of the things you’ve planned?

And, just to ratchet up the tension a little bit more, this is the time of year when most of us start thinking about our next year–our big plans, our goals, our gotta-make-it-happen’s for 2015.

We have a solution to help you focus.  Read more…

We’re beginning Part Two of our Best of 2014 list with, well, lists. A big part of creative inspiration is discovering the peers whose stories, bright thinking, and advice we can all learn from. Here is a recap of our best-of lists from 2014: Read more…

Great ideas can be fleeting, fragile things at first. They need a protector to grow and thrive — and sometimes even appear at all.

That’s you, Creative Executive.

“Most of us have tons of great ideas throughout the day, but without a sounding board or platform, we may shrug off these ideas as whimsy,” says Aaron Burgess, director of content for the User Experience Design Group — and a protector of ideas — at PayPal.

Based in Austin, Texas, Burgess leads a couple dozen content designers and video producers and works with colleagues across six states and four continents. While he admits that he’s never really off the clock, he also points out that his “work rarely feels like work,” and that his life beyond PayPal includes skateboarding (“I think my wife and my knees would prefer I stuck to a safer form of exercise”), meditating, going for runs to the sounds of Minor Threat and Slayer and starting to make stuff again. He’ll tell us more about that in this Creative Leadership in Action interview, where he also delves into building culture, nurturing ideas and creativity and forgiving yourself. Read more…

Your leadership can make all the difference in you and your team’s experience of work, resiliency through tough times, and how a mission and vision can be actualized in the day-to-day.

Here are some things to think about…

– The things you know about leading powerfully
– Things that get in the way of you being effective
– How to persuade and share your ideas with others

You have the opportunity to share your leadership gifts with the worlds you encounter. Remember that gift has great power.  Use it for good.

Last month I had the amazing opportunity to attend a 5-day intensive training that helped participants shape their own narrative and hone their presenting skills. It was transformational (more on that to come), but it also got me thinking about the influential leaders out there who help creative leaders become better speakers. Read more…