Leadership Development

Crucial conversations is a dialogue style that teaches you to calm your emotions and stick to the heart of the matter during high stake, highly opinionated conversations. For civility, this tool is a game-changer. Help your teams learn to express controversial topics with respect for one another.

Learn how to help new managers in Micheal D. Watkins' Virtuous Cycle for new managers in his International Bestseller, The First 90 Days. The Virtuous Cycle and The Vicious Cycle are two cycles that forecast the success or failure of hiring a new manager.

By March, organizations don’t need more enthusiasm, they need subtraction. The question isn’t whether initiatives are worthwhile, it’s whether they are sequenced. When everything is urgent, nothing is prioritized. And when priorities aren’t ranked against real capacity, execution inevitably fragments.

Effective manager development starts with honesty. It requires HR to identify avoided behaviors, design training around real scenarios, and hold leaders accountable for application. When HR is willing to confront the real skill gap, training stops being an event and starts becoming a lever for performance.

Employees offer input based on what prior experience has taught them. When feedback is mishandled or ignored, they adjust. Silence becomes rational. Silence itself is data. It signals breakdowns in accountability, credibility, or follow-through. HR leaders who want honest feedback must create the conditions that sustain it.

As organizations look ahead to 2026, the question isn’t whether alignment matters, it’s whether alignment is being designed or simply hoped for. HR’s opportunity is to operationalize alignment as a capability.

"Dear Ellie" is an advice column from a seasoned HR consultant. Hear her advice for an HR pro who is currently trying to prioritize industry recommended initiatives for 2026.

Learn how workplace disagreements escalate beneath the surface and how tools like the Ladder of Inference can help teams move from assumption to clarity. With a return-to-office example, we show how to redirect tension into productive dialogue.

Gallup research shows that only about three in ten employees believe their opinions count at work, signaling open-door promises aren’t creating the space intended. Open-door policies came from the right place. They were designed to signal care, openness, and trust. But intent without structure no longer works.