Soft Skills Insights

The Beachhead Test: Choose the First Win That Enables the Full Win.

A leadership team has developed a strategy to address a critical business challenge. They've diagnosed the problem, evaluated poten...

Information used to be expensive.

Finding the right report, expert, dataset, or piece of research could take days or weeks. Today, for many knowledge workers, access to information has become dramati...

Most organizations have two basic options when they need to improve how their people solve complex problems.

They can train them. Bring in an expert, teach a framework, practice it on a case or exerc...

Most organizations are teaching employees how to prompt AI.

Far fewer are teaching them how to think with it.

That distinction matters most when AI is being used for work that requires significant c...

Why “think more critically” is too vague—and how leaders can identify where the thinking process is actually breaking down.

Leaders see the symptoms every day. An employee overlooks a key stakeholder...

Most delegation fails for a simple reason: lack of clarity.

Not effort. Not intelligence. Not even capability.

Clarity.

When managers assign work, they often believe they’ve communicated effectivel...

When leaders encounter a problem that resists conventional analysis, the instinct is often to double down on data, debate assumptions, or refine existing models. Yet research in cognitive science and ...

During a board meeting I volunteer to attend, the treasurer presented financial projections that showed our fund balance would grow from under $2M to over $7M in 5 years. People were excited and pleas...

Many companies come to us because they can’t get their people to think for themselves or take ownership for results. We hear this a lot:

“I’ve told them a hundred times they need to… What is wrong wi...

Yes, an objective and an agenda can help you run an effective meeting, but these two tools – a destination and a pathway – are much better.

WHY THIS MATTERS: Professionals today spend 23 hours in ...

As AI takes over additional tasks, we will increasingly focus our efforts on skills like complex problem-solving. This is one of the reasons problem-solving makes LinkedIn’s list of the most-in demand...

Most professionals spend hours trying to land a dream job, but once they secure a job, they allow their career to take its own direction. This laissez-faire approach to career development can make sen...