Marcia's Leadership Q and As: What Humans Do Better Than AI

Q. Will AI replace leaders, or will we maintain a competitive edge?

A. AI is a capability that is reshaping how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how organizations operate. That creates a hard truth many leaders are avoiding. If AI can do more of the doing, then leadership must become far more intentional about the thinking. The question is not whether AI will change leadership. It already has.

The real question is this. What do leaders do that AI can’t? AI can process, predict, and produce. It can analyze patterns faster than any human and generate outputs at scale. But it can’t care, commit, or be accountable. When mistakes are made, the excuse “the AI did it isn’t going to fly!”

Leaders define meaning. They decide what matters and why. They choose direction in the face of uncertainty, often without complete or reliable data. AI can inform those decisions, but it cannot make them with responsibility.

Leaders also navigate the human system. They read tension, resistance, fears, and unspoken concerns. They understand when an issue is technical and when it is cultural. AI does not sense context the way humans do.

And leaders create coherence. In a world flooded with information, they simplify, prioritize, and align. They ensure the organization is not just busy, but focused. Consider this. Are you spending your time on what only you can do? Or are you still operating as if your value is in producing answers rather than defining direction?

Stop Blaming People. Fix the System.

Most organizations still operate with a flawed assumption that people need to be held accountable. They do not. People behave exactly as the system is designed. Leaders create that system through structure, incentives, metrics, and culture. When results fall short, the issue is rarely individual performance. It is almost always systemic.

AI will expose this faster than ever. It will highlight inefficiencies, contradictions, and misaligned incentives in real time. Leaders must shift from managing people to designing systems that enable people to succeed.

Where is your system producing the very behaviors, you say you do not want? What are you tolerating in the system that no amount of accountability will fix? Accountability is not something you enforce. It is something that emerges from a well-designed system.

From Decision Maker to System Designer

For decades, leaders were rewarded for being the smartest people in the room. That model is breaking down. AI now outperforms humans in many forms of analysis and pattern recognition. The leader’s role is no longer to have the best answers. It is to design how answers are developed, challenged, and used.

This requires a fundamental shift. Leaders must architect decision systems for the environment. They must define guardrails, clarify values, and ensure that AI is used responsibly, ethically, and effectively. They must ask better questions, not just give better answers.

Are you designing how decisions get made, or inserting yourself into every decision? Is your organization dependent on you or enabled by the system you built? The leaders who scale are those who design systems that deliver.

Rethinking Judgment in an AI World

AI will give you more options, faster. That does not make decisions easier. It makes them more complex. Judgment becomes the differentiator. But judgment is not instinct alone. It is grounded in values, clarity of purpose, and an understanding of long-term consequences. Leaders become more explicit about how decisions are made, not less.

They must also resist the temptation to outsource judgment to algorithms. When AI presents multiple viable paths, how do you choose? What principles guide your decisions when efficiency conflicts with ethics or long-term value? The quality of leadership will be defined by the quality of judgment under pressure.

Innovation Requires Human Tension

AI is excellent at extending what already exists. It predicts the next logical step. But transformation rarely comes from the next logical step. It comes from challenging the mindset, knowledge, and frame entirely. Leaders create the conditions for that to happen. They invite dissent. They tolerate ambiguity. They protect ideas before they are fully formed.

AI can support creativity, but it cannot lead it. Are you creating space for new thinking or optimizing the current model? Do your systems reward learning or just performance? If your organization only values efficiency, it will miss transformation.

What Leaders Must Transform Now

To leverage AI, leaders change how they think and how they act. They stop equating leadership with control and start focusing on design. They move from directing work to shaping environments. They shift from evaluating people to improving systems.

This also requires personal transformation. Leaders are more curious, not more certain. They are more disciplined in their thinking, not more reactive to data. They are willing to question their own assumptions, especially when AI reinforces them. They must also protect their time differently. If AI can handle the routine, leaders must invest in reflection, learning, and deep thinking, the work that cannot be automated.

Where are you still leading in ways that no longer serve the organization? What would you stop doing if you fully trusted AI to handle what it does best?

The Real Work of Leadership

AI will continue to evolve. It will become more capable, more embedded, and more influential. But it will not replace leadership. It will expose it. The organizations that thrive will not be those with the most advanced AI. They will be those with leaders who understand how to integrate that capability into a coherent system, one that produces clarity, vision, and meaningful results.

The final question is simple. Are you trying to keep up with AI, or are you redesigning how you lead because of it?

Marcia’s Leadership Q and As: Ten Traits AI Leaders Need in the Future Workplace

Q. With the rapid revolution of AI in organizations, what traits do leaders need to emphasize or develop for the AI workplace?

A.  In the future AI-driven workplace, leaders must shift to more adaptive, systems-thinking leadership. The following traits will be critical to thrive and lead effectively in environments shaped by automation, algorithms, and accelerating change.

1. Strategic Curiosity

If you thought you ask a lot of questions currently, you’ve just dabbled on the surface of the depth of questions you’ll need to be asking. Leaders must be relentless questioners exploring how AI, data, and automation can unlock new thinking, business models, efficiencies, and customer value. This means challenging the status quo, engaging with emerging technologies, and staying ahead of industry shifts or totally changing industries. Strategic curiosity drives innovation because it asks, “What if we?” and “Why not?” Future-ready leaders will embed curiosity into their culture, encouraging continual discovery and unconventional thinking across all levels of the organization.

2. Ethical Foresight 

The future of work will demand leaders with strong ethical compasses who can anticipate and mitigate AI risks like bias, privacy breaches, and unintended consequences. Ethical foresight means understanding not only what AI can do, but what it should do. Leaders will need to establish ethical frameworks, guide responsible innovation, and ensure decisions align with organizational values and societal trust. This trait builds the foundation for sustainable success in a tech-driven world.

3. Systems Thinking

In a hyperconnected AI landscape, isolated decisions can create ripple effects across supply chains, ecosystems, and cultures. Leaders must move beyond linear thinking to embrace a systems mindset recognizing patterns, feedback loops, and the long-term impact of short-term actions. Systems thinkers connect dots across data, departments, and disruptions. They lead transformation by seeing the bigger picture and designing adaptive strategies that work across complex environments, not just within silos.

4. Empathy and Human-Centered Insight

In a world dominated by logic-driven machines, it is emotional intelligence and empathy that will set great leaders apart. AI cannot replace the human need to feel, or be seen, heard, and valued. Empathetic leaders listen actively, understand diverse perspectives, and design workplaces that prioritize well-being and inclusion. This is how trust is built. Trust will be the new competitive advantage. Human-centered leadership also fosters stronger customer relationships and more resilient teams.

5. Learning Agility 

AI will transform industries faster than traditional training programs can keep up. Leaders must model learning agility: the ability to unlearn outdated beliefs, embrace new knowledge, and pivot quickly. Agile learners experiment, reflect, and grow through uncertainty. They create environments where continual development is the norm. Mistakes are reframed as data for improvement. This mindset fuels innovation and keeps organizations relevant amid constant change.

6. Collaboration Across Boundaries

Tomorrow’s problems won’t be solved by isolated thinkers. Leaders must foster collaboration across roles, geographies, generations and between humans and machines. That includes breaking down functional silos, promoting knowledge sharing, and enabling co-creation across disciplines. It also means creating inclusive environments where every voice can contribute. In AI-augmented teams, collaboration becomes less about hierarchy and more about integration. Leaders who build these bridges will unlock extraordinary collective intelligence.

7. Courage to Experiment

The AI age rewards those willing to test, learn, and adapt. Leaders must cultivate the courage to explore the unknown, challenge assumptions, and fail forward. This means resisting the urge for perfection and instead embracing rapid prototyping, iterative learning, and bold innovation. Leaders with experimental courage encourage their teams to take smart risks and try new ideas without fear of punishment. This fosters agility, engagement, and long-term resilience.

8. Clarity of Purpose

In a world overloaded with data, distractions, and disruption, clarity of purpose becomes a guiding light. Leaders must define and communicate a compelling vision one that aligns strategy, values, and behaviors. Purpose gives people meaning, focus, and a reason to innovate. It anchors decision-making and helps teams navigate ambiguity with confidence. Purpose-driven leadership attracts talent, inspires loyalty, and aligns organizations to serve something greater than short-term profits.

9. Resilience and Adaptive Grit

AI and automation will cause continual upheaval eliminating jobs, creating new ones, and requiring constant reinvention. Leaders must develop personal and organizational resilience to thrive through disruption. Resilience is more than endurance; it’s about emotional fortitude, optimism under pressure, and the ability to recover quickly from setbacks. Adaptive leaders bounce forward not just back by learning from adversity and evolving stronger. They model steadiness, foster psychological safety, and help teams find opportunity in uncertainty.

10. Authentic Communication

In the AI workplace, communication must be more than transactional it must be clear, courageous, and connective. Leaders must distill complex ideas, deliver tough messages with empathy, and ensure people feel seen and understood. Authentic communication builds trust and engagement, especially during rapid change. It also involves listening deeply, facilitating dialogue, and aligning teams around shared meaning. In a world where machines can talk, human communication must be more intentional, transparent, and real.

The successful leaders and organizations won’t use each of these traits like a checklist but will more importantly integrate them into the fabric of their culture. The road ahead is uncharted. Roadmaps can’t be used (we’re not driving from Chicago to Dallas with a map.) Where we’re going requires a Strategic Compass, so we all keep adapting and learning together. Download a copy of the Strategic Compass on my website at https://www.mdaszko.com/resources

The AI workplace will demand more human leadership, not less. The future won’t be led by those who automate the most it will be led by those who think, listen, adapt, and act with courage. If you're a board member, executive, or team leader, it’s time to ask yourself: Which of these 10 traits are you building right now? And what will your leadership look like in a future shaped by AI?

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: To Adopt AI or Wait?

Q. How do our executives decide whether to adopt AI or wait?

A. Artificial intelligence is not one thing. It is a set of technologies that can automate decisions, surface patterns in data, generate content, and perform tasks that once required human judgment. In practice, AI shows up as a chatbot answering customer questions, an algorithm predicting which invoices will go unpaid, a system that drafts a contract in seconds, or a model that flags a fraud attempt before it clears. The technology itself is not complicated to define. What is complicated is knowing what role it should play in your business and whether you are ready for it.

Three Distinct Roles

The first mistake most leaders make is treating AI as a single thing with a single purpose. In practice, it operates at three distinct levels, and each one demands a different kind of thinking.

As a tool, AI handles specific, bounded tasks. It summarizes documents, transcribes calls, routes support tickets, and processes invoices. At this level, the question is simple: does it do the task better, faster, or cheaper than the current approach? If yes, use it. If not, do not.

As a capability, AI changes what your organization can do. It enables you to personalize at scale, forecast with more precision, and respond to customers in real time across multiple channels simultaneously. At this level, the question shifts: what can we now do that we could not do before, and does that matter in our market?

As a strategy, AI reshapes how you compete. It informs product decisions, pricing models, and the speed at which you can move. At this level, the question is: how does AI change the rules of our industry, and are we positioned to benefit from that shift or absorb the damage if we are not?

The Questions Every Leader Must Answer

Understanding the three roles is the starting point. What follows is harder. Before any AI investment, leaders owe their organizations honest answers to a short set of foundational questions. What problem are we solving, and is AI the right solution? Not every problem benefits from automation, and not every inefficiency is worth the cost of addressing it with technology.

Do we have the data to support this? AI runs on data. Poor data quality, fragmented systems, and inconsistent records produce unreliable outputs regardless of how sophisticated the model is.

What are the ethical boundaries? Who does this system affect, and how? What happens when it is wrong? These questions are not optional. They belong in the planning conversation, not the post-incident review.

What guardrails will we build? Every AI system makes mistakes. Human oversight, audit trails, and defined escalation points are not signs of distrust in the technology. They are the conditions under which responsible deployment happens.

How will this affect our people and our customers? Employees need to understand what is changing and why. Customers deserve transparency about how decisions that affect them are being made.

Is this the right moment? Moving before your organization has the leaders developing their AI knowledge, systems framework, strategic conversations, ethical clarity, data quality, the process definitions, or the governance structure to support AI is not boldness. It is a liability.

The Bottom Line

AI will keep advancing regardless of whether any individual business chooses to adopt it. The leaders who benefit most will not be the ones who move first. They will be the ones who move with purpose: clear about what role AI is playing, disciplined about the questions they ask before they commit, and serious about the responsibility that comes with deploying systems that affect people. That combination of clarity and accountability is what separates a strategy from grabbing a trend. It will also define the leaders that react and conduct massive layoffs and saying it’s due to AI versus the ethical leaders who transform their organization with a thoughtful adoption of an innovation.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: What Future-Thinking Leaders Do in Uncertain Times

Q. For months, we’ve faced an uncertain future in our business. The future is unpredictable. How can we survive?

A. Leaders are facing a new era of change. The pace, complexity, innovations, and interconnected nature of today’s challenges have exposed a hard truth: traditional management approaches are not just outdated, they are ineffective. The most effective leaders I see today are not focusing on speed. Speed is a given. But they are rethinking who they are, what they need to question and learn, how they lead, how they structure their organizations, and how they make decisions under pressure. Here’s what sets them apart.

Lead to Adapt

For decades, leaders were taught to create stability, predictability, control, and efficiency. That model no longer holds. Markets shift too quickly, customer expectations evolve too rapidly, and technology, especially AI, reshapes industries in real time.

Curious, future-thinking leaders who intimately understand their customers’ problems and challenges are not chasing long-term stability as they knew it. They are building cultures that can adapt and pivot at the core of their organizations. They also examine and commit the systems they lead to reflect their vision, values in behaviors, ethics, and culture.

Engage More with Employees & Customers

To learn and envision a more creative and innovative business, managers must take a deeper approach. Be more curious, ask more questions, think strategically. Experiment with shorter planning cycles, decision-making, and adopt a willingness to change direction.

Ask different questions: “How quickly can we create and apply?” and “How quickly can we respond?” instead of “How can we prevent disruption?” There is and will be disruption now and at a faster pace. Management understands that resilience is not about avoiding shocks; it’s about absorbing them and moving forward stronger.

Integrate AI with Human Judgment

AI is not just a tool. The AI revolution is changing the business we do and will create new businesses and methods for much of what we currently do. The leaders who can move into the future are not blindly automating everything in sight. They are being intentional and unleashing the creativity of their teams.

They are asking more questions upfront. integrating AI where it enhances speed, insight, and efficiency, while preserving human judgment where nuance, ethics, and creativity matter most. This is a critical distinction.

Poorly applied, AI creates noise, confusion, and risk. Thoughtfully applied, it sharpens decision-making and frees people to focus on higher-value work. The smartest leaders are not asking, “Where can we use AI?” They are asking, “Where does human judgment matter most, and how do we amplify it?”

Design for Focus and Clarity

Many organizations are still trying to do too much. Too many priorities, too many initiatives, too many distractions. Most organizations still have too much waste, complexity, and fear that erodes productivity and profits. That’s from the ways executives have been managing and struggling with old management fads and “best practices” for decades. In a high-velocity environment, this is a recipe for rapid decline.

Leaders Must Pivot in an AI Era

Savvy leaders are doing the opposite. They are clarifying what they want to accomplish and draw a direct line to those they serve. They narrow their focus, relentlessly. They are making clear choices about where to play and where not to play. And they communicate incessantly.

This requires discipline. It means saying no to opportunities that are not interconnecting. It means assessing resources and energy around a few critical priorities. And it means ensuring that everyone in the organization understands what matters most. Clarity is a competitive advantage.

Build Your System To Learn Faster

The ultimate differentiator is new learning. The businesses that will survive and scale are learning organizations that are based in their values and ethics. Savvy leaders are creating environments where learning is constant and embedded in the work. They are encouraging experimentation, reducing fears, and treating mistakes as data.

They are also breaking down silos that slow information flow. Insights move quickly across teams, decisions are informed by real-time data, and feedback loops are tight. This is not about training programs. It is about building a culture where learning is continual, practical, and directly tied to system performance.

The Bottom Line

Going forward, we will not see a minor shift in leadership. We need a fundamental reset. Those who will thrive are those who are willing to let go of outdated assumptions and embrace a different way of operating. They are adaptive instead of rigid. Focused instead of scattered. Thoughtful in their use of technology. And committed to building organizations that can learn and evolve continually.

This is not easy work. But it is necessary work. And it is what separates those who will lead in the future from those who will struggle to keep up. The future leadership thinking is a different mindset than it was a decade ago. The issues facing business leaders today are unlike those they have previously encountered. Those savvy leaders who embrace and wallow in possibilities, the unknown, creativity, and new opportunities will have a field day!

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: The Stark Contrast in High and Low Performing Organizations

Q. Why are some organizations high performing while others struggle, decline, and perform poorly?

A. There is a different kind of management team emerging inside a small number of highly productive organizations. You can feel it almost immediately. The conversations are sharper. The questions go deeper. The energy is focused on the future, not just the present. The leadership and its teams are not simply managing performance. They are shaping what the organization can become.

When a management team operates at this level, the impact is profound. Strategy becomes clearer and more decisive. People understand where the organization is going and why. Innovation accelerates because an innovation system (not merely an improvement system) is created, and the environment supports it. Decisions happen faster, and with greater confidence. The organization begins to move as a system, rather than a collection of parts.

These teams create possibility. They start by seeing themselves differently. They are not a collection of functional leaders reporting on their areas of responsibility and therefore in silos. They are stewards of the enterprise. Every decision is made through the lens of what strengthens the whole system. This shift changes everything. Silos begin to dissolve, not because they are mandated away, but because they no longer make sense.

They think in terms of interdependence. A decision about technology is also a decision about people, culture, and customer experience. A decision about cost is also a decision about capability and future growth. High performing teams do not separate these conversations. They integrate them. They understand that the quality of their thinking determines the quality of their outcomes.

They are willing to engage in real dialogue. Not surface-level agreement, but thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable exploration of what is true. They challenge each other’s assumptions. They test ideas before the market does. There is a level of respect in these conversations that allows for disagreement without dysfunction. The result is better thinking and stronger decisions.

They invest in people in a way that is visible and continual. Talent is not a line item or an annual review process. It is central to the future they are creating. They ask whether they have the leadership required for where they are going, not just where they have been. They develop people intentionally and assess what new investment is needed to build collective knowledge.

Leaders pay attention to signals that others miss. Financial performance matters, but it is not enough. These teams look at indicators of adaptability, innovation, quality, customer connection, and cultural health. They are paying attention to what is emerging, not just what has already happened. This allows them to act earlier and with greater clarity.

Management is deliberate about how they operate. Meetings are not routines to endure. They are designed to create value. Time is prioritized and allocated to the conversations that matter most. Clarity exists around how decisions are made and who can contribute to the best options. This discipline creates focus and reduces noise.

Leaders hold themselves to a high standard. Not just in what they expect from the organization, but in how they show up as a team. They are willing to examine their own effectiveness and make changes. This creates credibility. People believe what they see.

Management stays connected to reality by staying connected to people across the organization at various levels. They do not rely on reports that move up through layers of the organization. They seek direct input from employees, customers, and external voices. This keeps their perspective grounded and relevant. It also helps them see what others might overlook.

They are clear about what they stand for. In a time of rapid change, decisions about technology, data, and people carry real consequences. These teams define the principles that guide their choices. They act in ways that build trust over time.

High performing organizations become possible when a management team truly leads. And yet, most executive teams don’t operate this way.

Many are still structured around updates and reporting. Conversations stay at the surface. Difficult questions go unasked. Time is consumed by reviewing the past rather than shaping the future. Silos persist, even when there is a stated desire to collaborate. The capability to think and act as an integrated leadership team is rarely fully developed.

This is not a criticism. It is a reality. The demands on management teams have changed significantly, but it takes a team committed to transforming to reap the benefits of greater success.

The opportunity is significant. Any management team can begin to shift how it thinks, how it works, and how it leads. It requires a new philosophy of management, a new mindset, a different level of intention, discipline, and willingness to challenge what is really happening inside the team.

The organizations that move forward will be those where the management team commits to learn together and transform. You can see the difference quickly. There is clarity with new knowledge.

It raises a simple but important question. What’s possible if your management team transformed?

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: How AI Can Benefit Women

Q. How might AI benefit women in their work and careers?

A. Artificial intelligence is being talked about as disruption, risk, and uncertainty. That is only part of the story. For women at work, AI can be a meaningful advantage if leaders choose to use it intentionally. Women have navigated structural barriers for decades. They face bias in hiring to uneven advancement and the constant pressure of balancing work and life. AI has the potential to remove friction in these systems and create new pathways for contribution, visibility, and leadership.

Reduce bias in hiring and advancement

AI can bring more consistency to how people are evaluated. Traditional hiring and promotion decisions are often shaped by subjective judgment. That is where bias quietly enters. Well-designed AI tools can focus attention on skills, performance, and outcomes. This does not eliminate bias on its own, but it can reduce variability and force more discipline into decision making. For women, this means a stronger likelihood of being evaluated on what they deliver, not on assumptions about style, personality, or fit.

Reclaim time for higher value work

Many women carry invisible workloads at work and at home. AI can take on repetitive tasks such as scheduling, note-taking, reporting, and first-level analysis. That shift matters. It moves time away from administrative effort and toward thinking, leading, and creating. Visibility increases when work is tied to outcomes rather than activity. Women can spend more time shaping decisions and less time supporting them behind the scenes.

Enable real flexibility without penalty

Flexibility has often come with a hidden cost. Step back, and you risk being overlooked. AI-powered tools are changing how work gets coordinated. Asynchronous communication, intelligent scheduling, and virtual collaboration allow work to move forward without everyone being present at the same time. This creates a more realistic model for integrating work and life. Women can remain fully engaged and on track, even when their schedules are not linear.

Expand access to entrepreneurship

AI lowers the barrier to starting and scaling a business. Marketing, customer engagement, content creation, and data insights can now be done with far fewer resources. Women who may not have access to capital or large teams can still build something meaningful. This is not just about side projects. It is about economic independence and ownership. AI gives women tools to act on ideas quickly and compete in ways that were not possible before.

Accelerate learning and reinvention

Careers are no longer linear, and many women step in and out of the workforce for different reasons. AI-driven learning platforms can personalize how new skills are developed. Instead of one-size-fits-all training, women can focus on exactly what they need, at their own pace. This shortens the path back into the workforce or into a new role. It builds confidence and capability at the same time.

Strengthen decision-making and influence

AI can surface patterns, insights, and data that were previously hard to access. This strengthens how decisions are made. Women who use these tools well can bring sharper, evidence-based perspectives into conversations. That increases credibility and influence. It shifts the dynamic from being heard to being relied upon.

None of these benefits happen by accident. AI can just as easily reinforce bias if it is built on flawed data or used without oversight. Leaders must be deliberate. That means questioning how tools are designed, who is involved in building them, and how system outcomes are measured.

AI is not just about efficiency. It is about redesigning work. When work is defined by outcomes, when contribution is visible, and when systems adapt to people, women do not have to work around the system. They can lead and contribute to the system success. That is where the real advantage is.

Marcia’s Leadership Q and As: Fix Loneliness! Reap Connections

Q. Although our devices connect people with hundreds and millions of contacts and followers, the greatest mental health crisis seems to be loneliness. How can we battle this epidemic and improve the mental health of our employees and communities?

A. Loneliness is not just feeling alone. It is a quiet, often invisible experience that can affect anyone, whether a teen, a worker, or an older adult. It is subversive and shows up in different ways for different people.

In my experience working with organizations across all sectors, one of the most powerful ways to help someone who might be struggling or feeling disconnected is simply to communicate that you believe in them. That small act is a huge contribution to a person’s sense of worth and belonging. It’s easy to do. It can take only five or ten minutes.

Ask about their project or work. Ask for their ideas. Ask what they’d like to improve. Many lonely people have been amazing observers full of insights. Ask questions. Be curious and then listen.

We live in a world where people can be surrounded by others and still feel unseen. Digital connections are abundant, but meaningful human interaction is often missing. This creates a gap in our lives, workplaces, and communities that leaders and each of us can help close. Where there are multiple causes, there are multiple solutions. Connection is something we can intentionally create.

Create a Culture Where People Feel Seen

Leaders set the tone. When leaders model openness, listen actively, and show genuine interest in people, it encourages everyone else to do the same. Teams thrive when people feel included, respected, and valued for more than just the work they produce. In workplaces and communities, creating a culture of belonging helps people show up fully and connect with each other in meaningful ways.

Make Space for Social Interaction

Connection rarely happens by accident. Intentional spaces, whether in person or virtual, give people opportunities to get to know each other. Shared lunches, small group discussions, interest-based groups, or casual meetups make it easier for relationships to form naturally. These spaces do not have to be elaborate. The key is to provide opportunities where people can interact regularly and authentically.

Town hall sessions, feedback group gatherings (ideally with food), or interactive learning sessions are profound in growing community and deepening relationships.

Encourage Peer Support and Mentoring

Structured peer networks, mentoring relationships, and small support groups help people feel anchored. Pairing someone new with a mentor or connecting individuals with shared interests can build a sense of community quickly. These relationships give people a place to turn, a chance to be understood, and a way to participate in something larger than themselves.

Equip Leaders to Notice and Respond

Leaders are the first line in shaping how people experience connection. By asking simple questions, listening without judgment, and acknowledging someone’s efforts or contributions, leaders can make a profound difference. Recognizing when someone might be struggling and taking the time to engage shows that you care and that you believe in them.

Encourage Involvement Beyond the Immediate Circle

Connection grows when people participate in shared goals and activities beyond their usual circles. Volunteering, community projects, or team service activities bring people together around purpose and meaning. These opportunities build bonds, strengthen shared values, and remind people that they belong to something bigger.

Design for Everyday Connection

Small choices matter. In workplaces, common spaces, casual gatherings, walking meetings, or shared meals create natural moments for connection. In communities, neighborhood activities, clubs, and gatherings encourage people to meet, talk, and learn from each other. Thoughtful environments make it easier to engage and harder to feel invisible.

Reach Out and Help Each Other

Connection is not only the responsibility of leaders. Every one of us can reach out in ways that make a difference. A text, an invitation, a phone call, or a simple check-in can change how someone experiences their day or week. Whether it is a teen reaching out to a classmate, a colleague noticing a teammate who has been quiet, or a neighbor calling an older adult, small acts of acknowledgment and support are powerful.

Building Connection Requires Multiple Solutions

Loneliness is complex. There is no single solution, but there are many actions we can take together. By creating cultures of belonging, intentional spaces for interaction, peer networks, attentive leadership, community engagement, and everyday opportunities to reach out, we build a stronger, more connected world.

My belief is simple. When you communicate to someone that you see them, that you believe in them, and that they matter, you contribute something far greater than words. You offer a sense of connection and purpose that ripples through their lives and through the communities and teams they touch. Connection matters. It sustains and transforms.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Transition from Disruptions to a New Purpose

Q. There are changes both in our personal and professional lives. How can we best adapt to change?

A. Transitions in life are profound. In work, it means a long career ends in retirement. A leadership role changes or disappears through restructuring. Someone steps away to care for family. Others re-enter the workforce after years outside it. Sometimes the transition is planned. Sometimes it arrives abruptly.

Work is not just a job. For many people it shapes identity, status, relationships, and our daily habits. It provides a sense of contribution. When worklife changes, something deeper than a schedule is disrupted. The question quietly emerges: Who am I now, and what is the next chapter of my life about?

Many people rush to fill that gap. An executive retires and quickly seeks another role. Someone leaving a company jumps into the next opportunity without reflection. Activity can feel reassuring, but without thoughtful reflection people often recreate the same patterns they just left.

A more powerful approach begins with acknowledging the transition itself. When a career stage ends, something meaningful has concluded. Titles, responsibilities, and influence may shift. That can feel unsettling, even when the change is positive. Recognizing that an ending has occurred allows people to move forward more thoughtfully.

The next step is reflection. Instead of asking only What should I do next? a more important question is What did this chapter of my life teach me?

Every career produces experience that goes far beyond technical skill. People develop judgment, perspective, and insight about leadership, teamwork, and human behavior. Reflecting on those lessons often reveals something powerful: the value of a career is not only what was accomplished, but the wisdom gained along the way.

Another helpful reflection is to ask, what truly matters to me now? Early career decisions are often driven by advancement, financial stability, or recognition. Later in life priorities frequently shift. Contribution, relationships, intellectual curiosity, and freedom often become more important than titles or status. This shift in priorities opens new possibilities.

Rather than trying to replicate a previous role, people can begin exploring new ways to contribute. The key is to start with small experiments rather than one large commitment. Experiment. Now you can choose diverse, different possibilities to consider:

·      Mentor or advise younger professionals or organizations

·      Teach or speak in community programs or workshops

·      Volunteer for causes that matter to you

·      Write or create to share your knowledge and experience

·      Take classes. Learn something new, a skill, a hobby, a deep topic

·      Engage deeply with family, friends, or community

These experiments are valuable because they reveal what generates energy and meaning. Purpose rarely appears all at once. It emerges gradually through exploration.

Another essential step is rethinking identity. For decades people may have introduced themselves by their title: CEO, physician, professor, executive. When that role changes, identity can feel uncertain. Yet it can also expand.

A former executive may become a mentor. A retiring professional may become a teacher or advisor. Someone re-entering the workforce may bring fresh perspective shaped by life experience. A high-tech executive many become a novelist or painter. The title may change, but the capacity to contribute does not disappear.

Finally, smooth transitions require staying connected. Work environments naturally provide networks of colleagues and relationships. When roles change, maintaining and building connections becomes intentional. Conversations, collaborations, and shared projects keep people engaged with ideas and communities that matter.

Transitions in the work world can feel disruptive. Yet they also create a rare opportunity to step back and ask deeper questions about purpose and contribution.

Careers unfold in chapters. When one chapter ends, the next does not need to be rushed or feared. With reflection, curiosity, and a willingness to experiment, the experience gained over a lifetime of work can evolve into something equally meaningful: guiding others, sharing wisdom, learning more about a passion there was never any time to pursue, and shaping the future in new ways.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Why Training Budgets Increase, Results Decrease

Q. Over the past 20 years, have leaders increased or decreased their time and budgets to train and educate their workforce? Has the investment been effective?

A. Over the past two decades, organizations have not reduced training. They have reorganized it. In many companies, budgets and participation have held steady or increased, while delivery has shifted dramatically. Less time is spent away at conferences, and more learning occurs through internal programs, online platforms, compliance training, on-demand libraries, and microlearning.

The more important question is not whether organizations are investing. The real question, “Are the new delivery methods working?” Boards and executives increasingly express frustration. Despite the scale of training activity, organizational performance is not improving fast enough.

Decision quality is uneven. Execution drifts. Cross-functional alignment breaks down. Risk is addressed late rather than early. Training participation may be high, but results are inconsistent.

Training Activity Has Increased, but Effectiveness Is Inconsistent

Most organizations offer an extensive menu of learning options: technical upskilling, software training, project management, sales enablement, leadership programs, safety, compliance, communications, and more. The volume of training is not the problem.

The problem is that much of corporate training is designed to deliver content, not to build capability. Employees complete courses, pass assessments, and earn certificates, yet the organization continues to struggle with recurring issues such as slow decisions, rework, silos, weak follow-through, and chronic firefighting. Training becomes an event rather than an operating discipline. Knowledge is delivered, but it is not converted into better work.

Knowledge and Skills Only Matter When They Change How Work Gets Done

Education is valuable only when it improves performance in the actual system of work. Skills are real when they show up under pressure, inside real constraints, with real consequences.

Employees may learn new tools, but if processes prevent them from using those tools, nothing changes. Managers may attend training, but if incentives reward short-term output over long-term improvement, behavior reverts quickly. Teams may learn best practices, but if governance does not have a system for better decisions, old habits dominate.

Organizations do not get results from training content. They get results from improved responsibilities, decisions, and processes.

The Missing Link Is Application to Real Work

The most effective learning is anchored in live work: customer problems, operational bottlenecks, quality failures, cycle-time delays, service breakdowns, supply risks, and budget constraints.

When training is tied to real problems, people must apply what they learn, test assumptions, and evaluate results. Learning becomes practical, contextual, and durable. When learning is separated from real work, it remains theoretical, and performance does not improve.

Systems Thinking Determines Whether Training Sticks

Many training efforts fail because organizations treat performance as an individual issue rather than a system issue. People are trained to perform better while the underlying structures remain unchanged. Conflicting goals, unclear decision rights, broken handoffs, poor measurement, and misaligned incentives continue to drive the same outcomes.

Systems thinking changes the conversation. Leaders and teams stop blaming individuals, and start redesigning the system.

Processes, feedback loops, policies, constraints, and cross-functional dependencies become visible and actionable.

This reflects the principle taught by W. Edwards Deming: performance is produced by the system, and leadership is accountable for improving that system. Without this perspective, training often produces educated but frustrated employees trapped in broken structures.

Depth Beats Volume and Repetition Beats One-Time Events

Over the last 20 years, organizations pursued efficiency in learning. Shorter modules, faster rollouts, more content, and less time away from work became the norm. The result has often been high completion and low transfer.

Capability develops through depth and repetition. Fewer priorities, practiced over time, applied on the job, reinforced by managers, and measured through system outcomes outperform large catalogs of disconnected courses.

Complex work requires practice, coaching, and feedback over time. That is not optional. That is how adults learn.

What Actually Makes Education and Training Effective

Education and training become effective when they are treated as part of running the business, not as an add-on. Learning must be governed, reinforced, and connected directly to performance.

Effective education and training build capability tied to real work and real constraints. They improve decision quality, include practice and feedback, apply systems thinking to remove structural barriers, measure outcomes rather than participation, and embed learning into governance and accountability.

The Bottom Line

Across the past 20 years, organizations have not stopped investing in employee education. If anything, access has expanded and learning options have multiplied. The question is whether those investments are producing better performance. The difference is not budget size. The difference is whether learning is designed to change how people think, decide, and improve the work inside the system that produces results.

When training is reduced to content consumption, effectiveness will always be limited. When learning is applied to real work, reinforced by governance, and grounded in systems thinking, it becomes a strategic advantage, and often, a competitive advantage.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Superwoman to Super YOU: Develop Your Natural Leadership

Q. Juggling multiple facets at work and home seems insurmountable at times, but I want to be a better person and leader. How can I be a better leader?

A. Leadership for women has long been framed as something to perform.

Be confident. Be visible. Speak up more. Lean in.

While well intentioned, this advice often keeps women focused on surface behaviors rather than the deeper work that sustains leadership over time.

Enduring leadership is not built through performance or perfection. It is built through a disciplined shift in how women think, decide, and relate to responsibility, authority, and power. Many women continue to operate from a Superwoman model that rewards endurance, self-sacrifice, and constant availability. That model may deliver short term results and external praise, but over time it erodes judgment, trust, and And credibility—and the person!

Leadership is not about doing more, being louder, or carrying everything alone. It is about having clarity and direction. Natural leadership develops from the inside out. It requires awareness, discipline, and the courage to let go of habits that once felt necessary but no longer serve.

The following fourteen principles reflect what consistently distinguishes women who lead with credibility, influence, and staying power across roles, industries, and stages of career.

1. Invite Respect and Trust

Every woman in a leadership role owes herself honest feedback. Ask whether people respect you or quietly fear you. Fear based compliance is not leadership. If people walk on eggshells, that is a warning sign. Respect based leadership invites dialogue, learning, and better decisions. Leaders who cultivate respect create environments where truth can surface and problems are addressed early, before they become crises. Create healthy environments where truth and trust can surface.

2. Build Real Peer Support

Transactional networking rarely produces meaningful growth. Leadership develops faster in small peer circles where women think together, challenge assumptions, and hold one another accountable. These relationships provide perspective during uncertainty and reinforce confidence during difficult decisions. Over time, peer support strengthens judgment, emotional resilience, and strategic thinking in ways individual effort alone cannot. Women who lead in isolation are more vulnerable to burnout, blind spots, and self-doubt. Peer support creates a sounding board for clarity rather than validation.

3. Lift Others Up

Leadership credibility grows when women use their influence to elevate others. Sponsorship means recommending colleagues, opening doors, and sharing credit publicly. This behavior disrupts scarcity thinking and builds trust quickly. Leaders who hoard power eventually lose it.

Leaders who share it multiply impact and strengthen their own credibility and reputation. Organizations notice who builds capability and who protects territory. Influence expands through generosity, not control, and leadership becomes associated with growth rather than self-protection.

4. Speak Sooner, Listen Deeply

Leadership presence grows when women stop waiting for certainty. Speaking early shapes the direction of discussion and decision making. Thoughtful questions count as leadership. More importantly, listen deeply. Clear, concise contributions signal confidence and competence. Early participation allows leaders to frame issues, surface risks, and guide outcomes.

5. Focus on Meaning

Sustainable leadership environments are built around purpose, not relentless performance. Women leaders who connect work to meaning anchor people during uncertainty and change. Meaning deepens commitment, strengthens trust, and reduces burnout. Without meaning, even high performing cultures eventually erode under pressure.

6. Guide Thinking

Many women lead most effectively as facilitators of thinking rather than commanders of action. Facilitation integrates diverse perspectives and surfaces insights. It is a sophisticated leadership skill that requires preparation and discipline. When women facilitate well, people feel respected and included. Trust grows. Facilitation produces better decisions, stronger commitment, and healthier team dynamics. It shifts leadership from control to collective intelligence.

7. Stay Curious and Humble

Leadership credibility requires reflection, feedback, and course correction. Humility is not weakness. It is the strength to remain teachable, to acknowledge limits, and to correct course quickly. Leaders without humility are often inauthentic and controlling.

Leaders with humility earn trust because people know they will listen and learn. Curiosity keeps leaders relevant as conditions and risks continue to change. Learning becomes a leadership habit rather than a reaction to failure.

8. Seek Long Term Mentors

Short mentoring relationships rarely produce deep growth. Women benefit most from mentors who invest over time. Women mentors offer understanding. Men mentors often provide access to broader influence and different perspectives on power and decision making. Together, they expand judgment and strategic awareness.

Long term mentors help leaders see patterns, risks, and opportunities they cannot yet see themselves. Mentorship accelerates learning that experience alone would take years to teach.

9. Trust Yourself

Leadership begins with self-trust. Many capable women hesitate, second guessing their judgment and seeking reassurance. Over time, this hesitation weakens authority and slows decisions. Self-trust does not mean certainty. It means being accountable for decisions, learning from outcomes, and pivoting as needed. Leaders who trust themselves project steadiness in moments of ambiguity.

10. Leadership Is Not a Title

Women who redefine leadership as contribution rather than position stop waiting for permission. They act where they are, regardless of role. This shift expands leadership capacity. It breaks the belief that authority must be granted before it can be exercised. Organizations promote those who already demonstrate leadership thinking and responsibility.

11. Strengthen Your Self-Awareness

Leadership requires inner discipline. Self-awareness reveals how behaviors land and how decisions affect others. Self-esteem reduces the need for constant validation and approval. Mental strength keeps leaders focused on solutions rather than complain or blame. Leaders with titles but poor self-esteem are often seeking more titles, more attention, more selfies. Seldom do they lift others up, but they are often the bullies in the organization.

12. Be Real

Leadership cannot be faked. Titles, visibility, and curated images do not create trust. When authenticity is missing, respect erodes quietly but completely. This often signals the need for deeper inner work, frequently supported by coaching that challenges patterns rather than reinforces comfort. Authentic leaders invite honesty, accountability, and meaningful dialogue. Trust grows when words and actions consistently align.

13. Understand Power

Organizations do not run on merit alone. Women who understand power dynamics can navigate responsibly without losing integrity. Ignoring power does not make it disappear. Understanding it allows leaders to shape outcomes rather than be sidelined or surprised. Power literacy is essential for strategic leaders to navigate the culture.

14. Set Boundaries

Clear boundaries protect your energy and credibility. Respect does not always coexist with being liked. Leadership sometimes requires disappointing people. Chronic exhaustion undermines influence and decision making. Boundaries make leadership.

Leadership Begins With YOU. Leadership transformation does not begin with strategy, structure, or systems. It begins with the leader. Personal transformation always precedes organizational transformation.

Organizations do not change because initiatives are announced or structures are redrawn. They change only when leaders change how they think, decide, and behave. When women release the Superwoman model and develop their natural leadership, they stop carrying the organization on their backs and begin leading it forward.

Marcia' Leadership Q And As: Why People Resist Change?

Q. Why People Resist Change ?

A. For decades, leaders have relied on a single word to mobilize organizations: change. Change initiatives. Change programs. Change management. Change readiness.

Yet few leaders pause to ask a more consequential question: What does the word “change” trigger for the people expected to carry it out?

For many employees, change does not signal opportunity or progress. It signals risk, loss, exposure, uncertainty. When leaders speak about change without understanding its human impact, they unintentionally activate fear. And fear, once introduced into a system, quietly erodes people, productivity, and profits long before leaders see the damage in financial results.

Great leaders recognize this pattern and pivot. They stop pushing change and instead invite people to work together to improve the systems they work within every day. Invite people to embrace improvement.

Fear Is Not a Soft Issue. It Is a Business Risk.

Fear in organizations is often dismissed as emotional noise, something to be managed through communication plans, engagement surveys, or resilience training. Fear is a systemic condition that directly affects thinking, judgment, and performance.

When fear is present, predictable things happen:

• Thinking narrows from problem-solving to self-protection

• Learning slows because mistakes feel unsafe

• Information is filtered or withheld

• Decision quality deteriorates

• Effort becomes cautious rather than committed

This is how fear erodes productivity. It does not fail loudly. It fails quietly through rework, delays, disengagement, and missed opportunities. Profits decline not because people don’t care, but because fear makes caring risky.

What Fear Looks Like Inside Organizations

Fear rarely announces itself directly. Leaders often mislabel it as resistance, lack of accountability, or poor attitude.

Employees are afraid of losing their jobs, their relevance, or their credibility. They fear being evaluated by unclear or shifting criteria. They fear speaking up and being punished, ignored, or sidelined. They fear decisions being made behind closed doors.

Increasingly, they fear technology. Now fear is escalating as AI is being introduced without any explanation of its impact on their work.

Leaders hear the symptoms but miss the signal. What looks like resistance and dis-engagement is often rational self-protection in an environment that feels unsafe.

Why “Change” Triggers Fear

From an employee’s perspective, the word “change” often carries unspoken messages:

• Decisions have been made and are not transparent

• Expectations may shift without warning

• Experience may no longer matter

• Mistakes will be punished

Even well-intended change efforts can provoke fear when leaders emphasize speed, compliance, or messaging. Instead understand how people experience the system. When change is done to people rather than with them, fear fills the gap.

Leaders Pivot: From Change to Improve

Great leaders make a deliberate pivot in language. They stop focusing on change and “change management.” Instead, they invite people to Improve the work and results Together.

This transformation in language, the pivot from change to improve is monumental. New vocabulary impacts behavior because while there may be resistance to change (due to a perception of loss), people often enjoy working together to improve.

Improvement restores. It builds on what people know and can share. Knowledge and experience can be appreciated. It invites contribution rather than compliance. Improvement tells people they matter to the system, not just the outcome.

How Leaders Pivot Their Language

Leadership language either amplifies fear or reduces it. There is no neutral ground. Fear-based language is often vague, sanitized, or euphemistic. Words like restructuring, maximize, or realignment without context leave people guessing. Silence invites worst-case assumptions.

Trust-building language creates clarity:

• Why a decision is happening and why now

• What is known and what is still uncertain

• How decisions will be evaluated

• Where human judgment remains essential

This is not soft language. It is precise, transparent, and respectful.

How Leaders Act to Build Trust

Trust is built through repeatable words, operational actions, and respectful behaviors that reduce uncertainty and restores clarity.

Great leaders lead a decision-making system. They communicate the intent, direction, and expectations. They create an environment where either rapid or thoughtful processes can be discussed, debated, experimented with, and solutions proposed. They surface trade-offs instead of hiding them. They slow decisions just enough to gather inputs, then execute decisively together when the timing is optimal.

Operational trust-building shows up when leaders:

• Share decision criteria in advance

• Separate input-gathering from decision-making

• Make constraints visible

• Eliminate low-value work before demanding efficiency

• Allocate time for learning, not just delivery

These actions reduce speculation and political or dysfunctional behavior. People stop protecting themselves and start supporting each other to improve the work together and serve the customers.

How Leaders Design Trust into Daily Operations

Leaders who build trust redesign the system so work processes can flow. People solve problems through robust conversations with data in context. Operationally, this looks like:

• Meetings with clear purpose, decision owners, and outcomes

• Metrics are used to learn, not punish

• Early surfacing of root causes to problems

• Break down barriers across teams and departments

When trust is designed into operations, fear loses its grip.

Trust is most essential during challenging and uncertain times

Dignity is non-negotiable, even during layoffs, restructuring, or automation decisions. This behavior signals that people can safely contribute even when things are hard.

The Payoff

When leaders pivot from fear-driven change to improvement-centered leadership, trust grows. Learning accelerates. Engagement deepens. Innovation becomes safer. Productivity improves sustainably. Profits follow through capability, not pressure.

People do not need to be motivated to care. They need to feel safe to think.

A Wake-Up Call for Leaders

If fear exists, the system is speaking. Leaders design the system. If the system and the culture are not healthy and don’t deliver the results you want, leaders are accountable to build trust. To do nothing means fear will be contagious and erode the people, productivity, and profits.

Fear is not a people problem. It is a leadership and system design problem. Great leaders do not deny fear or label it resistance. They identify it, name it, and list how it impacts people and the organization. They pivot and create a System for improvement and trust.

They continually work to reduce fear and build trust. They replace fear with clarity. They replace imposed change with improvement.

Marcia' Leadership Q And As: Our Key Future of Work Challenges

Q: As we look forward, what are some of our most key challenges we face in our future work?

A. The biggest challenge in how we think about the future of work is not AI, automation, or remote policies. It is that management is often looking for the quick answers or quick fixes, especially when they are surrounded with uncertainty or disruption in the economy, supply chains, labor force, or geopolitical environment.

Rather than discuss “business as usual” agendas, meetings must pivot and address topics that may not be typical and not have easy answers. While leaders often want to focus future work around new technology, the most relevant issue will be to have conversations to address transforming leadership thinking to address the challenges in the next year and beyond.

Much work discussion focuses on tools such as AI platforms, digital workflows, skills, and productivity dashboards. These matter. But they won’t address the real disruption. The deeper challenge is systemic, and it always has been.

Work itself has changed. The knowledge and skills needed for the new work has changed. But the leadership thinking and the investment in staff development has not kept pace. There are gaps, and that’s where the risks lie. But they are often not seen or not addressed.

Outdated models are driving modern decisions

Work used to be controlled, standardized, and maximized as if stability exists. But todays’ work environments are defined by volatility, interdependence, and uncertainty. Linear thinking breaks down quickly. The goal is no longer alignment. If bureaucratic or command and control models are still implemented, complexity, waste and fear rapidly increase.

The problem is not resistance to change. It’s a reliance on beliefs that no longer reflect reality.

Technology automates broken systems

For decades, some leaders pushed to automate. The goal was more technology and data, and now AI. Speed was the goal. However, the goals and strategies are not clear and if systems are ineffective, making them more efficient just means that you’re accelerating broken systems and making garbage faster.

Automation and AI don’t fix dysfunctions. They expose them.

There is a mismatch between flawed processes and powerful technology. Inefficiency accelerates. Bias scales. More data charts are generated. Teams are overwhelmed. Poor decisions happen faster. Clarity is lost, and the methods to achieve any goals become murky.

The drive to implement AI is like the gold rush. Is there any infrastructure in place? Or do organizations implode in chaos? Overlooked are the strategic questions about the purpose for pursuing a product or service, and is there a market? Does a system exist, and should it be automated? Without systems thinking, technology simply magnifies existing weaknesses. Because people work IN the system, they are blind to see different perspectives.

What is value for your customer

Customers don’t want compliance or efficient but poor quality. They want products and services that are based on listening and understanding their needs. Customers want vendors who can adapt to their needs.

Unfortunately, organizations have set up their systems to reward and offer incentives to promote the hierarchy, internal competition, and short-term metrics. Tension builds and performance and employee engagement wanes.

What Leadership Capability Is Needed

For the future of work, leaders are needed who can navigate uncertainty, make decisions with incomplete data, and operate with non-linearity (think across the organization and break down the silos.)

The constraints have been a lack of talent, skills, labor shortages, or technology. But now it is a lack of leadership. Leaders need to build a system, hire and develop more leaders, and invest in the people to achieve the aim of the system that will deliver quality to the customers.

Better Judgment, Better Control

The quality of the questions, the answers, and the decisions will expose the strengths and weaknesses of leaders and their organizations. Organizations now must be investing rapidly in accelerating their knowledge about making high-quality decisions, ethical reasoning, systems design, and cross-functional collaboration for effective results.

The Current Future of Work Question

While many businesses are asking, “How do we use AI?” that question needs to be set aside. The real question is, “What kind of leadership do we need to develop, and are we willing to transform ourselves (with guidance from an advisor) to meet the need?

Until leaders’ thinking evolves and understands the profound knowledge needed to lead for the future of work, no amount of technology will deliver sustainable results. AI will become a technology sub-optimized and become another tool that people use to tinker. The future of work will not be determined by tools. Will leaders transform their thinking to re-assess how work works in the future?

Send your questions to strategic advisor, facilitator, and speaker Marcia Daszko at md@mdaszko.com. Check out her provocative bestselling book “Pivot Disrupt Transform: How Leaders Beat the Odds and Survive.” See mdaszko.com and take your free leadership self-assessment.

Marcia’s Leadership Q And As: How Great Leaders Make the Better Decisions

Q. During both “business as usual” times and times of uncertainty and disruption in our industry, the markets, or the economy, we must make the best decisions we can. How can we improve our decisions?

A. Every executive believes decision-making is part of the job. Yet few recognize that how decisions are made matters more than who makes them.

Poor decisions rarely come from lack of intelligence. They come from flawed thinking, incomplete systems, false assumptions, and pressure to act fast without understanding consequences. In complex organizations, decisions do not fail because leaders are careless. They fail because leaders are operating inside outdated mental models designed for a simpler world.

The best leaders do not rely on instinct alone, nor do they chase consensus or copy what others are doing. They design better ways to think, evaluate, test, and learn. They recognize that decision-making is not an event. It is a system. Here are seven ways exceptional leaders consistently make better decisions, even under uncertainty.

1. Leaders understand the system before trying to fix the problem

Average leaders jump to solutions. They react. Strong leaders pause to understand the system producing the problem. They ask questions and understand the root causes of a problem before giving solutions and answers.

Every result an organization gets—good or bad—is generated by its system:structure, policies, incentives, workflows, metrics, and leadership behaviors. When leaders treat symptoms instead of causes, they unintentionally make problems worse, and the problems will keep recurring because they’re not solved at the root-cause level.

The best decision-makers ask deeper questions:

What are we trying to accomplish?
What conditions created this outcome?
What behaviors are we rewarding?
What constraints are shaping choices?

Instead of asking, “Who messed up?” they ask, “What in the system made this happen? Was it predictable? What does the data tell us?” This shift immediately reduces blame and fear. Then collaborative learning and understanding can flourish and, and the discussion can lead to far more effective decisions.

2. Leaders distinguish data from opinion and insight from noise

Most organizations are drowning in data yet starving for insight.

Great leaders do not confuse volume with clarity. They challenge dashboards, question metrics, and ask whether the data explains variation or merely reports activity. They understand that not all data is useful, and not all numbers tell the truth. What trends does the data show? Is the system stable?

They also recognize that experience-based opinions, while valuable, are not facts. Decisions improve dramatically when leaders separate assumptions from evidence and demand clarity about what is known, what is unknown, and what is being guessed.

Better decisions emerge not from more data, but from better questions about the data. And by charting the data and looking at it over time, it’s much easier to make decisions. Decisions should be tied to the customers. Do they make a difference for the customer experience and satisfaction?

3. Leaders slow down thinking, even when speed is demanded

Pressure creates the illusion that faster decisions are better decisions.

Exceptional leaders know that urgency often amplifies bias. Under stress, people narrow options, default to familiar patterns, and mistake confidence for competence. The strongest leaders create deliberate pauses in decision-making. They ask teams to reflect, challenge prevailing views, and explore unintended consequences before committing. Leaders ask, “What happened in the process?Show me the data.”

Slowing thinking does not mean slowing action. It means improving judgment before action begins. One hour of disciplined thinking can often prevent weeks or months of costly rework.

4. Leaders design decisions collaboratively, not democratically

Great leaders do not decide alone, but they also do not decide by committee.

They involve diverse perspectives early, especially those closest to the work. They invite dialogue, opposing views, disagreement without punishment, and encourage people to challenge assumptions rather than protect egos. Often they ask team members to play the “devil’s advocate” and flesh out various perspectives. One common tool used is Six-Hat Thinking.

However, collaboration does not mean consensus. Final accountability remains clear. The quality of a decision improves when leaders tap collective intelligence without surrendering leadership accountability. The goal is not agreement. The goal is understanding. Employees are responsible to share and contribute their ideas for a robust decision.

When people feel heard, even difficult decisions gain credibility and execution improves dramatically. That’s where speed is relevant.

5. Leaders test assumptions before scaling decisions

Many failed strategies share the same root cause: leaders assumed instead of tested. High-performing leaders treat major decisions as hypotheses, not declarations. They pilot, experiment, and learn before committing massive resources.

They ask:
What would we need to learn before this becomes irreversible?
How can we test this safely and quickly?

This approach reduces risk while accelerating learning. It also shifts the culture from fear of failure to disciplined experimentation, an essential capability in an AI-enabled, rapidly changing environment.

The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) model of Continual Improvement is often used for quality decision making. It’s a collaborative model that is foundational for everyone learning and trying to improve a process.

6. Leaders consider second- and third-order consequences

Weak decisions solve today’s problem while creating tomorrow’s crisis. Strong leaders think beyond immediate outcomes. They examine ripple effects across customers, employees, partners, culture, and long-term capability.

They ask uncomfortable questions:

What behaviors will this decision encourage?
What problems might it create next year?
What trade-offs are we silently accepting?

This long-range thinking distinguishes strategic leadership from reactive management. It prevents short-term wins from undermining long-term performance.

7. Leaders continually learn from decisions after they are made

The decision itself is not the end. Learning is.

Exceptional leaders review outcomes without blame. They study what worked, what didn’t, and why. They refine future decisions based on evidence, not ego.

Instead of asking, “Was this a good or bad decision?” they ask, “What did we learn about our system?” and “How can we improve?”

This discipline turns every decision into an asset. Over time, organizations develop institutional wisdom rather than repeating the same mistakes with different names.

The real difference

The best leaders are not smarter, more charismatic, or more confident than others.

They think differently.

They recognize that decision-making is a leadership system, one that can be examined, improved, and redesigned. When leaders upgrade how decisions are made, performance improves, trust increases, and organizations become far more resilient in uncertainty.

In a world defined by complexity, speed, AI, and constant disruption, leadership is no longer about having the right answers.

It is about designing the right thinking to continually implement better answers.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Pivots You Need to Succeed

Q. We see teams and businesses struggle and sometimes fail. Why do so many fail, and how could they turn around and succeed?

A. Whether it’s a team or a company that is starting up, there are several fundamental factors needed for success. These are significant, so as you begin, discuss with your team and assess to determine if you’ve got the foundation to move forward.

First, to begin, what is your aim? What are you trying to accomplish together? There needs to be clarity. If team members are all going in different directions, any progress and energy will fade away.

Second, to what depth have you gone to learn, discover, and understand what your customers want? Beyond that and more importantly, what do they need that you can provide? /what’s their urgency for what you can provide? It’s up to you to observe, hear, and understand their issues and deliver your solutions. Often this step is superficially understood. That means the team will fail.

Third, a market for your product or service needs to be robust enough to have sustainable success. If the market is too small, there’s no future. Or if potential customers resist your solution, and you don’t have early adopters, the work forward will be short-lived. A good solution and process may be short-lived if it can’t scale.

Fourth, while a product may be good, it may not be compelling enough that people must buy it, must tell their friends about it, and must buy it repeatedly. Therefore, the market is short-lived.

Fifth, many companies create a great product or service, but they are a one-idea wonder. Teams need to work on product development to deliver new and different products over time. Sometimes they need to innovate and pivot abruptly to survive. It even means sometimes changing industries. We saw major pivots during the pandemic to fulfil the short-term needs. One example was the auto manufacturers modifying their manufacturing lines to build ventilator for hospitals. That was innovation at work.

Successful entrepreneurs and teams must have a solid foundation for delivering satisfaction to markets that are eager to buy products that will solve problems. And there are problems that are not articulated. For example, who had thought of putting wheels on suitcases and briefcases? The initial patents began appearing in 1921, but the wheeled suitcases didn’t gain popularity until an airline pilot began using them in the early 1970s. Then the airline industry started using them as well as travelers.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Genuine Gratitude

Q.  As the holidays approach, it is important to genuinely appreciate our colleagues. How can we best show our appreciation?

A.  In many organizations, appreciation and recognition has been reduced to gimmicks such as point systems, gift cards, gold stars, and awards and certificates that are distributed at quarterly or annual meetings. But incentives are transactional, superficial, and often erode the very motivation leaders hope to inspire. 

Incentive have been a popular “best practice” for decades because leaders didn’t understand the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Incentives often create internal competition, resentment, manipulation, and fear. Those all- cause waste, complexity, and dysfunctional cultures. A popular practice especially in sales departments is to set targets and arbitrary numerical goals.

Genuine appreciation is not a program. It is a mindset and a system that shapes a healthy culture. It elevates humanity, creates joy in work, strengthens trust, and encourages people to contribute their ideas without fear of speaking up. 

When people feel respected, heard, and valued, their level of courage, creativity, and contribution increases. When people experience the joy in learning, working, and improving together, people are self-motivated. That’s where the power is! People experience a healthy, developing self-esteem. 

True recognition flows from understanding how people think, what they care about, and how their work contributes to a larger purpose. Leaders slow down tom observe and acknowledge the effort, progress, not just the results. 

Years ago, as a management team committed to transforming their leadership, they also questioned how to recognize people if they gave up incentives. Over time, a monthly gathering emerged that was open to all employees and all teams. At the meeting anyone or team that wanted to share information about their projects or progress, could share. Sometimes they were working mid-project, and they came to share their progress as well as their questions so they could gather fresh ideas from their colleagues. Some teams came to share and celebrate the end to a project. The gathering was an eye-opener, full of learning, and celebrating. Creating regular platforms for people to share their own successes, experiments, and learning builds recognition into a healthy culture. The gratitude and recognition aren’t merely leader-driven (top-down), but is community-generated. Gratitude is built horizontally, not just vertically. Over time, the strength, trust, and communication is reinforced. Another opportunity is to offer precise acknowledgment (rather than a vague, superficial comment.) Name and identify exactly what someone did and how it mattered. It demonstrates respect and authentic gratitude. It shows that leaders are paying attention. Some people prefer quiet recognition (even a hand-written notecard.) Others feel energized by group acknowledgement (team members support each other.) Leaders can open the communication and create psychological safety with simple, vulnerable comments such as, “I appreciate your patience or contributions as we experimented to solve this customer’s problem.” It’s helpful to surface issues and risks and encourage innovating without fear. Finally, leaders must abolish artificial ranking and rating systems and individual performance management programs that damage morale. Why? Those systems blame people for sub-optimal system results! Instead, replace them with meaningful process conversations. Always, leaders create dignity of the individual. Authentic appreciation costs nothing, but its impact is profound. Creating trust is the fuel for transformation. And leaders are accountable for transforming the organization.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: What Makes Great Leaders?

Q. Developing our natural leadership is continually important. How can we inspire everyone to work on leadership development?

A.  If you want an excellent opportunity to engage with your employees, give them a platform to express their creativity. Whether there are small groups of 10 or larger groups of several hundred, there are powerful ways to learn what’s working and not working in your organizations. 

Periodically, create venues for exploration and discussions about leadership. Discover how people define it. What is their experience? When employees share and reflect on what is not working, everyone can discover what’s possible. 

Teams of people can address the barriers to great leadership. Together they can define what kind of leadership they want to optimize and transform their enterprise. Then they can better serve the customers. 

There are driving forces that help leaders naturally develop. Here are some traits leaders have (which ones do you have?): a compelling purpose, ability to inspire others, build trust, listen actively, encourage challenging the status quo in order to innovate, recognize contributions, communicate effectively, behave with respect and integrity, make decisions and pivot as needed, foster collaboration, invest in the education and skills for all, create a learning environment, reduce fear and complexity, solve problems systematically at the root cause level, ask what and how (not who), and model humility, transparency, and authenticity. 

Driving Forces

Restraining forces can hinder leadership development throughout an organization. But great leaders will identify and remove barriers as quickly as possible. Like detectives, natural leaders and positional leaders act. Poor leaders need to pivot if they have a lack of purpose or direction, micromanage, don’t listen well, resist new ideas, fear and distrust others, communicate poorly, are unethical, don’t invest in people’s continual learning and development, sabotage the team’s work, criticize and blame people, demotivate people, refuse to be accountable for the results of the system, creates a judgmental and dysfunctional culture, acts as a bully, emphasizes their self-importance (is there an over- abundance of selfies and low self-esteem?), and rules with a hierarchical structure. 

Restraining Forces

As you reflect on your own leadership behaviors as well as those colleagues in your organization, you can rapidly discern which traits are obvious. Based on these, essential conversations may need to occur if leaders are to achieve better results. 

The quality of leadership has a direct correlation to the results the organization can achieve. The questions are, “Are you happy with the results you’re achieving?” and “Does anyone care about profits?”

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: How to Pivot Your Career

Q. People are entering or re-entering the workforce, changing careers, or retiring. Whatever the shift, how can we best adapt?

A.  Life is a series of transitions—some planned, others unexpected. One of the most pivotal is the move from education into a career. For students, the shift can be thrilling but daunting. The challenges to create an effective resume and LinkedIn profile, to navigate job boards/fairs, to secure appointments for interviews, interview and follow-up, to negotiate for a position and salary, are all foreign territory in a career search. How are students learning to successfully navigate these new tasks? Many flounder and waste time. Eventually they discover what works and what doesn’t. Or they “luck out” and find a job. Some are fortunate to have professors, a mentor, classes, or parents who teach and guide them. 

The early career pivot after years of structured learning sets the tone for personal growth, skill-building, fitting into a culture and contributing, and growing some financial independence. Yet career pivots don’t stop at that first job. They often accelerate as people explore new interests, confront layoffs, respond to economic shifts, or seek more meaningful work. Professionals may transition from corporate roles to entrepreneurship, or from high-pressure positions to mission- driven nonprofits. Today, career agility is not just an asset—it’s essential. 

Eventually, every career reaches another crossroads: retirement. This transition is both an ending and a beginning. For some people it’s an abrupt halt. For others the pivot is one they prepare for, for a year or two. Leaders especially ask two significant questions. The first is, “What is my legacy I want to leave?” The other is, “What’s my plan for my next phase of my life, whether it be retirement or an encore career of “giving back?” 

For many, retirement is no longer a complete withdrawal but a pivot toward purpose. Some become mentors, volunteers, authors, or part-time consultants. Others travel, pursue hobbies, or contribute to causes they care about. Regardless of the path, retirement today is as much about reinvention as it is about rest, fun, and freedom. 

What unites these life phases, starting out, changing direction, and planning for retirement, is the opportunity to leave a legacy. Whether it’s the students you’ve mentored, the company you helped grow, the ideas you championed, or the values you embodied, your impact extends far beyond your title. 

Each pivot in life invites reflection and bold action. It’s not about having one perfect plan. it’s about evolving with purpose. Students, professionals, and retirees alike can embrace change as a platform for growth and legacy. Life doesn’t move in a straight line. It’s non-linear, and that’s what makes every pivot so powerful. 

When transitioning from one phase of life to another, it’s wise to seek a coach to help you navigate through the preferences and opportunities. An insightful coach will present ask questions and present possibilities. An effective transition coach will present “what if scenarios” so the depth and breadth of your thinking can be fuller and more reflective.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: 12 Ways to Accelerate Team Productivity

Q. With retirements and layoffs, our teams are smaller but are expected to produce more results. How can we do that?

A.  In most organizations, leaders say they want higher productivity. Yet they chase it with the wrong methods! They spend valuable time setting individual performance ratings and arbitrary numerical targets. They cut costs and micromanage. These outdated approaches create fear, waste, complexity, and burnout. 

The truth is: productivity doesn’t increase by pushing people harder. It rises when leaders transform the system. Productivity rapidly increases when the flow of the work, communication, and information increases. It also increases depending on how people work together with clarity, trust, and purpose. 

To accelerate a team’s productivity, leaders must shift from managing by numbers to leading with knowledge, courage, and systems thinking. Here are 12 proven ways to dramatically raise your team’s performance and results without adding stress or confusion to both management and the teams. 

1. Clarify the Purpose and System 

Every team must understand why it exists and how it fits into the larger organizational system. When people can connect their daily work to a clear purpose and shared vision, self-motivation and their contributions increase naturally. A leader’s role is to ensure that everyone sees the whole picture: how their contributions create value for customers and society. Productivity rises when people adopt the meaning behind the work, to make a difference and to serve customers. It’s management responsibility to connect the dots and communicate repeatedly. 

2. Eliminate Fear and Blame 

Fear paralyzes performance. When people are afraid of change, speaking up, punishment, ridicule, or job loss, they stop communicating honestly. They play it safe. Great leaders replace fear with trust and curiosity. They ask: “What can we learn from this?” not “Who’s to blame?” When fear leaves the system, people take initiative, collaborate, and innovate. As Dr. W. Edwards Deming said, “Drive out fear so everyone may work effectively for the company.” 

 3. FOCUS on Process, Not Just Outcomes (especially not numerical outcomes) 

Most problems in organizations are not caused by people; they’re caused by processes. When outcomes fall short, leaders must study the system, not blame or criticize individuals. Improve the process, and performance will follow. Use data and observation to identify bottlenecks, redundancy, or confusion. Teach teams to see the flow of work and to simplify it. True productivity comes from improving how work is done, not just demanding more of it. 

4. Set Clear, Meaningful Priorities 

A team drowning in competing demands will deliver mediocrity. Productivity thrives when leaders define the vital few priorities that truly matter. Clarity brings focus, energy, and quality. Limit projects in progress and remove distractions. Encourage teams to finish what they start and celebrate real completion. Complexity and overload are the enemies of progress; clarity is its catalyst. 

5. Put Decision-Making at the Right Level 

When every decision must go up the chain, momentum dies. Leaders who push decision-making closer to where the work happens accelerate results and build ownership. Let the teams solve problems within clear boundaries and purpose. This trust unleashes creativity and engagement. A team that feels ownership acts faster, learns faster, and adapts faster: key drivers of productivity in a fast-changing world. 

6. Foster Continuous Learning 

Learning and productivity are inseparable. Encourage curiosity and reflection. Schedule short learning loops after projects or key events: What worked? What didn’t? What can we improve next time? When learning becomes a habit, not a special event, performance compounds. A learning team is a self-correcting system; it grows stronger with every challenge. The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Improvement Model is a fundamental tool for any organization and team. 

7. Remove Waste and Barriers 

Productivity isn’t about working harder. Again, you can use the PDSA model for rapid learning and work implementation. Identify wasteful activities that drain time and energy: redundant approvals, useless reports, unclear roles, and unproductive meetings. Then reduce the waste. Ask your team: “What slows us down that we can stop doing?” The answers will surprise you. Every barrier removed frees capacity for innovation, customer service, and meaningful work. 

8. Build Trust, Collaboration, and Joy in Work 

Trust accelerates everything. It reduces friction, shortens meetings, and strengthens relationships. Collaboration across roles and functions allows ideas to flow, and problems can be solved at their root. But beyond trust and collaboration lies something deeper: joy in work. When people feel proud of their contributions and connected to their teammates, their energy and creativity soar. Joy in work is not a luxury; it’s a multiplier of results. 

9. Explore What Measures Strategically Matter 

Many organizations drown in meaningless metrics that drive the wrong behaviors. Data gathering (much less than most organizations do) should start with strategic questions. Why are you going to gather that data? What do you expect it to tell you? Instead of measuring what’s easy to count, observe and discuss what truly counts: learning, teamwork, creativity, progress, and value creation. There’s both qualitative and quantitative data to consider. But don’t get stuck in the mud with data as most organizations do. Use data to guide decisions, not to instill fear. The right measures illuminate where improvement is needed and inspire action. Numbers should serve the team’s purpose, not replace it. 

10. Model Courageous and Consistent Leadership 

The fastest way to destroy productivity is inconsistent leadership. Teams watch their leaders closely. When leaders waver, hide, or shift priorities constantly, trust erodes. Courageous leaders face facts, make tough calls, and stay consistent with their values. They create stability in uncertainty and confidence through example. When leaders lead with courage and clarity, teams align naturally and productivity follows. 

11. Strengthen Cross-Functional Communication 

Silos are the silent killers of productivity. When departments protect turf or fail to share information, rework multiplies and customer satisfaction declines. High-performing teams connect across boundaries: marketing with operations, finance with customer service, leadership with the front line. They share knowledge early and often. Collaboration across the system prevents duplication, sparks creativity, and accelerates execution.

12. Create a Rhythm of Reflection and Renewal 

Speed without reflection leads to exhaustion. To sustain performance, teams need time to pause, learn, and renew. Build brief moments of reflection into the rhythm of work: weekly or monthly check-ins to celebrate wins, identify barriers, and realign on priorities. Renewal fuels resilience. A rested, reflective team outperforms a frantic one every time. 

The Leadership Wake-Up Call 

If you want to accelerate productivity, stop trying to squeeze more output from tired or frustrated people who may lack resources and broken systems. Productivity isn’t a demand; it’s a result of strategic, systems thinking leaders. When leaders focus on improving systems, developing people, and removing fear and waste, performance improves dramatically and sustainably. 

The Wake-Up Call for leaders today is urgent: You cannot manage your way to higher productivity; you must lead your team there. It requires courage to challenge assumptions, clarity to focus on your aim/purpose linked to customers, effective communication, and compassion to create conditions where people can thrive. 

As Dr. Deming taught decades ago, “Survival is optional. No one must change.” But those who choose to pivot, disrupt, and transform will not only survive; they’ll flourish. Productivity, innovation, and joy in work will rise naturally when leadership transforms thinking from control to contribution, from fear to trust, from management to meaning.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: 8 Ways Leaders Can Solve Their Labor Shortages

Q. The bottom line is, we can’t find enough skilled people to do the work we have. What do we do? 

A.  Across industries, leaders complain that they cannot find good people. They post hundreds of jobs, offer signing bonuses, and still struggle to attract or retain talent. At the same time, millions of capable individuals, from college graduates to experienced professionals, remain unemployed, underemployed, or disengaged. This paradox is not a labor shortage; it is a leadership shortage.

Too many leaders rely on outdated management practices while the nature of work, technology, and expectations have radically changed. The systems built for the industrial era, such as rigid hierarchies, short-term metrics, and credential- based hiring, no longer serve a world of accelerating innovation and human complexity. 

If leaders want to solve their workforce challenges, they must stop blaming the people and start transforming the systems. The solutions require courage, creativity, and a profound respect for human potential. 

Here are eight ways leaders can address their labor and skills shortages and build organizations ready for the future of work. These are not possible, theoretical solutions. As necessary, my clients have adopted and implemented these processes. 

1. Redefine Work and Talent 

Most job descriptions today are relics, static lists of duties, credentials, and years of experience. They exclude capable people who could learn quickly and contribute immediately. Leaders should redefine work in terms of purpose and contribution, not rigid positions. Ask, “What outcomes do we need to achieve?” not “Who has five years in this narrow role?” Hire for curiosity, collaboration, and problem-solving, traits that fuel long-term growth. When you define talent as the ability to learn and contribute, the pool of potential employees expands dramatically. 

2. Build a Learning System, Not Just a Training Program 

Training in skills is one way to learn. But another essential part of learning is education, as a system. In high-performing organizations, learning is also embedded in daily work through mentoring, cross-functional projects, reflection sessions, and feedback loops. Teams learn from successes and mistakes. Leaders must make learning continual and accessible. That means funding development and encouraging experimentation and knowledge sharing. The question should shift from “How do we fill this gap?” to “How do we develop our people and create and optimize our system, so all the essential parts of the system are connected?” A learning system produces resilience, adaptability, and innovation, some of the most valuable skills any organization can possess.

3. Partner with Education and Community Systems 

The pipeline problem starts long before a job posting. Schools and colleges often teach theory disconnected from real-world systems of work. Leaders can bridge this divide through partnerships that benefit both sides. Offer internships, apprenticeships, and co-op programs that expose students to real challenges. Invite educators to see your operations and understand evolving industry needs. Sponsor projects that teach systems thinking, teamwork, and creativity, not just technical tasks. When employers and educators collaborate, students graduate ready to contribute, and companies develop loyal, prepared employees who understand their purpose from day one. 

4. Remove Fear and Bureaucratic Barriers 

Fear kills initiative and engagement. Bureaucracy slows everything. Employees who fear failure, punishment, or micromanagement will never take ownership or innovate. Likewise, applicants drop out of hiring systems filled with long delays, unclear expectations, and impersonal screening tools. Leaders must reduce fear at every level. Simplify processes. Communicate openly. Invite feedback and act on it. Create psychological safety so employees can ask questions, challenge assumptions, and learn without fear of blame. When fear is reduced in the system, energy, creativity, and productivity rise naturally. 

5. Communicate with Teams and Decentralize Decisions 

Bottlenecks destroy speed and morale. In many organizations, decisions must travel up and down a rigid hierarchy before any action is taken. That delay kills agility and drives talent away. Communicate the aim and expectations clearly. Define the purpose, boundaries, and outcomes, then trust people closest to the work to make decisions. When employees can act and have the knowledge to improve their processes, productivity and innovation accelerate. People thrive.

6. Expand Pathways for Nontraditional Talent 

Too many potential employees are screened out by arbitrary requirements: four- year degrees, specific software experience, or continuous employment histories. These filters exclude veterans, caregivers, older workers, people from community colleges, and those who have shifted industries. Leaders should create flexible on-ramps: paid apprenticeships, project-based roles, skill bootcamps, and mentoring programs that let people prove their capability rather than rely on credentials. Hire for potential and cultural contribution, then train for skill. You will find committed, capable people who grow with the organization instead of chasing the next offer. 

7. Create a Culture of Trust 

The root cause of retention problems is rarely pay; it is often a lack of trust. People want to know their work matters and that their leaders care about their development. Leaders must make purpose visible. Connect every role to how it creates value for customers, community, or society. Communicate with honesty and consistent transparency. Recognize contributions that advance learning and improvement, not just short-term results. Trust reduces turnover, increases engagement, and attracts amazing talent. People join organizations for opportunity but stay for meaning. 

8. Lead with Systems Thinking, Not Short-Term Fixes 

Chasing short-term fixes, such as hiring sprees, layoffs, incentives, or bonuses, only perpetuates instability. The real solution is systems transformation. 

Leaders must study the system of work to understand where breakdowns occur in poor processes, unclear roles, lack of learning, conflicting goals, or outdated technology. When you improve the system, you improve results sustainably. Systems thinking allows leaders to see interdependencies, anticipate consequences, and make decisions that strengthen the whole, not just patch a symptom. As Dr. W. Edwards Deming taught, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Solving the skills shortage means fixing the system that creates it. 

A Wake-Up Call for Modern Leaders 

The skills shortage is not inevitable; it reflects leadership choices. Fear, short-term thinking, and outdated systems have created an unnecessary divide between employers and potential employees. 

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade will be those that redefine work around contribution, build systems that learn continually, develop courageous system-thinking leaders, and foster trust, flexibility, and purpose. 

People are not the problem; systems are. When leaders redesign their systems to bring out the potential in people, they will not just fill jobs; they will ignite innovation, commitment, and joy in work. 

Solving the labor shortage is not about finding workers; it is about becoming the kind of leader people want to work for.

Marcia's Leadership Q and As: What Teams Need

Q. How can we help our teams be more stable and successful?

A. From your Board of Directors to your customer-facing teams, from work to home to your community, it starts with your natural leadership, wherever you are in life. How can you and how do you contribute toward your aim? Define what you want to accomplish together. 

Whatever is happening in your work and with your team, the more you decide what you want to achieve, unite, and communicate, the more likely you will achieve progress and success. Define what success is. Define your barriers to success and make your plan to tackle and remove them together. If you need help or resources, ask for them or get creative and find them. 

Clarify Your Purpose. Clarity during chaotic times is a key role for team leaders. Having a purpose, priorities and ways to ensure progress is being made will help teams thrive. Communicating and collaborating are going to be significant actions that you commit to. Don’t let fear impact you. 

Learn and Adapt. The more a team works together, learns about the work and improvements they can make, the more adaptable they become. Experimenting and questioning leads to creativity and new pivots. Instead of having a rigid plan, have a flexible plan. Learn from new ideas and mistakes (steps in the process) and do not blame each other for trying new ways to accomplish the work. 

Communicate. Encourage people to speak up, questions assumptions, share, listen well, and navigating in new directions. When people contribute, appreciate their contribution. A simple thank you goes a long way. 

Use Data. Look at data over time to make informed decisions in context. Look at processes, and rapidly make improvements. 

Train People to Deliver Quality. Committing to delivering quality to the customers and supporting each other helps make teams resilient. They can be proud of their work and cohesive, no matter what challenges they face.