Leadership requires judgment and direction. Facilitation requires neutrality and mechanics. When one person tackles both simultaneously, progress suffers. This article explores why the balance is so challenging, and the importance and benefits of separating the roles.

Having a defined plan is important—essential, even—but it must be balanced with curiosity and adaptability. If you’re constantly navigating stakeholder pressure, team friction, and the gap between strategy and execution, learn how to build muscle memory around this balance with my facilitator-approved tips.

Lately, I keep returning to one question: How can we be with one another?

In a time when it feels like so much is unraveling around us, when fear, tension, and uncertainty hang thick in the air, this question feels more urgent than ever. How do we show up for one another in the hardest moments? What does it look like to offer presence, solidarity, and compassion when there are forces that seem intent on pulling us apart?

A roadmap brings direction, helps align the team, and keeps everyone moving toward shared goals. But here's the thing: The strength of your roadmap is only as good as the foundation it's built on. Here are three foundational pillars you should address before building a roadmap, along with practical to-dos that will help you fortify your baseline.

Being able to give direct feedback is one of the most important aspects of leadership. It can sometimes feel easier to dodge direct language or soften our words too much because we think we’re being kind. But, as Brené Brown reminds us, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” Let’s talk about what it looks like to be clear and kind, along with 5 ways to give feedback more effectively.

Between holidays, vacations, and general year-end fatigue, the window between Thanksgiving and New Year’s can turn into a murky holding pattern. But it’s only October, which means there’s time to get ahead of this potential pitfall! Here are 5 leadership moves you can make right now to align your team before the end of the year.

If you’re thinking about leading a workshop yourself, learn about the five most common roadblocks that stall progress, along with a few of my facilitator-approved tips for getting ahead of the spiral.

You don’t always need to wait for a big strategy offsite to kick off meaningful conversations with your team. Here are five facilitator-approved, easy-to-run micro-workshops designed for teams working on innovation, new product/feature design, ideation, or simply looking for more productive ways to collaborate.

A couple of years ago, I shared the painful but eye-opening moment when I realized I was in the throes of a burnout episode and something had to change ASAP. Here, you’ll find articles, tools, and actionable advice for breaking the burnout cycle. Because burnout is about more than being tired. It’s about disconnection—from meaning, from purpose, from yourself.

What does “holding space” really mean with regard to leading? And what impact can you expect to see when you embody it? Here, I cover 3 practical ways you can improve your ability to hold space in your leadership role, with actionable “homework” assignments to help you build muscle memory around this skill.

The best leaders are more focused on asking questions than leading with answers. In this article, I’ll share some researched-backed evidence for this mindset, along with practical, facilitator-approved advice for asking better questions and leading with inquiry.

How do you successfully shift from strategic planning into execution? In this article, I’ll cover the common blockers to a smooth transition and the solutions to the challenges that block execution so you can keep team momentum going long after the strategy has been set.

How do you confidently improve and refine a mature product while mitigating risks and maintaining user trust? A Design Sprint may be just what you need. Learn why and how to run a Design Sprint for your mature product, with some tangible evaluation criteria to help you determine if a Design Sprint is right for your team.

When conflict arises in work and life, it can seem easier to ignore or divert, but finding middle ground helps us become more resilient, better communicators and de-escalators, and better at embracing diverse perspectives. In this article, you’ll learn facilitator-approved tools and mindsets to better navigate hard conversations at work and in your personal life.

Whether you’ve been facilitating for a while, or are just dipping your toe in, these 5 superpowers will help elevate your ability to successfully guide people through the winding road of decision making, ideation, and problem solving, all in the spirit of helping them do their best work.

Often, a team’s inability to work productively is due to a lack of focus, lack of support, and/or lack of alignment. In this article, you'll learn why your teams are probably getting stuck, along with a solution that I’ve seen work time and time again for getting them out of the weeds and back on track.

In this article, learn about the essential yet undervalued bookends of workshops: the prep work and wrap-up activities. The tips in this article will help elevate your workshop design, support better outcomes for the teams you lead, and set you up for success as a facilitator.

With people working in distributed, remote, and hybrid capacities, teams are more reliant than ever on virtual meetings and workshops to help accelerate ideas and projects. But how do we overcome meeting fatigue and skepticism? With the right tools, methods, and activities, we can make meetings more productive and enjoyable. The facilitator-approved tips in this article will help you do just that!

Summer can feel so precious, signaling time to rest and find ease. But it may also usher in a seemingly-endless number of things to do that compete with the desire to simply slow down. It’s a vicious cycle, but there are resources, habits, and mindsets you can use to cultivate more balance and less burnout. This article includes the most powerful tools that have helped me do just that.

Visual aids are a necessary tool for anyone who facilitates group collaboration. They break up dense information, activate different parts of the brain, and help participants better visualize ideas. As a facilitator, there are three primary ways I use visual aids, which I’ll cover in this article along with some examples you can apply directly to your work.