Things I believe to be true.

On Hiring

We've built elaborate systems to select for the wrong things.

Most hiring processes are designed to assess confidence in interviews, not capability on the job. We optimize for polish, pedigree, and the ability to perform well under artificial pressure — and remain surprised when new hires disappoint, teams remain homogeneous, and organizational culture doesn't shift despite stated commitments to change. Competency-based hiring, done rigorously, is not a compliance exercise. It is the most powerful lever that most organizations consistently fail to pull.

On Organizational Culture

Culture is not what leadership says it values. It is what the organization rewards.

Culture change is an organizational design problem. The sooner leaders treat it that way, the sooner they'll stop being surprised that their culture programs haven't worked. You cannot train your way to a different culture. You have to redesign the incentives, the structures, and the behaviors that the system actually reinforces.

On Managing Performance

Annual performance reviews are not managing performance. They are documenting it.

The most effective performance management happens in real time, through clear role design, honest ongoing feedback, and development conversations that are actually about development. The organizations I've worked with that have the best performance cultures share one characteristic: transparent, equitable performance systems and managers equipped to have difficult conversations before they become formal ones.

On Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It is a strategic capability — and it is measurable.

Leaders who cannot build genuine trust across cultural differences are expensive. They drive attrition, suppress candor, and make organizations slower and more fragile. Cultural intelligence and emotional regulation are learnable — but only when organizations stop treating them as personality traits and start treating them as competencies. The case for developing emotional intelligence at the leadership level is not a human resources argument. It is a business case.

On Followership

We have spent decades studying leadership and almost no time studying the people who make it work.

Leadership is critical — no serious practitioner would argue otherwise. But organizations don't function because of leaders alone. They function because of the quality of the relationship between leaders and those they lead. Effective followership — knowing when to push back, when to commit, how to manage upward, how to build horizontal trust — is a learnable skill that most organizations have never thought to develop. The obsession with leadership has left the other half of the equation largely unexamined. The fact that we don't teach followership says more about our cultural assumptions than about its importance.

AI and the Future of Work

The most dangerous AI strategy is having no framework at all.

Most organizations are either paralyzed by AI or rushing to automate without a workforce design logic. The question is not what AI can do — it is what work should remain human, what should be augmented, and what organizational structures need to change as a result. That is an HR and OD problem before it is a technology problem.