The Fault Line: When Change Isn't Your Choice
Sometimes the change lands on your desk and you didn't ask for it — a new strategy from above, a layoff decision, a shift in hours. In this episode of The Fault Line, Kim Scribner and Gary Lancina dig into what it takes to lead through change you didn't choose, especially when you're not sure it's the right call. They cover the different flavors of imposed change, from the ones you're excited about to the ones you don't believe in, and share stories from their own careers about pushing back on an initiative, delivering hard news, and pivoting when events outside anyone's control change the plan. Along the way they talk about why limited visibility — seeing the world through a knothole — leads to the wrong conclusions, why you have to deal with your own emotions before communicating a change to your team, and how being transparent about what you know and don't know builds trust. Collaboration doesn't mean consensus, but you always have a choice in how you respond.
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The Fault Line: Accountability Without Decision Authority
What happens when you're held accountable for a result but can't make the decisions that drive it? Or when you hand someone accountability and forget to give them the authority to act on it? In this episode of The Fault Line, Kim Scribner and Gary Lancina look at both sides of accountability without decision authority. They untangle accountability from responsibility and talk about how leaders set people up to succeed: clear success measures, guardrails like spending limits and check-in cadence, and the autonomy to act within them. Along the way they share stories from their own careers — a leader who believed every decision was important enough for him to make, a workshop where a leader told her team "I trust you" and meant it, and a cake made with powdered sugar that makes a surprisingly good case for delegating by default. They also cover mutual accountability in cross-functional and agile teams, why it's hard when reviews and raises are written for individuals, and what to do if you're on the receiving end: play back what success looks like, find where the boundaries are, and check whether the accountability and authority actually fit.
- 5 min read
From Report to Results: Turning Leadership Assessments into a Learning Agenda
An assessment creates value only when leaders can use the findings to decide what to practice, where to apply it, and how they'll know anything is changing.
Working through change of your own?
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