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How-To Guides

Essential Tools for Leadership Challenges

These guides offer practical ways to approach three recurring leadership challenges. Each one breaks the work into clear steps, questions to ask, and simple structures you can use with your team or on your own.

LEADERSHIP SKILL

Active Listening Techniques: A 5-Part Framework for Leaders

This guide introduces a five-part approach to listening that helps you understand what sits beneath the surface of a conversation. It covers the mental stance needed for real listening, noticing the wider system a comment lives in, asking questions that open up thinking, pausing before you respond, and following up in ways that show what you heard.

Five-part listening model Questions that deepen insight Everyday practice prompts
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PROBLEM SOLVING

How to Handle a Difficult Employee: A 5-Step SOP for Senior Leaders

This guide offers a five-step sequence for working with a difficult employee by reading the system around them, not just their individual behavior. It helps you distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges, hold conversations that surface assumptions and pressures, test small systemic interventions, and use a one-page cheat sheet and reflection prompts in real situations.

Five-step SOP System-level diagnosis Reflection prompts and cheat sheet
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MEETING DESIGN

The Art of Effective Meetings: How to Design Meetings that Energize Rather than Drain

This guide outlines a simple structure for planning and running meetings that create clarity rather than fatigue. It covers the core elements of effective meetings, a flow you can adapt to different situations, and facilitation moves that help keep discussion focused and useful.

Meeting flow Core elements Facilitation moves
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