Posts By Kathleen Schafer

Using Conflict As a Tool for Growth: 3 Steps to Resolution

This blog is an excerpt from Kathleen’s upcoming book Living the Leadership Choice. Join the Leadership Connection community to receive updates and exclusive content. “Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging the relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.” – William James One ofRead… Read more »

New Domesticity: Leadership Begins in the Home

As a Gen X woman who has spent a vast portion of the past 20 years, training, teaching and coaching women to play a more robust role in governing, I find the current discussion about the “new domesticity” an interesting one. As the younger generations are coming into early adulthood, many women are looking atRead… Read more »

Need a Job? Three Steps to Take Now

The fact that millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed is not news. Although we seem to be engaged in Einstein’s infamous trap of ‘doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’ Policy makers are debating how to entice businesses into hiring more people and the unemployed are angry and frustrated overRead… Read more »

Fooling Ourselves and Paying a High Price

While the saga around the Penn State sexual abuse scandal will, and should, continue as people come to terms with the horrifying series of events that transpired, I find myself looking for any good that can come from this disturbing series of (in)actions of those in positions of authority. What happened in Happy Valley isRead… Read more »

Are You a 21st Century Leader?

The Occupy movement is raising questions about leaders in business and politics. Motivated by corporate excess and government blundering of our nation’s economic system “occupiers” are expressing frustration and anger by taking to the streets. With a fuzzy message fueled by personal economic challenges and years of feeling powerless against “the big guys,” the unfortunateRead… Read more »

Our Future Success Depends on Creating a New Model

This blog is co-authored with Mark Herbert a corporate management and executive coach with more than 30 years experience in helping businesses become leaders in their field. In my dream the angel shrugged and said, “this time if we fail it will be a failure of imagination,” and then she gently placed the world inRead… Read more »

Why Creating Jobs Won’t Help Our Economy

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. –Albert Einstein While this ubiquitous quote from one of the 20th Century’s greatest thinkers seems simple, it is amazing how often our country’s leaders seem to fall into this trap. Unlike a college football coach who after onlyRead… Read more »

It Is Time to Face the Music

I enjoy idioms and the richness of our culture that creates them—and none seems more apt for our current situation than “it is time to face the music.” We have long since passed this point and the current litany of woes facing our country can be traced back to our collective reluctance to face theRead… Read more »

Finger Pointers Need to Look in the Mirror

How many times have we been in situations where we think, “if this person would just . . .” It doesn’t matter if it is a coworker or a spouse we know the issue at hand could be easily addressed if the other party would just do something different. Our frustration rises as we lookRead… Read more »