To the Leader Who Has to Manage Up
The leader who has to manage both their team and their boss does a delicate and complex job. It’s one that often goes unseen, but it’s not unappreciated.
Posts By Megan Rodgers
When You Don’t Feel Like the Leader You Already Are
“Imposter syndrome” isn’t a character flaw; it’s a pattern of thought that can be understood and gently shifted so you can recognize your own competence.
The Relationships Holding Up Your Agency
Trust, communication and connection are working parts of the organization, as real as a budget or a policy manual. Treat them as structural issues.
What Your Organization Needs From You: Seven Qualities of Relational Leadership
It is worth asking a different question. Not “what kind of person makes a good leader?” but “what does an organization need from the person leading it?”
What Leaders Lose When the Room Is Not Safe
The cost of an unsafe space is never a single dramatic event. It is a slow leak of early warnings, honest accounts, useful dissent, and eventually, people.
Becoming Trauma-Informed While Everything Else Is Changing
An organization becoming trauma-informed and navigating a leadership change has no steady ground to stand on. The work has to happen in motion.
You Saw the Architecture Before You Had the Words for It
There’s a specific, disorienting moment that shows up in public-sector work more often than we admit: You walk out of a meeting knowing something is wrong with how the room just made a decision, and you cannot yet say what. Not “I disagree with the outcome.” Something structural. A shape you registered before you hadRead… Read more »
Which Part of Your Leadership Is Failing?
What I have come to believe, after years of working with complex public sector systems, is that leadership failures are rarely random.
Complexity Isn’t the Problem. Pretending It Isn’t Is.
The reason so many public sector initiatives fail is not lack of effort, lack of funding or lack of good people. It is that we keep applying simple solutions to problems that are not simple and then wondering why the problems persist. This is not a criticism. It is a description of what happens whenRead… Read more »
The Difference Between a Team and a System
A team is a collection of people with a common goal. A system is something more specific. Understanding the difference is essential.