(Versão em português abaixo) The best leadership development experiences don’t just teach you new skills. They show you something you can't unsee. Four days after our workshop, one student walked into a conversation he'd been dreading. A difficult message to deliver to a collaborator. A real relationship, high stakes, no script. "The role-play was not just a class exercise," he wrote afterwards. "It was a full rehearsal for something that was worrying me." He didn't say it we

(Versão em português abaixo) Same conversation, same room, completely different experience. Think you know how that last difficult conversation landed? You might not. I recently read through 120 individual reflections from MBA students on the same exercise, and realized those who acted as leaders noticed one set of things. Students who were employees noticed something completely different. And observers often saw the most clearly of all. One observer described watching a mana

(Versão em português abaixo) Smart people often do something predictable in hard conversations – they reach for logic when things get challenging. And it almost always makes things worse. In the work I’ve been exploring in this series, one student described it perfectly. He was acting as a leader, delivering news that a salary increase wasn't possible. His employee pushed back. And pushed back again. "I noticed myself feeling pressured to justify the decision more and more,"

(Versão em português abaixo) You know that moment in a hard conversation, when you feel their emotion rising? What you do next matters. And if you're someone who values empathy and cares about people, your instinct is immediate and powerful: make this better. Now. This January, I watched it play out again and again in a room full of thoughtful leaders. The conversations would start well, with a clear message and good presence. And then, the moment the other person showed frus