Author: margaret@beatonexecutivecoaching.com

Dorie Clark’s 2021 HRB article Feeling Stuck or Stymied? is full of insights. It’s also practically helpful if you feel your career is moving too slowly or maybe spluttering to a halt. More often, if you feel like this, it’s a case of not giving yourself enough time and permission to succeed.

If you focus on the under-30s who founded unicorns and the under-40s who lead major listed companies, you risk becoming demoralised because you don’t know what’s a reasonable pace for the great majority of executives. You need a framework to understand what’s acceptable progress and a way to explain why some peers are getting ahead faster than you. You need to cultivate what Dorie Clark calls strategic patience. This does not mean being passively accepting; rather, you need to learn to be proactive and thoughtful. Here’s how.

What’s popularly known as the Great Resignation is not inevitable in your organisation. But it will inexorably gain ground if you don’t act knowingly and decisively. Gone for now, or gone for good?, the catchy title of today’s post, is the headline of a March 2022 research paper by Aaron De Smet and colleagues. In this post, I set out how as a leader you can act to prevent disruption and distress.

The pandemic and its social, health and economic consequences have triggered the waves of people leaving their traditional employment. But the causes are multi-faceted and partly self-inflicted by leaders. In the past, voluntary attrition was the result of competition for talent where a worker left their company for greener pastures in another. Now it’s different – and your first step is to truly understand.

It’s now well-understood that organisations benefit in their performance and innovation from fostering diversity of thought. But…what if some executives don’t feel psychologically safe offering their views or asking challenging questions? If your team has members who hold back because they are worried about being rejected or falling into disfavour with colleagues and the ‘boss’, then your organisation and all its stakeholders are the poorer.


As the end-of-year holidays and festive season draw closer, I am looking forward to 2022; especially, the anticipation of a new year and its opportunities. I hope you are too. Be sure to make time to reflect on and be grateful for what you've achieved personally and professionally in the past year. To round out 2021, I've selected five of my most popular weekly LinkedIn posts to share with followers of my blog, Letting go. Stepping up. The threads that run through these gems of wisdom and insights are the courage that comes from conviction, living in the moment, striving for wellbeing and caring for others.

Today's post Look back. Look forward. Using the power of simplicity to succeed returns to the classic story of the hedgehog and the fox. The modern incarnation of the ancient Greek poem – made famous by Isiah Berlin – stems from Good to Great, the best-seller by Jim Collins. The Greek poem held that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. Hence the title of today's post Look back. Look forward. Using the power of simplicity to succeed.

Stop managing the probable. Start leading what’s possible. exhorts my readers to lessen their reliance on a fixed mindset that there’s a standard way of doing things and strengthen their growth mindset that new and different ways can be learned.   Stop managing the probable. Start leading what’s possible. is drawn from the work of McKinsey over recent years. In January 2021 McKinsey wrote ‘Standard problem-solving works well with standard problems, but sometimes – as we have recently learned – we face unexpected and novel ones. Using the standard tool kit to narrow down the ways of addressing them is exactly what we should not do’.