A Conversation with Leo Bottary and Daryl Woodhouse on Making Peer Dynamics Visible and Actionable. --Despina Wilson, D.Litt. Organizations measure almost everything: revenue, productivity, engagement, customer satisfaction, and leadership effectiveness, to name a few. Yet one of the strongest influences on how people perform every day rarely appears on a dashboard: the influence peers have on one another. For more than two decades, Leo Bottary has studied how peer dynamics

CEOs make deliberate choices about strategy, structure, technology, processes, incentives, leadership, and talent. They invest enormous amounts of time and money to determine how work should be done, who should be responsible for doing it, and what systems will enable people to perform at their best. Yet one of the most powerful systems inside an organization operates largely out of sight. It isn’t documented in a strategic plan. There is no software implementation for it, an

Leaders rarely set out to create an unhealthy team environment. Quite the opposite. Most work intentionally to build cultures where people trust one another, collaborate effectively, speak candidly, and feel valued. They invest in development, communicate expectations, recognize good work, and encourage open dialogue. By every reasonable measure, they believe they are creating the conditions for people to succeed. Then something unexpected happens. One employee describes the

I recently watched a YouTube interview with legendary UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma. After more than four decades of coaching championship teams and some of the greatest players ever to play the game, he’s earned the right to make people think. One observation, in particular, stayed with me. Paraphrasing his point, Geno suggested that young children are naturally good teammates. Left to their own devices, they tend to share, include others, celebrate together,

Leaders spend countless hours studying the numbers that determine business performance. They look at revenue, margin, productivity, market share, customer retention, and other key metrics. Those numbers matter, as they should. What leaders spend far less time examining are the human interactions that produce them. Which is why I’ve never been comfortable with the term soft skills. For years, we’ve grouped qualities like trust, collaboration, curiosity, communication, accounta

Russell Ackoff once observed that a system is not merely the sum of its parts but the product of their interaction. The distinction matters because organizations have long invested heavily in the quality of their individual components. They recruit talented people, develop capable leaders, refine strategy, strengthen culture, and measure performance. All of that is necessary. Yet none of it, by itself, explains why some teams consistently outperform others with comparable tal

Every so often, a conversation refuses to end when the meeting does. That happened recently during one of our Peernovation Certification sessions. During our time together, curiosity became the centerpiece of our discussions, and long after the session ended, I found myself thinking about it. Not curiosity in the broad sense, but something more specific. I reflected on my own curious tendencies, and the fact that I can be really curious but not about everything; it’s rather q

I recently enjoyed the privilege of guest lecturing in an MBA course for DeSales University, taught by my friend and outstanding professor, Stephen Hart. One of the texts the students were reading was What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. In the book, Goldsmith explains that the behaviors responsible for our early success often become obstacles later in our careers. We rise by demonstrating our own capability, but once we begin leading others, success d

Whenever I speak to a group, I often ask a simple question: Who is the best leader you’ve ever worked for? Whether I’m with CEOs, students, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, or frontline employees, the response is remarkably consistent. People don’t hesitate. They know exactly who comes to mind. What’s even more interesting is why. Rarely does anyone begin by describing that leader’s vision, strategic brilliance, or ability to exceed expectations. They don’t talk about

There are times when a simple image tells a story that words struggle to convey. Imagine a group of hikers navigating a narrow mountain ridge. They move together along the same path toward the same destination. Now imagine that nothing about the landscape changes except the conditions around them. Dense fog settles over the ridge, obscuring everything beyond the next few steps. Powerful winds sweep across the mountainside, demanding greater balance and concentration. A thunde

A few weeks ago, TEC Canada Chair Whitney Shaw, CEC shared a simple observation that immediately caught my attention. She pointed out the height requirements posted at amusement park rides and how they relate to business and life. The metaphor was impossible to ignore. Anyone who has ever stood in line for one of those rides knows how the process works. Before boarding, there’s a simple test: Are you tall enough? The standard is clear. If you meet it, you ride. If you don’t,

After rereading Vanessa Druskat’s outstanding book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform the Rest, I found myself thinking less about individual leaders and more about the teams they serve. For decades, we have treated emotional intelligence primarily as an individual capability. Her work invites us to consider that teams need to develop emotional intelligence as well. In other words, emotionally intelligent people matter. But when t

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of helping others grow. Specifically, I argued that one of the most important responsibilities leaders have today is to elevate the people around them. In an era when influence increasingly flows horizontally rather than vertically, the ability to help peers think better, contribute more, and achieve more together has become an essential leadership skill. Since then, I’ve found myself thinking about the other side of the equation.

Many people think of LEGO in terms of the finished products it produces. They see castles, race cars, bridges, cities, spacecraft, and increasingly sophisticated kits for builders of all ages. Yet the company’s real value has never been the finished model shown on the box. Its value lies within the system. LEGO offers a collection of building blocks that can be assembled and reassembled in countless ways. The same pieces can yield entirely different outcomes, depending on the

Despite this article’s tongue-in-cheek title, I have nothing against the word. execution or the many other terms that dominate our business lexicon. Organizations need execution. Ideas without action accomplish very little. But before we focus on execution, alignment, leverage, optimization, activation, transformation, and whatever new buzzword emerges next quarter, perhaps we should pause long enough to ask a simple question: What exactly do we mean? The answer may reveal th

It is relatively easy to lead when confidence is high and conditions are favorable. It is far more difficult when uncertainty rises, institutions struggle, and people begin retreating into self-preservation. Yet those are precisely the moments when leadership is needed most. The challenge facing leaders today extends beyond managing performance or navigating change. It is helping people believe that succeeding together is still possible. As trust erodes, leadership’s responsi

Some books arrive at exactly the right moment. Bruce Feiler’s A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us is one of them. On the surface, the book explores the role rituals play in our lives. Yet beneath that premise lies a much larger question: How do we reconnect in a world that increasingly pulls us apart? It is a question that extends far beyond families, neighborhoods, and communities. It reaches directly into our workplaces, where leaders are c

Not long ago, companies competed primarily on scale, strategy, capital, and operational efficiency. Those factors still matter, of course, but the leadership equation has changed dramatically in recent years. AI now accelerates execution at unprecedented speed. Information moves instantly. Markets are shifting faster than annual planning cycles. Employees expect more transparency, collaboration, and purpose than their predecessors. Meanwhile, trust continues to shift away fro

AI continues to accelerate execution while exposing dysfunction faster than many organizations can address it. Employees increasingly trust coworkers and teammates more than institutions or authority figures. Younger generations expect collaboration, participation, and meaningful contribution rather than a rigid hierarchy. At the same time, the pace and complexity of business have grown too quickly for any one leader to process alone. Organizations gain a significant advantag

Last week, I wrote “Want to Grow Leaders? Teach Them How to Elevate Their Peers.” It challenged the mental model that leading by example alone is enough to inspire people to follow you. That raises the question of how many other mental models we hold that are worth reexamining. Leadership is often less about what we know than about the assumptions we no longer question. Let’s take a moment to look in the mirror. Over time, success can harden into certainty. The leadership app