Thoughts from the ledge

Timely musings to help you navigate the peaks and valleys of your career journey.

Build Your Performance Mindset Katharine Smith Build Your Performance Mindset Katharine Smith

It’s Time to Ditch Your Growth Mindset

Since the 1970s, American psychologist Carol Dweck has been spearheading mindset research. Her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success popularized her findings and initiated a seismic shift in management and leadership conversations across the country, so there’s a very good chance you were introduced to her ideas earlier in your career!

The crux of her teachings urged professionals to relinquish a fixed mindset and embrace a growth mindset.

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Lead Your People Through Chaos Katharine Smith Lead Your People Through Chaos Katharine Smith

9 Ways to Break Through a Culture of Fear

If you and your co-workers are finding it hard to feel secure at work - especially when pressure to innovate, sell, and prove your worth has never been higher! - you are not alone. To help you, I created this leadership behavior cheatsheet to help you break through a culture of fear inside your organization and elevate your team’s performance at the same time.

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Create a High Performance Culture Katharine Smith Create a High Performance Culture Katharine Smith

How to Make or Break Your Team’s Performance

Whenever an ambitious leader enthusiastically lists all their plans to transform their team, I gently caution them against "flooding the zone."

This strategy of deliberately saturating an environment with simultaneous changes might seem like an effective way to pressure people into hitting performance targets, but it invariably undermines performance and leaves people more fragile.

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Outgrow Unhealthy Work Habits Katharine Smith Outgrow Unhealthy Work Habits Katharine Smith

Stop Conflating Self-Criticism with Self-Awareness

For my entire career, I have worked alongside highly ambitious professionals. I have drafted countless talking points, helped leaders prepare for more than a few board meetings and Town Halls, sat beside them in public and private moments, and heard some of the most brilliant individuals hurl brutal criticisms at themselves (and others) because they believed it would help them perform better.

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Create a High Performance Culture Katharine Smith Create a High Performance Culture Katharine Smith

How Presence Drives Performance

Most mid-career professionals I coach are surprisingly bad at assessing their own success in real time. They tend to focus negatively on what they haven’t been able to do, what hasn’t gone well enough, and what still needs to be accomplished. It’s as though they believe staying vigilant and critical in the short term ensures success in the long term…but this is an outdated belief.

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Outgrow Unhealthy Work Habits Katharine Smith Outgrow Unhealthy Work Habits Katharine Smith

The Fallacy of the Quick Fix

Just about every week, a client, friend, or acquaintance shares something with me that’s rather painful…and not like, “gee, that sucks” painful. I’m talking like, “I don’t share this with many people…” painful.

To be clear, it is a privilege to be entrusted with these personal and painful stories, as they are usually rich with insights. However, I can also tell you that there are two words that always come up that I wish we would all stop using: FIX IT.

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Lead Your People Through Chaos Katharine Smith Lead Your People Through Chaos Katharine Smith

How to Survive Extraordinary Transitions

Watching someone you love navigate change is hard, and initiating it yourself is even harder - so whether you are preparing for a disruptive career move, or planning to shake things up at the highest level of your organization - I can tell you that good change is absolutely achievable when you dedicate yourself to three powerful priorities.

…and this may shock you, but none of them are about nailing the time, budget, or plan just perfectly!

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Build Your Performance Mindset Katharine Smith Build Your Performance Mindset Katharine Smith

How to Lead With Relaxed Authority

At an early age, Sarah* was trained to follow instructions and win.

She became a stand-out student, athlete, and musician. She attended great schools, landed competitive internships, and was on track to surpass her own career expectations, but in the last few year's relationship with work started slipping.

Her deep-seated drive to avoid missteps, impress her stakeholders, and expedite decisions consumed all her time and energy, and she was finding it impossible to…

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Make Your Career Transition Katharine Smith Make Your Career Transition Katharine Smith

The Power of a Clear and Coherent Vision

Several weeks ago, my husband and I met with an architect to articulate a vision for our family’s future home.

“A take on Nordic modern, with a warmer palette and loads of windows to maximize natural light…” we blathered with unqualified confidence.

The architect graciously replied, “Can you share some pictures with me?”

Of course, we had a few ready because we’d been geeking out on the idea of building a home for years, but it wasn’t until we were asked to share them that I realized just how undefined and incoherent our ‘good' ideas still were.

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Create a High Performance Culture Lisa Russell Create a High Performance Culture Lisa Russell

How to Sustain High Performance

Way back in 2015, I had the privilege of consulting on strategic work inside a world-famous corporation. It was, and still is, known all around the world for its bold brand positioning and its high performance culture…so you can probably guess which one I’m talking about.

If not, I’ll give you a hint: its name rhymes with “Mikey.”

During my tenure, I got to work with some truly brilliant professionals: category leaders, functional leaders, innovators, and creators, and I was charged with leading workplace transformation inside various departments.

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Build Your Performance Mindset Lisa Russell Build Your Performance Mindset Lisa Russell

Don't Let Your Beliefs Undermine Your Performance

Since 2023, I have invested a lot more time and energy into understanding the science of behavior change and the art of subconscious programming (aka mindset work), all to transform my clients’ career performance.

I have dug deeper than smart decision-making frameworks and collaborative leadership models and I’ve examined the invisible levers that drive performance: your perceptions and beliefs.

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Build Your Performance Mindset Katharine Smith Build Your Performance Mindset Katharine Smith

How To Survive Seemingly Endless Change

About ten days ago, my family and I completed our “Relocation Roadtrip” from Bend, Oregon to Flagstaff, Arizona - by way of Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and a handful of national parks!

But as I continue to unpack boxes, set up our rental home, and facilitate new norms for the people I love, I can’t help but bristle at that word ‘completed.’

…because if you’ve ever initiated a big career move, been tasked with a re-org, or spearheaded a turnaround, you know that big change never really feels ‘complete.'

So this month, let’s get real about living in seemingly endless change and how you (and I!) can lead through it.

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Outgrow Unhealthy Work Habits Katharine Smith Outgrow Unhealthy Work Habits Katharine Smith

The Fallacy of Hard Work

Last month, my husband and I embarked on the trip of a lifetime. We dropped into the Grand Canyon to raft 220 miles of the Colorado River.

For 14 days, we loaded, floated, braced, paddled, splashed, and crashed through more than 80 whitewater rapids under the tutelage of five remarkable guides and their two assistants - most of whom were as strong in body as they were in character.

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Make Your Career Transition Katharine Smith Make Your Career Transition Katharine Smith

Processing Complex Career Transitions

For ambitious, mid-career professionals, career transitions are complex, and over time, they can become quite disorienting and destabilizing. While we may do our best to make the optimal choice, our minds are often littered with questions and unknowns. We vacillate justifications around money, time, family, well-being, security, autonomy, etc. This messy mental state is related to what psychologists ‘cognitive dissonance’ - when your mind tries to reconcile two or more thoughts (or behaviors) that are inconsistent with your beliefs or values. So why does your smart brain launch into these mental gymnastics? And how can you outsmart it to minimize exhaustion?

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Make Your Career Transition Katharine Smith Make Your Career Transition Katharine Smith

How To Get Unstuck At Work

I spent decades collecting some pretty strong beliefs about work, money, and professionalism.

My beliefs carried me (and a lot of people I know) pretty far, but at a certain point they stopped being helpful and they started complicating my career transitions.

In 2019, I finally figured out what it actually takes to make a successful career transition: getting really clear on your own definition of success.

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What SuperCommunicators Do Differently

Every month, I have the privilege of engaging in wide-ranging conversations with ambitious professionals - bankers, attorneys, physicians, start-up founders, non-profit executives, and small business owners.

Every week, I take a front row seat to their busy schedules, their remarkably complex responsibilities, their tenuous relationships, and their bold visions.

I know how exhausting it is to be a human at work these days, and how much you long to feel seen, heard, understood, and respected by your colleagues, clients, or customers. (Because we all do!)

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Create a High Performance Culture Katharine Smith Create a High Performance Culture Katharine Smith

Working With Emotional Data

I don’t know a single professional who hasn’t been confronted by heightened emotions at work, or tried to suppress heightened emotions in the midst of work. This is because we’ve been told for decades that emotions don’t belong in the workplace, and they are bad for decision-making, but this broad advice couldn’t be further from the truth, especially as we march forward into an AI-supported “relationship economy.” Knowing how to gather emotional data and work with it is an extremely valuable competency - especially if you aspire to lead yourself, your clients, and colleagues toward more creative and innovative solutions.

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