What the Courtroom Teaches Leaders About Listening
I’ve spent forty-one years in courtrooms, and I’ve watched people sit through the same trial, hear the same witnesses, review the same evidence, and leave with entirely different understandings of what happened. Sometimes the disagreement comes down to credibility. One person believes a witness, and another doesn’t. Other times, the difference is more interesting. Two […]
The Problem Your Best People Keep Solving
By Joe Curcillo Before you congratulate someone on finishing a difficult job, ask what they had to do to finish it. Sometimes you’ll hear about a genuinely hard problem that took experience and good judgment. Other times you’ll hear that they had to chase down the same missing information again, or that they caught a […]
The Outsider’s Question
The Outsider’s Question Expertise teaches you what to look for. Spend enough years in law and you learn which facts matter and which ones probably do not. An engineer learns where a structure is likely to fail. A physician develops pattern recognition the rest of us simply do not have. An experienced contractor can walk […]
What Fell Through the Gap?
What Fell Through the Gap? By Joe Curcillo Some organizational problems are easy to understand. Someone made a mistake. A warning was ignored. The numbers were wrong. A deadline was missed. Somebody simply failed to do the job. The more interesting problems are the ones where nobody obviously did anything wrong. Finance ran the […]
The Expertise Is Already in the Room. The Connection Isn’t.
The Expertise Is Already in the Room. The Connection Isn’t. By Joe Curcillo Most organizations do not suffer from a shortage of expertise. They have plenty of it. Finance understands the numbers. Legal understands the exposure. Operations understands what it takes to get the work done. Engineering understands the system. Marketing understands perception. Human resources […]
Step Out of Your Lane Before It Becomes a Blind Spot
Step Out of Your Lane Before It Becomes a Blind Spot By Joe Curcillo Some people walk into a room and see the people. Others see the numbers, the agenda, the legal issue, the operational problem, or whatever their experience has trained them to notice. Every once in a while, someone sees something else. They […]
Happens Between the Lanes
The Most Important Work Happens Between the Lanes By Joe Curcillo “Stay in your lane” is usually offered as good advice. Know what you know. Do your job. Respect the expertise of the people around you. Don’t wander into areas where you don’t belong. There is wisdom in that. I don’t want an amateur second-guessing […]
You Don’t Just Have a Labor Shortage. You Have a Decision-Making Shortage.
The employees already there were not lazy. They had learned that making a decision created personal exposure, while passing the file to another desk did not. So the file moved. You Don’t Just Have a Labor Shortage. You Have a Decision-Making Shortage. I spent years in government watching agencies answer slow work with the same […]
The Plan Was Never the Point
Why the best-run associations are quietly loosening their grip on the five-year plan. Years ago, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones gave me a piece of advice I have never been able to shake. “The words are either in your heart,” he said, “or they’re not.” A few days later, I prepared to speak. My notes were finished. […]
Leadership Succession: A Title Transfers Overnight. Judgment Never Does.
Recently, a regional credit union trade association finished a national search that started back in March: a search firm, months of vetting, and finally a new chief executive who took the seat today, carrying more than thirty-five years in the credit union movement with him. Somewhere else, a construction firm is trying to solve […]