Leadership at 32,000 Feet: Why Putting on Your Own Oxygen Mask First is the Smart Move

Drawing inspiration from the aviation industry’s principle of securing one’s oxygen mask before assisting others during an emergency, we look into how this principle can be applied to leadership. The emphasis is on the importance of self-care in leadership, including mental health awareness, setting an example, making sound decisions, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

The Team We Need vs. the Team We Deserve: Closing the Gap Between the Two

foosball table shallow focus photography

In the quest to assemble the team we need, do we often get the team we deserve instead? They should be one and the same, yet that’s barely ever the case in practice. We want—and need—our employees to be engaged, curious, collaborative, knowledgeable, proactive, daring, and with a mindset of learning and growing. We’ve also been trained to seek out and recruit for these qualities, however accurate a recruiting process can be. And then we expect team members, new and old, to act and live up to the potential we’ve seen in them. Things get tricky when that doesn’t happen, and we’re left wondering what went wrong.