Four Leadership Lessons That Changed How I Lead This Week
Or: practical insights on communication, adaptability, transparency, and feedback to supercharge your leadership skills.
Leadership isn’t theory: it’s practice. This article shares four real-world lessons learned during a high-pressure week: clear communication, adaptability, transparency, and feedback culture.
Clear communication prevents chaos
Adaptability is a leadership superpower
Transparency builds credibility
Culture starts with feedback
Each bite-sized insight includes a simple action plan I’m taking for the coming week, and can help leaders and new managers turn insights into habits that build trust, resilience, and team success.
1. Clear communication prevents chaos
One of my projects is starting to get attention from senior management, so there’s a lot of activity leading up to the MVP launch. One team member brought up a potential showstopper; and my response was “Bring it up in the next daily.”
This quickly aligned everyone and helped avoid knee-jerk reactions that could have derailed the project.
Reflecting on this, the lesson I picked out: Leadership means anticipating confusion and addressing it before it escalates.
How to apply next week: prepare a standard message format to align my teams on what’s most important for their projects this week. Focus on risks and potential confusion-causing things.
✨ Bonus tip: use an AI tool to scan my emails from the past week about those projects, to make sure I don’t drop the ball on anything!
2. Adaptability is a leadership superpower
One of my team members was looking forward to present their initiative in an upcoming global department townhall. At the last minute, the agenda filled up with a few other pressing topics.
We quickly met up and discussed this; rather than looking at it as a missed opportunity, we reframed it as a chance to refine and polish the solution for a retimed demo later this year.
This piece of quick thinking helped me: Leaders turn constraints into advantages instead of dwelling on setbacks.
How to apply next week: pick one project that has tight constraints, and do a quick 15-minute brainstorming session on how to turn those limitations into creative solutions.
3. Transparency builds credibility
This was another bad week for those dependent on cloud providers; the Azure outage ruffled a lot of feathers.
One silver lining: I noticed how openly sharing status updates - even when the news wasn’t good! - helped keep trust intact.
And as a leader, I need to remember to model that same transparency when things go wrong. No matter how painful it is.
How to apply next week: share a weekly update with the team about wins and challenges. Be candid about what’s not working, and invite ideas for improvement from the team.
✨ Bonus tip: use an AI tool to suggest something that’s bite-sized and “snackable” so that it doesn’t overload the team!
4. Culture starts with feedback
An internal memo from the President touched on many important topics for us. But I noticed a strong focus on feedback, and not just because we’re heading into that time of year for performance evaluations.
Reflecting back on the past 6 months, I picked out moments where I received good feedback that helped me do better. It echoed what the memo covers: Encouraging honest conversations about what works and what doesn’t helps teams evolve faster.
How to apply next week: Make feedback a strong cultural pillar for the team! Revisit the current 1-to-1 format that I have with them, and see if there’s any opportunity to improve the structure in the context of giving/receiving feedback.
✨ Bonus tip: explain the current format to an AI tool, and ask for feedback(!) on what I might not have considered.
That’s it for this week, thank you for reading 🙏🏻🙌🏻❤️