We’ve proven we can work from anywhere. You can run a business, buy groceries, and order lunch, all without ever looking another human in the eyes. But something’s missing – HUMAN CONNECTION. Eye contact, unplanned conversations, the “got a sec?” chats that spark big ideas.

Let’s be real: human connection drives performance.

Face-to-face conversations – without the filter of a screen – promote collaboration, innovation, and trust.

• MIT research shows that in-person interaction drives team creativity up by 15%.
• Harvard Business Review found that companies with a strong human connection outperform peers by 20%.
• Body language, facial expressions, and personal stories – these shape dialogue in a way video never will.

This isn’t about going back to the office 5 days a week. It’s about making real connections a strategic priority:

• Sync in-office days so teams are together, not just online at the same time.
• Prioritize leaders’ time to coach, mentor, and model real collaboration.
• Redesign meetings to spark dialogue, not just share updates.
• Use office time for “connection ROI” – relationship-building that fuels results.
• Build rituals that bring people together – Monday huddles, Thursday coffees, Friday reflections.

Now is the time to turn ideas into action. At PeopleThink, we help you reignite connection, collaboration, and purpose in the workplace. Explore our Team Tune-Up and Keep It Real Leadership programs that are designed to cultivate more engaged, high-performing teams.

Till the next time, keep it real.

Karen

The post Human Connection: The Workplace Advantage That Still Matters Most appeared first on PeopleThink.

Let’s face it — no one stays in the same seat forever. Leaders retire, move on, or sometimes make a sudden career change that surprises everyone. That’s where succession planning comes in. 

A smart, forward-thinking succession plan ensures that when someone steps down, someone else is ready to step up — without missing a beat. It keeps the momentum going, protects hard-earned progress, and sends a strong message to your team: We believe in growing from within.

Done well, succession planning ensures your organization is prepared — not just to survive leadership transitions, but to thrive through them. It helps you retain top talent, allocate development resources efficiently, and demonstrate a commitment to long-term growth.

Here are the four key steps for succession planning:

• Identify critical roles and competencies : Go beyond titles and think about impact. Which roles are essential to your organization’s success? What technical skills and leadership behaviors are necessary to thrive in those positions? Clarifying these competencies helps you define the kind of leadership your organization needs to succeed.
• Create targeted development plans : Once you’ve identified high-potential individuals, tailor growth opportunities to bridge their current capabilities with future leadership needs. This can include mentorship, cross-functional projects, leadership coaching, or stretch assignments. Aligning development plans with both individual career aspirations and organizational goals boosts motivation and ensures your bench strength is both deep and strategic.
• Communicate transparently : Letting team members know they’re being considered for future leadership isn’t just a morale booster — it’s a retention strategy. When employees feel seen and supported, they’re more likely to stay engaged and committed. Encourage open dialogue about career paths, readiness expectations, and the timelines for progression. Transparency builds a culture of trust and clarity.
• Track progress and refine your approach : Effective succession planning is dynamic, not static. Regularly revisit your plans, check in on development goals, and adjust based on performance, feedback, and evolving business needs. Use measurable outcomes — such as readiness assessments, promotion rates, or engagement surveys — to gauge effectiveness.

Companies that prioritize this work today will be better positioned to lead tomorrow. Leadership transitions aren’t a matter of if, but a matter of when.

If your organization is ready to take the next step in building a resilient leadership pipeline, explore PeopleThink’s Keep it Real Leadership Program. It’s designed to help you identify and grow the leaders of tomorrow—today. Let’s future-proof your team together.

Till the next time, keep it real.

Karen

The post Who’s Next? Why Succession Planning Deserves a Seat at the Table appeared first on PeopleThink.

Steve Jobs famously told graduates in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

“You’ve got to find what you love. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle!”

That quote has fueled an entire generation’s obsession with chasing their “one true passion.” But in 2025, let’s be real—does that mean you should drop everything, ignore practical needs (like rent, food, and personal growth), and hold out for a career that magically fulfills your soul?

Not according to research. Studies suggest that developing your passion(s) is far more important than relentlessly searching for a single “calling.” When we pin our entire sense of purpose on one thing, we risk feeling lost when that thing changes—or doesn’t pan out the way we hoped.

In other words, life isn’t a straight path—it’s a series of possibilities.

Author Cleo Wade put it best in her TED talk:

“Why are we putting the pressure on ourselves to have one purpose or one passion?”

Your 9-to-5 job doesn’t have to define you. It can—but it doesn’t have to be the sole source of purpose or joy in your life. Sometimes, a job is simply how you pay the bills, and that’s absolutely okay.

So here’s the truth: You can like what you do—maybe even love what you do —without sacrificing the rest of your life. You can have multiple passions, and your career is just one piece of the puzzle.

Want to explore how to find joy in ALL areas of your life? Check out my podcast, Passion and Work – Is It Possible?, for a simple exercise to help you do just that.

Till the next time, keep it real.

Karen

The post Can Passion and Work Truly Coexist? appeared first on PeopleThink.

The effects of this are becoming more obvious. According to recent research from Josh Bersin (November 2023), only 17% of companies have a solid leadership succession plan, and just 15% are addressing leader burnout. 

These facts are much too low!!!

Understandably, CEOs and CHROs have been focused on more immediate challenges, from sustaining the business, labor shortages, employee burnout and building efficient hybrid work models. In doing so, they’ve let leadership development dry up, creating a void at the top with no leadership bench strength to fill the gaps. 

This leadership drought is having a ripple effect. Without strong leadership, companies are struggling to attract, retain, and nurture talent. Companies without a pipeline of well-prepared leaders face challenges in:

• Developing a clear strategic direction
• Ensuring sustainable growth
• Fostering a thriving company culture
• Enhancing employee engagement
• Driving innovation

As we navigate this post-pandemic landscape, organizations must recognize the importance of investing in leadership development. This isn’t just about preparing future executives—it’s about creating a culture of learning, resilience, and adaptability. By doing so, companies can turn this leadership desert into an oasis of innovation, growth, and future success.

The desert we’re in may seem vast, but with the Keep It Real Leadership Program, your organization will cultivate leadership that drives sustainable growth. Contact us today so we can talk leadership and get your organization set up for success!

Till the next time, keep it real.

Karen

The post Navigating the Leadership Desert: Why Development Can’t Wait! appeared first on PeopleThink.

The goal is to find individuals with the right mindset, work ethic, and potential to learn and grow within the organization. So, when hiring, look for the right attitude because that will help create a positive work environment and overall organizational success. Once onboarded, you can invest in your team’s training and development to equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel in their roles.

This approach has several advantages:

• Cultural Fit: Candidates with the right attitude and values are more likely to align with the company’s culture and contribute positively to the work environment.
• Adaptability: Individuals with a strong learning mindset are often more adaptable and can acquire new skills and knowledge quickly as the business landscape evolves.
• Long-Term Potential: Hiring based on attitude can lead to long-term employee retention, as these individuals are likely to be motivated, engaged, and committed to personal and professional growth within the organization.

Here are a few tips on how to adjust your hiring strategy:

1. Rethink how you develop job descriptions and attract the right people for the positions within our organizations. Include the soft skills that will help the candidate succeed in the role, in addition to the technical skills.
2. In the interview process, train your hiring managers to ask well-thought-out behavioral questions to determine whether the candidate has the personal qualities and interpersonal skills needed for the job and to be a contributing team member.
3. Create a culture where the “soft skills” are valued as much or more than the “hard skills.” Review your learning and development strategy to ensure employees have opportunities to build their capabilities in problem-solving, innovation, emotional intelligence, and other competencies that will help them succeed. Promote people to leadership roles that demonstrate the personal qualities that will set the bar for the organization in creating the workforce for the future.

When implementing this philosophy, it’s essential to have a robust training and development program in place to ensure that employees have access to the resources and support they need to acquire the skills and knowledge required for their roles. Remember to strike a balance between attitude and necessary skills. Some roles may require a certain level of expertise or technical proficiency that cannot be easily trained from scratch and, therefore, still need employers to check for skill levels.

Lastly, with PeopleThink’s Keep It Real Leadership program, you can access the right leadership training! Ongoing feedback and coaching will help nurture the desired attitudes and behaviors within the organization.

Till the next time, keep it real.

Karen

The post Hire for Attitude! appeared first on PeopleThink.

Company culture plays a key role in retaining employees. A great culture, one that provides challenging work, opportunities for growth, connections, respect, and recognition is more likely to retain employees than the one that takes it for granted.

Nowadays with hybrid and fully-remote workspaces, establishing a strong culture can be a little challenging. Many employees who have been hired in the past three years have never met their co-workers or even their leader in person. They might be feeling adrift or disconnected.

How can leaders help employees be connected and engaged and become part of their company’s culture?

Develop a clear and consistent definition of the culture. A great culture is more than after-work events (in person or zoom), wellness programs, and catchy slogans. It’s how employees, customers and the outside world perceive an organization based on its attitudes and behaviors. It’s where employees feel valued, connected, challenged, and recognized. And it stems from leadership behavior at all organizational levels.

Communicate the culture. Make it easy to describe. Make it real. Do a periodic check-up to ensure that all parts of your culture are healthy and if not, review, adjust and get back on track. Every new hire (including remote ones) should receive an orientation that includes a discussion about company culture, vision, mission, and values. Consider having long-term (positive) employees/leaders describe the culture and give examples of how they’ve seen it demonstrated in their experience.

Demonstrate the culture. Make it an expectation that all interactions leader-leader, leader-employee, employee-employee align with the company values and promote the culture. Give new hires a strong start by helping them understand how their role contributes to the overall success of their team and the organization.

And last, but certainly not least, remember that it’s about the PEOPLE, PEOPLE, PEOPLE. Hiring the brightest and the best does you no good if you don’t take care of them. Be clear about their roles and responsibilities. Help them understand the values and the culture. Keep developing them, provide them with new challenges, and develop a work environment where every level of the organization is valued, connected, challenged, and recognized.

If you would like to learn more about how you can build a culture to attract, develop, and retain your top talent, join me for my next Leadership Power Hour webinar. You can register here for free.

Till the next time, keep it real.

Karen

The post Building A Great Culture – Winning from Within appeared first on PeopleThink.

TEN TIPS ON HOW TO RECEIVE FEEDBACK WELL:

1. Ask for it.  Asking others for feedback does a number of things: first, it puts the ball in your court about when you receive feedback and what you get feedback on.  Second, it lets people know that you are interested in improving, which can build a close and more connected relationship.  Third, it allows you to get feedback in bite-sized increments, which is often more appealing.

2. Get it often.  Don’t wait till your annual review to find out how your boss thinks you’re doing.  Don’t wait till ‘never’ to find out what your colleagues think about working with you. Make it a habit to check in with people frequently.  This again allows you to get feedback in small doses, and frequently more specific feedback if you ask about performance on a particular project rather than your overall performance over the past quarter.

3. Ask the hard people. The people that are easiest to ask are usually the ones we naturally ‘sync’ with best, so they’re the ones most likely to give positive feedback with little room for growth. But also ask the people you don’t get along with.  They will have feedback for you that’s on your growing edge.  The bonus is that the very act of asking them may bring you closer together!

4. Listen fully.  When someone is generous enough to provide feedback, make sure you listen carefully to what they have to say, even if there’s a voice inside screaming “but that’s not what I meant!” or “I do NOT do that!”  If you get defensive or argue with their feedback once you’ve asked for it, you can bet they won’t be so generous as to offer you honest feedback in the future!  Breathe, take notes and keep listening.

5. Ask questions.  Make sure you fully understand what they mean.  Be curious about what would have had something go better or what alternative they’d like to see.  You may not take them up on their suggestions, but it will help you understand the direction of their comments.

6. Know it’s not about you.  Of course, it is about you, but it’s about your behavior, your attitude or your words.  Whatever they say does not alter the beautiful human being that you are.  It’s just stuff: things that you can alter.  Make sure you’re in touch with your spiritual side, or your higher self, or whatever grounds you when you ask for feedback so you can keep perspective.

7. Handle your emotions offline.  If you do have an emotional reaction to something someone says, make sure you handle your reaction elsewhere. If you start to have a reaction in front of them it’s fine to say “wow, that’s surprising” or even “wow, that hurts” as long as you also thank them for their candor and tell them how much you appreciate it.  If they had the courage to tell you something hard to say or hear, you owe them gratitude for their courage and candor.  Your emotional reaction is yours to handle separately.  Make sure you do handle it!  Cry to your spouse, scream in a pillow, or lift weights till your arms hurt.  You must get that response OUT in order to address any of the items of feedback with perspective and power.

8. Take what you like and leave the rest.  You can’t address or work on anything if it’s not something you are willing to empower.  In other words, if someone says you speak too much in meetings but after looking at it, you decide that’s not feedback you want to work on, then fine, leave that feedback out of your development plan and your life.  Maybe you’ll come back to it later, but if you’re not ready to work on it, pretending to or trying to because you “should” won’t stick. One note here: there is always likely to be feedback you don’t agree with right off the bat. Of course!  So pay extra attention to the comments you think are way off base – there’s likely gold in them!

9. Take action.  Awareness is useless without action. Create a plan to address the feedback you want to take on, and make sure you do it (get a coach or accountability partner if it helps!)

10. Circle back.  Nothing says “I heard you” better than hearing the feedback, working on the items someone mentioned and then circling back with them to see how it’s going from their perspective. You will establish trust and support in those relationships in addition to getting additional feedback!

Join my Keep It Real (KIR) Leadership Development Program where I go further in depth of each step. In the KIR leadership program – together we will work through real-time, practical applications to better prepare you and strengthen leadership skills.

Till next time,

Karen

The post Accepting Feedback As a Leader appeared first on PeopleThink.

Between 2007 and 2016 the number of women-owned businesses in the US increased by 45%, according to a report commissioned by American Express. Compare this to just a 9% increase in all businesses during the same time period. The 11.3 million women-owned businesses in the US employ nearly 9 million people, and generate more than $1.6 trillion in revenues. Since 2007, employment in women-owned businesses has increased by 18%. Employment among all businesses, on the other hand, has declined by 1%. We women are pretty amazing!

Not only that, women entrepreneurs are happier. According to a 2013 report on global entrepreneurship, American women entrepreneurs “rank their well-being higher than other women in the US, higher than women entrepreneurs in other countries, and higher than men.”

Yet here’s the startling reality. Despite the fact that over the past 10 years the number of women-owned businesses has grown at 5 times the national average, only 4% of venture capital goes to women. Only 19% of business news content mentions firms led by women.

Most of us who go into business for ourselves do so because we want to pursue our area of expertise without the constraints of corporate ladders and company politics. We want to be more in control of our time and our future. What we discover, though, is that in addition to pursuing our strength, we also need to manage other parts of the business that may not be a strength (or that we just don’t like doing) e.g., the finances, business planning/strategy, marketing, selling, record keeping, HR, etc. Getting to that position where you can afford to hire others to do those things while you focus on your strength is one of the biggest challenges of entrepreneurship.

The good news is, you don’t have to figure this out on your own. This is where women supporting other women comes in. If you are a woman planning to start a business, wanting to grow your business, or feeling you need to make some changes in your business, here are some tips for moving forward.

Start your own personal Board of Directors. Gather a small group of other women entrepreneurs who will commit to meeting on a regular basis to share ideas, discuss strategy, give feedback (and yes, hold each other accountable!) Need help getting started? My personal Board and I have a “how to” book coming out soon: The AdviseHERy Board. We’ll announce publication on Facebook (like PeopleThink to be in the know!)

Find a mentor. Think about someone you know through your personal or professional network who is farther along in their business, and whom you admire. Invite them to coffee to seek their advice on a particular topic and to explore whether a mentoring relationship would be a mutual fit.

Leverage available resources. The Small Business Administration has lots of information and tutorials about starting a business and also offers business loans. Also, SCORE, a nonprofit organization that offers workshops and business advice for entrepreneurs, has chapters all over the country.

Join a women’s entrepreneurial group. Network with other women entrepreneurs, in groups like SheEO World, Watermark, Astra – Women’s Business Alliance, and NAWBO. Also, check your local Chamber of Commerce to see whether they have a women’s networking group.

Stay focused and ignore the naysayers! Yes, there are a variety of challenges in starting and running your own business, and…the rewards are so worth it! Just. Keep. Going.

And remember as you navigate the entrepreneurial landscape to turn around and help the women coming behind you. Women supporting women. Just as it oughta be.

“If you get, give. If you learn, teach.” – Maya Angelou

Till next time,

Karen

The post Women Entrepreneurs – We Rock! appeared first on PeopleThink.