Welcome! My blog offers for practical leadership resources to help you build stronger, more productive, and more resilient teams.
Leadership is not innate. It’s a set of skills that, practiced daily, promote cooperative, steady focus on what matters most. Anyone can learn these skills with dedication and practice, even if you don’t hire a coach. These skills help good leaders diagnose and tamp down distractions. Using tactics that support these skills, they build a positive team culture where everyone feels respected and has the opportunity to grow. In this way, this skillset helps leaders inspire whole teams to collaborate and pursue even ambitious goals.
The articles here explore five core leadership skills that consistently drive results: Confidence, Empathy, Trust, Team Alignment & 1:1s, and Decision Making — plus how to motivate your team, find the right coach, and the research behind these skills — what researchers call emotional intelligence.
Browse the articles below to find quick tips, tactical techniques, case studies, and immediate solutions to common leadership challenges.
Not sure which leadership skills matter most for you right now? Take the FREE 3-minute Leadership Skills Audit.
Want more free leadership resources? Build these skills live at my free training, One-on-Ones that Motivate.
Jump to a Section for Your Leadership Resources
Confidence at Work
Confidence isn’t about asserting yourself or dominance. It’s about knowing your strengths, accepting your gaps, and leading from your values.
True confidence creates calm. It helps you listen under pressure, make clear decisions, and project steady leadership that earns respect and trust.
Start Building Confidence Here:
- How to Be a Confident Leader and Beat Imposter Syndrome — Confidence isn’t about knowing everything — it’s about self-regard, humility, and a steady leadership presence. Find practical ways to grow it here.
Related Solutions:
- How to Appear More Confident and Speak with Authority — Learn how to build real confidence from the inside. See why authenticity and authority without ego help build an effective leadership style.
- Fight, Flight, or Freeze: How to Recognize & Cope with Stress at Work — Stress is inevitable. Learn to recognize and disrupt your automatic stress response and find strategies for building a steady leadership presence in the workplace.
- Why Self-Regard is the Bedrock of Emotional Stability, Confidence, Trust, and Resilience. — Self-regard is the foundation of authentic leadership. Learn how accepting your strengths and your weaknesses builds confidence, trust, and resilience at work.
- Emotional Self-Awareness is the Strongest Predictor of Leadership Success — Building emotional self-awareness helps you motivate, influence, and get results from others. Learn how it works and how to build it here.
Find my latest posts on Confidence at Work here.
Empathy in Leadership
Teams disengage when they feel ignored or misunderstood—and they engage when they feel seen and heard.
Leaders create that connection by using empathy as a tactic. It’s not just about feeling empathetic, but showing empathy. When you understand and validate what others feel, you build respect, defuse defensiveness, and open the door to collaboration and performance.
Start Building Empathy in Leadership Here:
- Empathy in Leadership: Why It Matters and How to Practice It — Tactical empathy gets results. Learn how to use empathy to build trust, boost performance, and inspire teams to succeed.
Related Solutions:
- Validation in Leadership: The Most Important Way to Help People Grow at Work. Validation at work is one of the deepest human needs—and one of the most overlooked leadership skills. Nothing motivates people more than feeling seen, heard, and valued. Learn 5 ways to validate employees effectively.
- How to Encourage Your Team to Speak Up More — Learn how to build a culture that encourages your team to offer more information, better ideas, and effective collaboration.
Find all my posts on Empathy in Leadership here.
Trust at Work
Once you’ve built confidence and empathy, you’re ready to create trust—the foundation of every high-performing team. Without it, performance collapses into silos, fear, and politics.
Trust grows from respect and listening. Respect is the foundation, and listening is its most visible sign. When people trust you to treat them with fairness, gratitude, and consistency, collaboration replaces fear, and teams focus their energy on shared goals.
Explore leadership resources on how to build trust day-to-day, create psychological safety, and replace fear with focus and performance.
Start Building Trust Here:
- Trust at Work: The Most Important Way to Boost Team Performance — Cultures of trust don’t just correlate with results; they cause higher performance. When there is trust at work, information flows, collaboration rises, and execution speeds up. When fear and control seep in, office politics and self-protection rise—and performance drops.
Related Solutions:
- The Cycle of Trust and Mistrust: How the Expectations Effect Raises (or Lowers) Team Performance — Trust and performance move together, either up or down. Learn about the cycle of trust, spot signs of mistrust, and make four moves to restart positive momentum.
- What Is Psychological Safety and How Does it Improve Performance? — Psychological safety at work creates a culture of trust where mistakes become learning opportunities. Discover how it improves performance and drives innovation.
- How to Build Trust at Work: Five Everyday Actions — Build trust at work with repeatable habits, and watch your results rise.
- Respect at Work: The Most Important Key to High Performance — Respect at work is a pre-condition for building trust, self-esteem, and motivation. It’s essential to creating the conditions high-performance teams.
- There Are No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders — What does alignment look like and how does it work? Find out in this real life story of alignment in action.
Find all my posts on Trust at Work here.
Team Alignment & 1:1s
Signs of low performance like missed deadlines or incomplete goals usually aren’t “people problems,” they’re alignment problems. Alignment is how to maintain high standards and psychological safety for results that propel teams forward.
Build a team structure that drives focus, accountability, and momentum — even during times of disruption.
Start Building Team Alignment here:
- Team Alignment: How To Build Better Teams and Exceed Expectations — A complete guide demonstrating alignment in action. See how trust, confidence, empathy, quarterly goals, and weekly one-on-ones all work together to create teams that outperform expectations, deliver better long-term results, and turn disruptions into competitive advantages.
Related Solutions:
- How to Motivate Your Team: A Practical, Proven Framework — Understand how powerful intrinsic motivators work and how to assess your employees to find the most powerful motivators for your team.
- Emotional Self-Awareness is the Strongest Predictor of Leadership Success — Building emotional self-awareness helps you motivate, influence, and get results from others. Learn how it works and how to build it here.
- How to Encourage Your Team to Speak Up More — Want more innovation and engagement? Learn how to encourage your team to speak up at work by creating psychological safety and trust.
- How to Deal with an Employee Who Can’t Work with Others — Do you have a brilliant technical employee who can’t work with others? Find out how to help them get along and build the relationship skills they need.
Find all my posts on Team Alignment and one-on-ones here.
Ready to create alignment this quarter? Get more leadership resources live in my free workshop, One-on-Ones that Motivate.
Decision Making
Good decisions aren’t luck. They’re built through processes that ensure better input and take into account what could get in the way.
Learn how to gather better information, reduce bias, balance stakeholders, and decide faster—so solutions stick the first time.
Start Making Better Decisions Here:
- A Leadership Guide to Better Decision Making: How to Find the Right Balance to Choose Wisely – A complete guide to how to balance emotions, innovation, and urgency—and what gets in the way—to make better decisions.
Related Solutions:
- Why Decision Making Is an Emotional Intelligence Skill — Find out how emotions like bias, fear, passion, and others, get in the way of good decisions, and how to manage competing forces to make better decisions.
- How Do I Get My Team to Make Fewer Mistakes? — When someone makes a mistake, a leader’s response raises or lowers performance on the team. Discover the systems and habits that encourage learning and reduce future mistakes.
- The GOOD Model of Conversation: How to Coach Instead of Command — A guide to better thinking in 5–10 minutes. Use the GOOD model—Goals, Options, Obstacles, Do—to run coaching conversations, refocus 1:1s, and help people solve problems without micromanaging.
Find all my posts on Decision Making here.
Motivation at Work
Motivation at work comes when the leaders and team culture satisfy our deep human needs. Discover what truly drives people — the universal needs for safety, belonging, respect, and self-actualization — and learn how to diagnose what your team needs from you to thrive.
All the skills above—trust, empathy, respect, confidence, and alignment—come together here. When you meet your team’s deeper needs, motivation soars!
Start Here
- How to Motivate Your Team: A Practical, Proven Framework — A guide to the fundamental needs that drive human behavior. Learn how to diagnose what your team needs from you.
Related Solutions
- Unlock Better Performance with 5 Practical and Tactical Empathy Skills — Leaders who use practical, tactical empathy skills know that it unlocks people’s inner drive to succeed.
- Validation in Leadership: The Most Important Way to Help People Grow at Work — Validation is one of the most overlooked skills in leadership. Find out how it builds trust and performance.
- How to Help Your Team Take Ownership of Their Work — Getting your team to take ownership of their work seems like a simple idea, but getting it done can be harder than one might think.
- There Are No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders — Or, as I like to say it, for every problem, leadership is the solution. A story illustrating a truth about leadership.
Find a Coach
Coaching accelerates personal and career growth. Learn how to identify a coach who understands your goals and fits your style and budget.
Learn how to assess coaching types, vet credentials, compare approaches, and choose a coach with confidence.
Start here:
Related Posts in This Series
- Coaching vs Teaching vs Therapy — What Is Better for Me?
- What Business Coaching Is and Why It Works: The Proven Science That Helps Good Leaders Get Even Better
- If You Can’t Find a Good Mentor, Get a Great Coach: How We Really Learn at Work
- Executive Coaching vs Leadership Coaching: What Is Better for Me?
Leadership Resources for Emotional Intelligence
These are the research-backed skills beneath great leadership — the engines behind trust, confidence, empathy, alignment, and decision making.
Learn to stop being emotional and instead, use emotional information strategically to build motivated teams, make better decisions, and lead more effectively.
Start Here for Leadership Resources on Emotional Intelligence:
- Which Emotional Intelligence Skills Drive High Performance? — A guide to the five emotional intelligence skills that support good leadership skills across the board.
Related Solutions:
- Why Self-Regard is the Bedrock of Emotional Stability, Confidence, Trust, and Resilience. — Self-regard is the foundation of authentic leadership. Learn how accepting your strengths and your weaknesses builds confidence, trust, and resilience at work.
- Emotional Self-Awareness is the Strongest Predictor of Leadership Success — Building emotional self-awareness helps you motivate, influence, and get results from others. Learn how it works and how to build it here.
- Five Ways Emotional Self-Expression Helps Motivate Your Team — Too little emotional self-expression makes you weak, and too much makes you oppressive, aggressive, or unacceptable. Learning how to express your emotions just right to increase motivation and engagement.
- Empathy in Leadership: Why It Matters and How to Practice It — Tactical empathy gets results. Learn how to use empathy to build trust, boost performance, and inspire teams to succeed.
- Why Decision Making Is an Emotional Intelligence Skill — Find out how emotions like bias, fear, passion, and others, get in the way of good decisions, and how to manage competing forces to make better decisions.
Find all posts on Emotional Intelligence here.
Get Started with More Leadership Resources
Leadership isn’t something you’re born with. It’s a set of daily skills you can practice. Use this hub to get started. Explore solutions to your biggest challenges and grow your impact over time.
Not sure where to start? Take my leadership quiz to find your top growth area.
Ready for more free leadership resources? Join One-on-Ones that Motivate for live practice.
Questions or need help choosing a starting point? Email me: lisa@lisadfostercoach.com
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