Why People Question Your Best Answers

People will question your best answers if they’re afraid you don’t understand their problems. Even when you have the best solutions, and you know exactly how to make things run right, people often resist. Nobody argues, exactly. They just get quiet. Side issues come up. So do excuses for delay. The meeting ends with “let’s […]

When Your Job Changes but Your Title Doesn’t

What do you do when your job changes and nobody announces it? When your company is in a growth phase, change happens organically. A team of 12 becomes a team of 40. The departments you used to walk over to are on another floor now, or in another time zone. Your title is the same. […]

Feedback You Can’t Shake: What It Means When You Keep Hearing the Same Thing

Getting the same feedback at work is one of the hardest things to shake. It shows up in your review. You work on it. A year later it’s back, in slightly different words. “Needs more executive presence.” “Could be more strategic.” “Needs to work on speaking up more.” “Needs to work on listening more.” You […]

Feedforward Instead of Feedback: A Better Way to Help Your Team Improve

Instead of feedback, try feedforward to get better results, even when the message itself is just as tough. Feedforward instead of feedback is one of the simplest shifts you can make as a leader, and one of the least used. Feedback looks backward — it tells someone what went wrong after it’s already happened. Feedforward […]

Five Moments That Tell You It’s Time to Get Help With Your Leadership

Signs you need a leadership coach often show up at the end of the year. Most leaders don’t look for help because things are falling apart. They look for help because something shifted: a new role, a new boss, a piece of feedback that won’t leave them alone. The way they’ve always led stopped working […]

Check Out My New Website at Lisadfostercoach.com

If you’ve visited lisadfostercoach.com recently, you may have noticed something different — I’ve just launched a new version of the site. Nothing about why I do this work has changed. What’s changed is how easy it is to actually find your way around it. The old site had grown the way most sites do after […]

Confidence After a Setback: What Being (Almost) Fired Taught Me

Have you ever built more confidence after a setback than you ever built by playing it safe? Confidence after a setback doesn’t usually feel like confidence while it’s happening. It feels like the floor dropping out. It’s less about what just happened, and more about what you next that matters. I found that out the […]

Fight, Flight, or Freeze: What’s Your Stress Response at Work?

Does your stress response at work follow the same pattern every time something gets tense? Most of us have a default stress response at work — a pattern we fall into under pressure before we’ve had a chance to think it through. I recently watched three people respond to the exact same workplace conflict in […]

Good Leadership Starts With Confidence, Not Certainty

Leading with confidence has less to do with having the right answer than with how you handle the moment before you answer someone. Leading with confidence isn’t a personality trait, and it isn’t the same thing as always knowing what to do. It’s the ability to manage your own reaction first — so you’re actually […]