Impossible is temporary.

NOBL Academy is our library of practical tools and actionable advice to help you make real change right now, with your organization. Learn more about NOBL.

What to Do When a Leader Leaves

In the course of our change work, we’ll often see a leader leave an organization. Sometimes it’s because they simply don’t like the way the company is evolving (or the fact that the company is evolving at all), so they opt out. Sometimes it’s the client who realizes that the leader isn’t a good fit anymore, and needs to leave so the rest of the team can flourish. And yes, sometimes it’s a coincidence—a leader finds a better job during a time of change.

Digital Transformation Requires Cultural Change

Our clients often want to delay a change program because they want to first implement a new digital tool—they’ll deal with “people change” later. But the reality is that digital transformations don’t fail due to technology: 60% of organizations say that culture is the biggest barrier to digital transformation.

How to Balance Optimists and Pessimists on Your Team

In any team environment, it’s never just as straightforward as saying “yes” or “no” to a proposal—there’s a political aspect to being perceived as an optimist or pessimist.

When a Teammate Won’t Accept Your Praise

As leaders, we know acknowledging our employees for a job well done helps keep them motivated, especially in the face of ongoing change. Yet sometimes our compliments get a strange reception: the individual stammers or deflects, or worse, acts like they don’t even hear your words of praise!

How Apple’s Top 100 Meeting Rewards High Performers

You don’t need a luxury location and a security crew to host an event that your leadership team will look forward to attending. Instead, you can build excitement and anticipation by forming your own version of Apple’s Top 100 meeting. Create an occasion to recognize your leaders, to share your vision, and to foster loyalty with your top performers.

Social Debt: Why Culture Doesn’t Come Later

Business, any business, is just the commercialization of human relationships. Yes, you’re building a product, but you’re actually foremost building a group of people that can work together to produce a product.

The Four Types of People You’ll Meet When Implementing Change

Not everyone responds to change the same way. By understanding individuals’ openness to change, you can focus your efforts on the right people, and more rapidly win converts to your cause.

Working Through Conflict

While politics and personal differences will always exist, the reality is, most conflict at work is really driven by different interpretations of the shared situation: different priorities, different information, or different perspectives on the mission.

Preventing Factions from Flourishing at Work

Politics is a canary in a coal mine for organization design. If you sense people are spending more of their time on impression management than on carrying out the work, an intervention is critical.

The Downsides to Incentivizing Innovation

If you need continuous big, bold imaginative ideas to remain ahead of your competitors and in the good graces of your customers, do you need an equally big and bold incentive program for your employees?

Building Team Resilience

Change can be disruptive and uncomfortable, so it’s no wonder leaders often ask us how they can help their teams become more resilient. You might think the best way to get a resilient team is to select for resilient people—those who are strong or stoic or mindful, who laugh in the face of danger. But according to some of the most recent scholarly research, it’s better to think of team resilience as a dynamic property of the team as a whole.

Effective Leaders Learn and Teach at the Same Time

Effective leaders must steer into the uncomfortable feelings of teaching people things they themselves are just learning. Many of us hesitate to learn skills as we climb the ladder because we might be seen as ignorant or unexperienced, but the worst leader is a leader who thinks they are done learning.

How to Change a Habit

Organizational change can be mystifying, which is why people hire NOBL in the first place. But we’ll let you in on a little secret: organizational change is really just individual behavior change at scale. When lots of people choose to work differently, change is effortless and natural.

Empowering Middle Managers to Lead Change

Whether you report to one, manage one, or are one, the middle manager is often a thankless role within the organization. They have to deal with the “relentless and conflicting” influx of demands, serving as gatekeeper between senior and junior levels. And while they’re meant to have autonomy over their direct reports, they often get stuck enforcing decisions made by those above them.

Deputization Versus Delegation

As leaders, we are repeatedly told that we need to learn to delegate. And unsurprisingly most of us struggle with it. After all, we likely got our jobs because we were star performers that happily took on more work and responsibilities.

When a New Team Member Isn’t Working Out

Being thoughtful and deliberate with your new hire’s first 90 days on the job will make them that much more successful down the road. But if you’re already noticing some bumps, this is the time to have a frank conversation about your expectations, where they’re not delivering, and how you can help them get there.

How to Overcome Resistance to Your Vision

So you’ve created a vision for change and rolled it out to your team. People have agreed to it because you’re the boss, but when it comes to acting on it, they’re moving slower than molasses in January.

How to Overcome Your Overconfidence

Think about an upcoming deadline at work that you’re 90% certain you’ll hit on time, or a recent budget estimate that you’re 90% sure about. The likelihood that you’re right about either is actually closer to 50%. It’s not exactly the model of decisive leadership that we all like to envision as leaders of high-performing teams.

Confronting a Culture of “NO”

When we work with large enterprises, we sometimes confront cultures of “No.” Not the strategic “no”, not even the occasional “no”, but a reflexive “no.” An automatic and unconscious rejection of new ideas and new approaches.

So You Think You Want to Reorg

Recently, someone asked us a simple question with no simple answers: “How should you restructure a global organization?”