My client was mad. I could read the body language in the room, and it was not good. It was plain to see she’d been hurt deeply by some unspoken slight from one of her team members. The two of them were sitting there with their arms crossed, facing away from each other. The rest of the team was fidgeting or wriggling in their chairs and not looking at anyone.

It was obvious there was an elephant in the room that all seven of them knew about, but were refusing to acknowledge. Knowing that a healthy team is critical for our success, I called out the issue.

Did you know that the most important part of your annual planning session isn't planning? If you're like many companies, your leadership team skips the most critical component of your annual planning. And it negatively impacts your team's creativity and goal setting for the coming year.

Business leaders of entrepreneurial companies are so hard-charging, so busy, and so overwhelmed, that they tend to see only the gaps ahead of them. These are the goals, ideals, and accomplishments they haven't reached yet. When you're feeling overworked from the previous year and start looking at all the gaps you have yet to cover, it can put you into the wrong frame of mind for moving forward.

As entrepreneurs, sometimes we can be our own worst enemies. We can get easily bored, leaving us with a need to “stir things up” to make things exciting again. For me, this stems from an intense desire to make things better. Whatever the motivation, this need for change and excitement can cause a crisis in our business.

What do you say when one of your team members asks you to keep something confidential? There’s a dangerous workplace situation that all leaders and managers find themselves drawn into from time to time. I call it the “confidential complaint” trap.

This happens to me when I’m working with leadership teams. Someone will stop me in the hall during a break and say, “May I talk to you for a minute, NOT in the room with the group?”

There’s a natural inclination to say yes to this kind of request. As leaders, we all want to be approachable. We may also want to find out what’s going on inside our organization. But promising blanket confidentiality for run-of-the-mill complaints can be a dangerous slope because it is diametrically opposed to creating a healthy workplace culture.

One of my clients was chomping at the bit to document their core processes – especially their HR process. They were a family-owned business and their turnover was holding back their profitability. They believed a robust HR process would reduce turnover and help increase profits.

So I taught them the three-step EOS^® method to document their process. They created a rock for it, and got to work. But there were problems.