Dr. Steve Conway’s Blog
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Is It My Job or Is It Me?
At some point, many successful leaders and professionals face the subtle, unexpected signs of career burnout and find themselves asking a question they never thought they’d ask: “Is it my job, or is it me? The question rarely emerges at the beginning of a career. More often, it appears after years…
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The Promotion That Makes People Miserable
Most professionals spend a significant portion of their careers pursuing greater responsibility, unaware of the hidden challenges of moving into a leadership role.. From the beginning, the path appears relatively straightforward. Develop expertise, perform well, build credibility, and opportunities will follow. Promotions are generally viewed as evidence that things are moving…
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When Leaders Stop Being Challenged By Those Around Them
One of the realities and major challenges of senior leadership is that the higher people rise within organizations, the fewer people seem willing to disagree with them. This rarely happens because leaders become more intelligent, more insightful, or somehow immune to mistakes. If anything, the opposite is often true. As responsibility…
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Why Smart Leaders Become Reactive Under Pressure
Most leaders do not wake up one morning and decide to become impatient, frustrated, or difficult to work with. In fact, many of the leaders I work with are thoughtful people who care deeply about their teams, their organizations, and the responsibilities they carry—yet they are fundamentally exposed to an unprecedented…
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When Your Team Stops Telling You the Truth
One of the more common surprises leaders experience is discovering that other people have known about a problem long before they did. An employee resigns unexpectedly, a project begins struggling, and a leader is left wondering why employees don’t speak up before frustrations surface out of nowhere. Concerns emerge that the…
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Why Soft Skills Are Often the Hardest Skills to Learn
Most leaders can think of at least one highly intelligent person whose technical expertise was unquestioned but whose leadership created problems wherever they went. This common failure pattern perfectly illustrates why soft skills are important for leaders. They may have been a brilliant engineer who struggled to communicate with people outside…
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Why Emotional Intelligence Matters More Than Most Leaders Think
For a long time, emotional intelligence sat somewhere in the background of leadership conversations. It was often treated as a useful addition rather than something central, the kind of capability that might help with people leadership but wasn’t seen as essential alongside strategy, execution, or technical expertise. That view has been…
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Why Leadership Can Feel Surprisingly Lonely
Leadership is not usually associated with loneliness. From the outside, it can look like the opposite. Leaders are in constant conversation, surrounded by colleagues, involved in decisions that shape the direction of teams and organizations. There is no shortage of interaction. And yet, many leaders describe something quite different once they…
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Why Coaching Is Often Structured as a Package
A coaching relationship is not transactional, even though it can sometimes look that way from the outside. You meet, you talk, you leave with something to think about or act on. On the surface, it can resemble a series of discrete conversations. In practice, it tends to be something that develops…
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When Leadership Burnout Creeps In
Leadership burnout rarely begins with a dramatic moment. It does not usually arrive in a way that is obvious or easy to name. More often, it develops gradually and almost quietly, which is part of what makes it so difficult to recognize while it is happening. Most people who step into…
