The Leadership Pipeline
Knowledge Center for Managers
Stage 1: Developing a Leader’s Mindset
This stage deals with who the manager is, before any action: self-perception, limiting beliefs, managerial identity, courage, authenticity, values and professional meaning.
To the full guide on developing a leader’s mindset →
- Leadership Identity & Limiting Beliefs 30
- Career Progression & Role Transitions 11
- Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty 2
- AI & the Future of Work 1
- Entrepreneurship & Founder Support 1
Leadership Identity & Limiting Beliefs
Writer's Block That Is Really an Identity Gap
Started writing 12 posts in two weeks and finished none. Instead of blaming the heat and August, Ronen sees that the knowledge and ideas were there, but he was not. He compares it to a manager who knew exactly how to hold an expectations conversation and simply never held it. The conclusion: the gap between knowing and doing almost never comes from missing knowledge, but from an inner perception that runs behavior.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Most Leadership Problems Are Identity Gaps
A short post linking to an article, opening with its positioning line: most leadership problems look like skill gaps, and they are not, they are identity gaps. The article covers three points: releasing dissonance and burnout by identifying and closing the identity gap, building quiet authority instead of imitating foreign management styles, and building psychological safety in the team through authentic communication.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Five Myths About Impostor Syndrome
70% of people will experience impostor syndrome at some point in their lives (research by Orbé-Austin), and the higher you climb, the louder the inner voice gets, because the stakes, responsibility and visibility grow. Everyone who heard the number reacted with 'only 70%?'. The post defines the syndrome and cites a finding that a structured 14-week intervention reduces symptoms by about 30%.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Managerial Courage and May the 4th
A video post, written in the feminine voice. Managerial courage begins exactly where the comfort zone ends, when there is vulnerability and a real risk of failing. The Force, in the Star Wars metaphor, is the belief that you can handle the consequences. It does not appear on a résumé or in a performance review, yet it is easy to spot managers who have no access to it. Draws on Brené Brown and closes by recommending practice on small tasks instead of waiting for the big moment.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Impostor Syndrome
Opens with the familiar inner voices ('they will soon find me out', 'I am not really good enough', 'I am not one of them'). Defines impostor syndrome as people with proven achievements who are convinced their success came from luck or from fooling others. Cites a finding that 80% of people feel this to varying degrees, and that women, under-represented groups and newly promoted managers are more vulnerable. Rejects the idea that it is an inner feeling with no functional consequences and recommends coaching that offers an external reality check.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Maybe I'm Not Cut Out to Be a Manager
Every manager who hits a wall, whether negative feedback or a missed target, gets stuck because of a limiting belief, which sometimes even prevents them from acquiring new skills. The belief: 'I cannot act like the ideal manager', that mythical figure who always knows what to do, decides in a split second and is assertive and charismatic. The claim: this belief is dangerous because it frees the manager from responsibility. The post ends with a small step: in the next meeting, ask one question out of a wish to empower the team, not out of fear that someone knows better than you.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Emotional Intelligence Is Not an Innate Trait
Forbes named emotional intelligence one of the five critical skills for 2026, yet most managers do nothing to improve it because of a stubborn myth that it is innate, a magic ability some were born with while the rest are doomed to stay technocrats. Ronen traces part of the source of the belief to the Hebrew language itself. The counter-argument: nobody is bad at every component of emotional intelligence, people are strong in some and weak in others, so a focused development plan is possible and effective.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Dilemmas No Management Course Teaches
There is a managerial difficulty nobody talks about, and you discover it when you start sitting in executive meetings and board meetings: dilemmas at the junction of commitment to the organization, commitment to the team and the professional values that guide you. The concrete example: a quarterly forecast that demands cuts, a decision to let go of the top earners rather than the weaker employees, and keeping it secret for three weeks. The claim: managers do not struggle because of the pressure, but because every time they must decide anew who they are in the situation, inside a system with its own expectations.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When I Went Full Boomer on Two Young Founders
Ronen works with two young founders who finished meaningful military service, both brilliant and hungry, and both jumped between topics, went back, and changed direction just before reaching the finish. Every article about the uncommitted Gen Z found confirmation in his reality, including a line from a manager he coached ('they just want it to be interesting and over, preferably by noon'). But it did not fit their skills, and the situation challenged him; at the peak of each project the picture flipped. From there the post moves to fixed perceptions that hold back managerial development.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Executive Presence Is Not Charisma
Executive presence is defined here as the ability to read a situation quickly and act well under pressure, not as modeling power and aesthetic perfection. Ronen admits he does not like the term and has been looking for another definition for a while. He describes the common image (a tall man with a deep voice who walks in and the room goes quiet, never stressed, never in doubt) as one that creates stuckness in real managers. Instead he presents presence as a skill set that can be developed, and asks where your pocket collapses: in delegating authority or in managing conflict.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When There Is No Excitement at the Airport
A personal post that begins with the excitement everyone feels walking into an airport, and the admission that it does not excite him because it feels like just another workday. The background: he worked almost nine years in airport security, even as a teenager as a baggage handler, and today coaches managers at the Airports Authority, which feels like coming home. From this reversal he identifies blurred boundaries between personal and professional identity, argues that healthy distance allows cleaner decisions and emotional stability, and calls for developing mental flexibility and a sense of worth that does not depend on the role.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The "Failed" Meeting That Wasn't a Failure
A client arrived disappointed after a failed meeting with an important customer they had prepared for together. When asked 'failed?', it turned out the problems were technical: the meeting was cut short and the customer asked for materials in Hebrew instead of English. Ronen offers a different reading: the customer asked for another meeting, which means they saw something important enough here, and the Hebrew preference shows that her fear about her English was unnecessary. He stresses this is not cheap advice to whistle and look at the bright side, but determined work of stopping, deciding and phrasing a new interpretation, because interpretation determines not only the experience but also the course of action.
Read the post on LinkedIn →There Is No Hack for Becoming an Outstanding Manager
The claim: you cannot imitate others and call it your way to become a legendary manager. Nobody can imitate Steve Jobs micromanaging every aspect of Apple's design, manage like NVIDIA's CEO with no one-on-one meetings, or copy Jeff Bezos's ban on slide decks and the silent reading of a six-page memo at the start of every meeting. These are not hacks but part of those managers' personal style. The hard part of management is that it depends on you, your beliefs and your communication style, so the process begins with self-examination and writing your own managerial identity card.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Executive Presence
In the second meeting, a manager sighed and said that when she speaks in an executive meeting she feels her voice gets lost and she struggles to influence decisions, while her parallel manager always knows what to say and how, with steady body language and strong eye contact. Ronen translated the complaint into a request: you ask that your presence be felt and make others stop and listen, and she was relieved that someone finally understood. The claim: executive presence is not a single trait but a synergy of skills that can be developed, and when they appear together they shape how others perceive you and open doors.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Composure
A group head Ronen coaches said the exact answer comes to him only when he gets home after the traffic, and asked where that reaction was in the middle of the crisis with the CEO. Asked what he experienced in real time, the manager described overwhelming emotions, a racing heart, a need for more air, and a mind that did not work as usual. The explanation: this is the natural fight-or-flight response, a mechanism that for thousands of years had to analyze a situation in a second. The post suggests a graded exercise to build the composure muscle, ranking tasks from easy to hard and choosing a safe situation to practice, for example the next time an employee asks a question: listen first, then ask clarifying questions, and only then explain the reasoning.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Managerial Courage
In a first coaching session, a group manager said in frustration that to succeed he has to do a lot of things, but in practice he does not have the mandate. Ronen admits he did not expect to run into a discussion of what is and is not within one's authority so often. The claim: when a manager says 'I do not have the mandate', they are actually waiting for someone to tell them what to do, while they are expected to take the reins and lead. He links this to the big challenge companies face, helping a manager move from being measured on personal output to being measured on the output of others. He suggests building the muscle task by task, such as preparing ahead for a feedback conversation and waiting for the right opportunity, or choosing in advance the meeting where you will voice your opinion and deciding what you will say and how.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Do or Do Not, There Is No Try
A May the Fourth post, written a day late. It opens by admitting that one of the things he likes least is difficult conversations with coachees, what coaching language calls delivering a coaching message: a call to order and a reset conversation meant to reflect to the coachee that she is not taking action. This week he had to hold one, and the coachee said 'I really am trying'. He believes her, but notices that every time the conversation reaches the part about doing, she says she is trying or will try, which reminds him of Yoda. The closing point: separating doing from succeeding lets us start doing and measure ourselves against the doing, not the result, because we never move forward in a straight line.
Read the post on LinkedIn →A Manager Needs the Capacity to Be Hated
One belief Ronen hears from managers is that you have to find a solution everyone will be happy with, usually disguised as a WIN-WIN solution, and he always asks, puzzled, 'everyone?'. On one hand he understands, since it is the human need to belong to a group, and as a graduate of the Adler Institute he knows the mechanism. But the bottom line is that a manager must deliver results, which requires making decisions and moving forward with them, and almost every decision is a potential source of friction and unhappy employees. He suggests practicing in relatively safe situations, such as letting people who are shouting vent their frustration at someone else and steering them to the desired point.
Read the post on LinkedIn →You Can Be Authentic All the Way to Being Fired
When managers tell him that authenticity is a value, he smiles to himself. The claim: being an authentic leader has become a trend, and it is also the most common advice, especially when the advisor has nothing smart or useful to say. In the name of authenticity, managers stopped thinking about their role and business goals and became people who say what is on their mind, as their thoughts and feelings became the most important thing in every managerial situation. Instead he offers a list of five skills, the first of which is a clear vision phrased so that it recruits employees to a shared goal, and concludes that the combination of skills with personal values and beliefs is what makes you not just an authentic leader but an effective one.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Measure Effort, Not Just Outcome
Opens with a quote from a manager who said 'I want to cry, I am a failure, I worked on this project for so long and in the end we did not succeed'. The claim: this is natural behavior because school, the army and studies always measured our successes and not our investment, so we developed a fixed mindset in which even self-worth is set by success or failure. But nobody acts in a vacuum, so we do not fully control outcomes, which are shaped by others' decisions. The conclusion: the road to success is rarely linear, and moving from judging results alone to focusing on effort and doing cultivates a growth mindset. The solution is to focus on the journey and celebrate the doing.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Emotional Intelligence Is Not Something You Are Born With
Opens with a statement that landed in his private inbox right after a previous post: 'Empathic listening? What do you want from me, I am an engineer, I have no emotional intelligence, that is what it is.' He is used to hearing this in one-on-one meetings with technology managers. Behind the sentence lies the assumption that emotional intelligence is something you are born with and cannot learn, and he argues this is simply not true. The central example: when Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO in 2014, he made emotional intelligence a top priority, invested in training programs and created a culture in which it is valued and rewarded, and Microsoft saw significant improvement in employee engagement and productivity. He adds data on gaps in productivity, engagement, profitability and customer satisfaction between companies with such a culture and others, and points to a blog post with practical tools.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Be a Goldfish
Opens with a Ted Lasso quote about the goldfish being the happiest animal in the world because it has a ten-second memory. The background: he sat with two founders after a user test in the US showed them they were off course, and told them they needed to be Ted Lasso. The idea: with a ten-second memory you never sink into the loop of negative thoughts, the loop that pulls you out of doing and into sinking. The closing point: the key to success is to strive toward the goal, stop, recharge, and then strive again, over and over until you succeed. He signs off by returning to the family vacation to recharge.
Read the post on LinkedIn →From Neurotic to Proactive
In a first meeting, a manager said he needed to calm down and be more laid-back, and in his words that he was crazy and neurotic and it was not reasonable to operate like this. Asked for examples, the manager rattled off ten at a dizzying pace: he must arrive at every meeting prepared so nobody trips him up, and when preparing work plans he will not let go and insists on preparing a solution for every problem in advance. Ronen listened, then reflected: 'so you are actually managing risk and do not want to be surprised'. The manager said 'yes' with excitement, and Ronen told him that is called being proactive. The claim: the story we tell ourselves about ourselves is usually negative, and through questions we can flip the interpretation and see that risk management and thorough preparation are accepted, even recommended, practices.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Excellent People Don't Make Mistakes
A manager walked into a meeting frustrated and announced she was going to resign. She had been given wrong information about a supplier, hardened her position in a negotiation with a veteran supplier, the negotiation blew up, and now the CEO and the COO were trying to calm things down. She said she had made a mistake and could not go on. Ronen chose to explore why a mistake makes her feel this way. The claim: nobody is free of mistakes, and, quoting Edison, he did not fail, he found ten thousand ways that do not work. The conclusion: replace self-judgment with the understanding that success is a process and every mistake is a chance to learn.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What Has That Got to Do With Anything
Yedidya Rice sent him a video in which a journalist asks Nikola Jokić what he learned from new fatherhood that made him a better player, and Jokić answers that it cannot help. Yedidya added that it is an idea for a post, because people need to understand that not everything is connected to everything. Ronen faces a dilemma: he holds a growth mindset and believes you can learn from every experience, yet the distance between parenting and basketball is large. His conclusion: you can learn from every experience, and whatever you learn about yourself as a person inevitably affects every area of your life. The question is how much energy it takes.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Alignment Between Values and Actions
A new department head he coaches walked in and said she would never be a good manager, which surprised him because they were at the end of the process and her progress had been phenomenal. The reason: she has to hold a wake-up conversation with an employee and cannot, because she believes a manager must be tough and a bit mean or will not be taken seriously, which clashes with the vision she built of being an empowering, teaching, inclusive manager. The claim: there is no real clash. What is needed is alignment between the values that guide you and your actual actions, what English calls Walk the Talk.
Read the post on LinkedIn →If Only I Were More
Opens with lines from a Tevye song and three examples from recent weeks: a coachee who said her life would change if only she were more sociable, a manager who said 'if only I were braver', and another who said 'if only I were more assertive'. The claim: each of us has that one thing we believe would make life better if we changed it, and it comes from wanting something, not acting, and then searching for the source of the problem. The solution: define the challenge specifically, for example how do I become more sociable in order to build an effective career network, then choose small actions and start small.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What Is Your Superpower
A follow-up to the previous post about the superpower in each of us that has to be learned and recognized. Opens by saying he does not know Superman personally, but believes he does not strive to fly, just as he himself does not strive to walk. After the previous post he received many messages that all went in the same direction: how do I identify my superpower? Following those discussions he attaches a carousel with three directions for finding it.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Any Minute Now They'll Find Me Out
A manager told him, just before being promoted to a senior management role, that any minute now they would find him out and that all his successes came from luck or from being around talented people. In front of him sat a brilliant, focused person with a proven record who had been waiting for years for someone to shout that the emperor has no clothes. Ronen asked about his ability to learn something new at supernatural speed and to separate the essential from the trivial. His definition: your superpower is the strength that works in you naturally and without effort, and like Superman not striving to fly, it counts as a superpower even though you made no effort to activate it.
Read the post on LinkedIn →If You Haven't Founded a Venture by 30, Give Up
A new client, a senior tech manager, came looking for his second career chapter and said he was stuck and did not know what change to make. The moment he walked in, Ronen recognized the look of entrepreneurs who avoid the step. After half an hour he challenged him: why haven't you told me about the startup you want to found? The client sighed and said he had circled it for years but missed the train: he is 47 and there are no successful founders over 30. The claim: we all decide according to our perception of how the world works, and each of us has a different rule that stops us from acting. He cites Einstein and points to a Harvard study that contradicts the assumption about founders' age.
Read the post on LinkedIn →
Career Progression & Role Transitions
Over-Ambition as a Career-Killing Blocker
He used to see ambition as a threshold condition for success, and over the years realized that what we call ambition is in practice over-ambition. In its name we allow ourselves to trample others or invest huge energy in managing up and marketing our successes. Relies on Korn Ferry research that defines over-ambition as a career-killing blocker that labels a manager as struggling in working relationships. Points to an AI-based blocker diagnostic he developed.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Over-Reliance on a Single Proficiency
The most dangerous trap in a senior executive's career is not weaknesses but over-reliance on one proven strength. The very skill that made you exceptional, rare technological understanding or analytical sharpness, becomes a weight as the role grows more senior, because it is the comfort zone where you always feel like the smartest person in the room. Quotes Marshall Goldsmith ('what got you here won't get you there') and the move required from outstanding employee to orchestra conductor. Includes four self-diagnostic questions and a pointer to an AI-based blocker diagnostic.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When What Worked Before Stops Working
Describes the moment a newly promoted manager discovers that what once worked no longer does, and the actions that used to be an advantage suddenly look less effective. The problems look objective (staff shortages, project overload, unclear expectations), and frustration grows because these managers give 200% and still see no change. He takes on the obvious explanation, the Peter principle, and rejects it. Instead he offers identity questions: how am I perceived in the organization versus how I see myself, what values guide me, and how should they be expressed now in the new role.
Read the post on LinkedIn →A Varied Career Is an Asset, Not a Weakness
Sitting with friends over beer, a friend who has been at her company four years and is looking for her next role asks for help. Over the years she did product management, development project management, operations at two companies and now Director of Customer Success, and the common opinion around the table was that lacking specialization in one field is a problem. Ronen was curious about something else: what interests her at all. The claim: a varied career is a managerial asset in the new world of work, and he suggests recruiters look at the advantages such a person brings to management roles rather than at a career path that challenges them.
Read the post on LinkedIn →From Senior Management Back to Individual Contributor
Moving from a senior management role back to individual contributor poses two challenges. The first is the courage to decide and act: it is easy to think of it as an escape, but in practice it is usually an active choice, driven by a wish to return to meaningful work, hands-on projects and professional flexibility, against the natural fear of hurting one's career and thoughts like how will this look and what if I cannot go back. The second is social: we live in a world where success is measured by climbing the hierarchy, so the move is sometimes seen as failure.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Why Technologists Struggle With the Move Into Senior Management
The central challenge in moving into senior management is the difference between an engineer's communication style and that of an effective manager. Technologists communicate directly, logically and in a structured way, while managers must tell a story that captures attention, connects the team to the bigger purpose and moves people to act. The job is no longer to produce a technical solution but to recruit and harness people. Quotes Steve Jobs on the difference between management and leadership, and concludes that a good manager knows how to ask the right questions, ones that make employees think, take responsibility and find solutions themselves.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up
The classic childhood question most people never thought through: at 22 or 23 they chose what to study, and ever since they have followed a career path they drifted into without experiencing fulfillment. The claim: most of us hold the romantic notion that there is one thing we were meant to do, and compare ourselves to those who knew from childhood. In practice, many successful people never had a clear picture, and their journey was full of frustration, confusion and fear, but also courage. The practical step: present your skills and experience in a way that answers the job requirements and connect the dots for the recruiter, and remember that not knowing the exact destination is also the chance to discover a unique path.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Desire Isn't a New Job, It's Meaning
He got a third phone call that week from someone unhappy at work who wants a new job where she can fulfill herself, and argues it is no coincidence, since Passover is a time when everyone also does an inner seder. Some are frustrated with their current place, some feel it is time for change but do not know the next step, and all fear making a change at this time, yet still glance at job boards without taking the step. The diagnosis: the wish is not necessarily to find a new position but to find meaning in what you do. He offers a structured, logical process for building a personal roadmap.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Technical Star With No Management Skills
He often meets managers who reached their role thanks to excellent professional skills and have no management skills or experience. When someone tries to draw their attention to it, the reaction is that no HR manager or outside consultant will teach them how to manage. He understands: they invested time and effort in developing their skills and got used to relying on their personal abilities, so it is natural that they find it hard to admit they need help. The claim: success as a manager does not depend on technical knowledge, because managers are not measured on their own performance but on others' success. The summary: management is a profession, and a successful manager is one in constant learning and growth.
Read the post on LinkedIn →A New Job or a New Sense of Meaning
He heard 'that's it, I'm done with my current role, time to move on' four times in the same week, after about seventy days of not hearing it at all. The claim: many people feel something is missing and translate it into a search for a new position, but the inner wish is to find meaning in what they do. Most do not stop to clarify and phrase what that meaning is, move to the next job, and within a few months feel exactly the same again. Quotes Germany Kent: if you do not know what you are looking for, you will never find it. He offers a mapping process that includes your passion and your wish to contribute to something bigger than yourself, from which a personal map for a more precise job search is built.
Read the post on LinkedIn →There Is No Such Thing as Starting From Zero
Quotes Marshall Goldsmith: there is no such thing as starting from zero, you pivot from experience. The background: in a period when no one is immune to layoffs, he works more and more with people who were forced to look for a new job and choose to use it to recalculate their route. Whenever he challenges them to find out what they would really like to do and to think beyond maximizing income, he gets the same response: 'I cannot go backward and start from zero now'. The argument: the world has changed and 45-year careers in one role barely exist, and in every move, to another industry or an entrepreneurial effort, we do not start over but use existing knowledge, skills and personal network to realize a new vision.
Read the post on LinkedIn →
Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty
In Wartime, Managing Is Not Enough
Separates management from leadership and explains that in Hebrew the word 'leader' is mistakenly seen as a legendary manager or senior author, while in practice even a first-time team lead can lead. Defines management as organizing, coordinating and supervising resources, and leadership as influencing others toward a shared vision. The claim: what cannot be replaced is the ability to act from a clear values compass that lets you tell the hard truth, give honest feedback that comes from caring and give the team backing in uncertainty. In wartime this need is even more critical.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Internal Dialogue in Wartime
Opens with a personal share about managing ADHD (which he refuses to call a disorder) and the absence of control over attention regulation: you can define a task as critical, block time for it in the calendar, go to the right location, and still stare at the screen. Describes a gatekeeper that lets in no task that does not come with its own dopamine or an external deadline. When Operation Roaring Lion began the gap deepened: in client meetings he is at 110 percent, and in the time between them he dropped to minus 20. The conclusion: managing under fire does not require emotional immunity and ignoring the situation, but reflection and managing the inner micro-dialogue.
Read the post on LinkedIn →
AI & the Future of Work
Management Skills for 2026
Everyone talks about AI as if it will change the organization, yet what will determine success in 2026 is the managers who lead it. Ronen shares a process he went through himself: months of work on his own business strategy for 2026, trying to understand how AI changes the labor market and not the technology itself, and at the same time wrestling with how to adapt his services, sharpen his marketing messages and connect everything to his Why.
Read the post on LinkedIn →
Entrepreneurship & Founder Support
Every Founder Has the Moment Before They Give Up
An entrepreneur he coaches told him he felt like curling up in a corner and crying, after the third meeting with the same investor blew up, with their backs to the wall, no money and no investment, and that he was done. Ronen honestly notes that he thought in his heart how to explain to someone in this state that he is not a psychologist. The claim: he has almost never had an entrepreneur coaching process without such a moment of failure or hitting a wall, and, paraphrasing Tolstoy, every founder who meets a challenge meets one unique to them. Each such challenge makes you doubt everything done so far, because before setting out everyone is in a fantasy. He quotes Churchill on success as moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm, and recalls the joke about the ten years it took to become an overnight success.
Read the post on LinkedIn →
Stage 2: Self-Management
This stage deals with how the manager manages their own resources: time, workload, energy, boundaries, planning, reflection and personal resilience.
To the full guide on self-management →
- Self-Management & Productivity 20
- Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty 5
- Career Progression & Role Transitions 2
- AI & the Future of Work 1
Self-Management & Productivity
Burnout Doesn't Come From Workload
The claim: burnout comes from mental and emotional load, not from the amount of work. Brings data from a lecture by Dr. Liane Davey: a manager spends on average 22 hours a week in meetings and 11 hours on email, an employee checks email every five minutes and receives a notification every two minutes, experiences a full interruption every 11 minutes and returns to the task only after 25, and switches between screens 1,200 times a day. Closes with the principle of managing energy as a renewable resource that requires recovery, disconnection and flow time.
Read the post on LinkedIn →A Year-End Review and New Year Workbook
2026 is expected to be a year of fast change in the labor market: business uncertainty, technology adoption and the arrival of Gen Z. Cites John Norcross: 92% of next-year plans fail, and argues the cause is not lack of will but lack of a mechanism, since we plan the what (goals) well and skip the who (managerial identity). Suggests starting with reflection on the past year and only then planning, with two ways to apply it: a downloadable workbook or working with AI.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Four Questions for Reflection
He managed to schedule a working meeting with a senior manager between the holidays, and during the scheduling call they decided not to wait until after the holidays. From there he looks at the Hebrew month of Tishrei as a deliberate sequence: from the reflection of Rosh Hashanah, through the atonement of Yom Kippur in which we understand mistakes, take responsibility, internalize lessons (and forgive ourselves), to the joy and insights of Simchat Torah. The claim: this is not a random sequence but a deep personal process that invites us to stop, think and learn.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What Is a Hot Spot
An answer to a question several people raised after the previous post. The opening: our brain works by associations, not intentions, and if the brain links the couch with rest, the expectation of writing a presentation on the couch will probably not be met. A Hot Spot is a specific physical place where you perform a defined task, not just another place with a desk but a space the brain associates with the task. He admits he is still learning this about himself, but since he has had a Hot Spot the task he avoided most is getting done more and more, because sometimes all you need is a place that reminds you who you are when you act.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Task I Get Stuck On Too
A personal confession: as an executive coach, most of his time goes to helping others turn intention into movement, yet he too has a task he always finds reasons to postpone in the name of productivity. He is not only a coach but a business owner, responsible for marketing, business development, proposals and planning ahead, which did not scare him since he was a VP of business development and sales. The task that trips him again and again is activating his network and asking for help. His solution: create a Hot Spot, a physical place that links location, mental readiness and the task. He closes with a coffee invitation and a half-serious warning that whoever does not write will get a message from him.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Home or Office, Before You Fall In Line With the Feed
According to the social feeds, the debate seems settled: the office is hell, open space is a disaster and the calendar is full of meetings that could have been an email. The counter-claim: the debate misses a simple point, success does not depend on where the work happens but on the employee's ability to do the job. It is easy to follow trends and blame the manager or decisions from above, yet working from home is a blessing for some and a disaster for others. He suggests employees honestly examine where they really work well and which type of task suits each environment, and shares that he himself needs an outside space for tasks that require the energy around him.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Time Management Is Never About Time
The claim: time management is about fear, identity and self-worth, not a problem of method, knowledge or tools. Everyone knows the big rocks, the Eisenhower matrix, time boxing and Pomodoro, and the knowledge is available and free, yet managers and employees still collapse under the load. It happens because the ability to manage time is an inner capability, and the lack of tools is the story we tell ourselves to avoid facing the blocker. He shares that he was always a champion of planning, with tables, colors and apps, and it did not work.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Five Ways to Say No
A manager he coaches answered the question of how her week went with: 'I work hard, but it's not like I'm a construction worker.' He identified at first, then realized the comparison is wrong: there is a difference between physical and mental exhaustion, because the body recovers with rest and the mind does not rest for a moment. The claim: she does not stop because of the inner voice that convinces her everyone else keeps up and only she does not, and that if she says no they will understand she is not good enough. The conclusion: before learning to say no to others, we have to learn to say no to ourselves, to old patterns and the habit of pushing more and more.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Responsibility for Work-Life Balance Is Yours
Two different clients sent him a TV news item about work-life balance, both with the message 'you see, it's not us, it's life.' He disagrees: the only one responsible for balance is you. It is not your manager's responsibility to say no to things landing on your desk, nor the organization's to make sure you leave on time, and the CEO will not set email notification off-hours for you. Quotes Jocko Willink on leaders taking full responsibility for everything in their world, and closes that only by acting, building a schedule and setting boundaries do you find balance.
Read the post on LinkedIn →A Free Guide for Planning 2025
Ahead of the annual wave of new-year lists, which he himself wrote in the past, he argues that a wish list does not really work, and what works is defining a few goals and writing a work plan to achieve them. Offers a free downloadable guide with no tricks and no need to leave an email, and presents a three-step approach: reflection (what you learned this year about yourself as a person and a professional), an inner compass (which values will guide you) and goals (the three most meaningful goals for the coming year).
Read the post on LinkedIn →A Family Film
A short post. A family trip to the movies, with the reminder that balance between career and family is a daily challenge, that the responsibility to find it is yours and that setting boundaries is an active action you take.
Read the post on LinkedIn →I Used to Be a Bookworm, Now I Only Read Emails
A senior manager's answer to the question of what he does to recharge. His complaint was not only about email but that all the means technology allows only increase the workload: he enters a task, lifts his head and is flooded with unanswered calls, emails, WhatsApp, Slack and project management systems. He adds the move to an asynchronous world, remote work, different time zones and flexible hours, which intensify information overload and blurred boundaries. The claim: these reasons are not a product of the technology. He offers a list of steps for mapping and implementing work processes, ending with ongoing monitoring of process performance and identifying improvement opportunities.
Read the post on LinkedIn →How to Protect Ourselves From Wasting Our Own Time
Written following a comment by Eyal Levi on the previous post about protecting your time from others, asking for five tips for the opposite direction too. The first tip is to say no to yourself as well, based on two truths that are hard to internalize: the number of tasks on your desk will never end, because we do not act in a vacuum and others keep working and producing, and no one in the world manages to do everything, and whoever seems to simply knows how to focus. He closes by surfacing the inner voices that keep us from tasks that advance us, such as 'my English is not good enough' or 'I cannot afford to fail'.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When Your Office Turns Into a Promenade
Everyone feels free to walk in, start chatting and needs something urgent, and everyone drinks your time until at the end of the day it turns out you did none of the tasks you set for yourself, as if your time is not yours. The claim: it is clear the responsibility for planning time is yours, but when someone appears in the office or calls you give in and do not know how to say no, then move from managing to reacting. He offers five tips for protecting your time, starting with testing every request against questions like whether it matters to the organization, and including short breaks between tasks and daily time for self-care, to keep the resilience to continue protecting your time.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Five Myths About Time Management
Opens with a personal admission: he finished a week breathless, exhausted, feeling inefficient and that the pile of tasks had only grown, and the guilt began because the cobbler's children go barefoot, since he himself guides managers on how to manage their schedules. The central claim: most of us are sure we are just procrastinators or lack motivation, yet what gets in the way is that we have not trained a method that suits us. And you cannot manage time at all, time is fixed. Productivity is derived from self-management, meaning how I manage myself within the time I have.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Loneliness of the Manager
In an intake conversation with a new manager he asked what bothers him most, and the answer was that he manages a team of twenty, has to look strong and stable all the time, but in practice he is alone, has no one to share the difficulties with, and fears that talking about it will hurt his career. Ronen lists the consequences of loneliness: lower performance due to difficulty making decisions, higher stress and anxiety, and damaged relationships when a lonely manager avoids connecting. He stresses it is a common phenomenon and calls for building a professional support network, letting others share their difficulties and listening to what they say and do not say, and promoting a culture in which sharing challenges is seen as an advantage and not a weakness.
Read the post on LinkedIn →No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy
Written in response to a comment on the previous post about new-year plans: 'lately this no longer works, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.' He agrees, noting that two years of Covid and now the war create a feeling that the moment you manage to lift your head above water, the next wave arrives. Quotes von Moltke that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and argues that reality can certainly serve as the enemy in this context. The solution he proposed in the original post: set calendar reminders in advance for dates to assess progress and adjust the plan, and remember that it is reasonable and fine for plans to change and not always bear fruit.
Read the post on LinkedIn →How to Build a List of Goals You'll Actually Stick To
It is new-year resolution season, and to the tradition of posts on the subject he adds his way of building a list you are more likely to keep, in three steps. The first step is choosing the goals: build a list of everything you want to achieve in every area, from the questions what matters to you and in which area of life you want to improve, career, family, parenting, relationship, health or friends, with concrete examples for each. The closing emphases: the list is a living document that should be reviewed and adjusted to reality, and time should be set in the calendar in advance for assessing progress and making adjustments, because that is the only way to ensure persistence and focus.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Too Many Meetings and Too Few Meetings
He read Microsoft's AI report, because he believes being professional means staying current. What caught his eye was a slide called five obstacles on the road to productivity, where the first obstacle is too few meetings and the third is too many meetings. The report presents AI as creating efficiency in meetings, and tools like Copilot integrated in Teams already summarize meetings and extract tasks. The counter-claim: the solution is not an AI tool but effective management, because the tool is not responsible for meeting scheduling policy and how meetings are run. The summary: a manager should find each employee's sweet spot and create a culture with neither too many meetings that hinder productivity nor too few that leave the team without tools.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The August Break and What It Teaches About Boundaries
Announces that after three months of one post a week he is pausing for three weeks, because in August we all stop and make room for the kids and for life. He uses it to return to a subject he works on with coachees, under the old name work-life balance or the new one, work-life harmony: everything starts and ends with deciding priorities, what you do and what you don't, where our boundaries are and whether we stick to the plan. He lists explanations he hears to show it is impossible: in my role it is different, it is a busy period (for ten years already), just let me clear the tasks off my desk and everything will calm down. The tools he suggests: keep a list of your successes so it is easier to dictate a boundary and hold it with less guilt, and surround yourself with people who are also looking for their balance.
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Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty
Leading in Uncertainty
Describes a Sunday when the schedule fell apart and four meetings were canceled: two because of reserve call-up orders, one because the kids stayed home, and the fourth ended after ten minutes when everyone went into their shelter. The claim: real crisis management starts with pausing the automatic reaction, and the guiding question is not what happens to our goals but what is actually within my control. The practical call: listen to employees and support every request they make, and use the inner compass precisely when chaos rules outside.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Meeting Where I Wasn't Really There
He says his post about Situational Leadership was prepared in advance, then Operation Rising Lion began and it did not fit the moment, so posts on managing in chaos, resilience and motivation went up instead. From there to the personal story: on Thursday at five in the afternoon he joined a Zoom with a client he is coaching through a deep process, the client talked, analyzed and got angry, and he listened, but in practice was not there. The noise of the house crept through the closed door, the thought of when the missiles would come today would not let go, and he had no air. He closes with a Brené Brown quote and a reminder that a manager is also a human being and it is allowed to feel what you feel.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When the Encourager Runs Out of Air Too
One of his most important roles in coaching processes is to encourage, as an Adlerian coaching tool, and this demands presence, listening, energy and belief in the other person's abilities even when they do not believe in themselves. But since Operation Rising Lion he too ran out of air and could not find the strength within to be the encourager. Even his motivation playlist did not work, because it is tuned to sales energy and sharp forward motion, and he just wanted to feel safe. He attaches the new playlist they built.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When Everyone Around Me Is Talking About the Same Burnout
Over beer with a friend, the friend shared that the period is terrible, that he cannot breathe and every little thing is a trigger. In the two weeks after that, it happened with almost everyone he met, mostly at social events, and his own experience in that period was the same. He notes it did not seem strange to him precisely because these are different people from different places going through exactly the same thing. His explanation: after eight months of fighting, resilience has not had time to refill. He offers five directions for recharging the resilience battery, and ends by saying that resilience is like a muscle that develops with awareness and investment, and that the road is long and complex.
Read the post on LinkedIn →So How the Hell Do You Work in a Period Like This
The question he asked himself for more than a week: on one hand we must be active to restore our resilience, on the other everything seems unimportant. Cites Dr. Anabela Shaked, who says nobody has resilience for an event like this, which cannot be prepared for: we all crash and then begin developing resilience again through action. The central point: it is not only contribution and volunteering that strengthen resilience, but also the routine tasks that feel banal. He describes his personal move into a wartime routine and the realization that whoever is not drafted must help, and says he runs extra screening on tasks to understand whether they are really critical to the other side and helps as much as he can.
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Career Progression & Role Transitions
From Passivity to Proactivity
The first post in a series on what to do to advance at work. Opens with a guy who was skipped for a team-lead promotion and arrived frustrated, claiming he does the most complex tasks and in the end they promoted whoever made the most noise. As a mantra he repeated 'I am an introvert, I cannot give orders like a commander in the army', and it turned out he was really describing his own manager, who barks orders and then disappears. The claim: there is no single thing you can do to advance, but there is a common denominator to all the actions, and it is being proactive.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Planning a Career the Way You Manage a Project
In a conversation with two friends, one strong in EQ and the other in IQ, he was told firmly that you cannot plan a life or career path because it is not a project. His answer: yes, you absolutely can. He admits it sounds far-fetched in a world where nobody asks 'where will you be in five years' anymore because everything moves too fast, but relies on Stanford research that to live a fulfilling life you need a work plan for life and career too, and without aiming somewhere you get nowhere. Quotes Eisenhower that planning is everything but the plan is nothing, and suggests testing any plan on how much you love it, your confidence in your ability to carry it out, and how well it fits how you see yourself.
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AI & the Future of Work
AI Brain Fry
A new Harvard Business Review study names the moment AI stops working for us and starts hurting us: acute mental fatigue from using and supervising tools beyond cognitive capacity. Fog, buzzing in the head, slow decisions. He connects it to long-standing multitasking research (Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, 2001) and the gap between feeling ten times as productive in a day and actual exhaustion. Closes by asking how many AI windows you have open right now.
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Stage 3: Managing People as Individuals
This stage deals with interaction with a single employee: feedback, aligning expectations, 1:1 meetings, trust and delegation, empathy and challenging employees.
To the full guide on managing people as individuals →
Managing People: Feedback, Trust & Delegation
Micromanagement as a Fear Response
Opens with a long quote from a manager he coaches who is worn down between the CEO's targets and a team he feels is not rallying. Gallup data: 76% of employees experience burnout, and 78.7% of them attribute it to poor management and mostly to micromanagement. He did not want to be a micromanager, he drifted there through a mechanism called the low-trust circle, or the sucker's payoff. The way out runs through managing up and moving from an 'I' perspective to a 'we' perspective.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Feedback as a Learning Process, Not as Criticism
Managers do not avoid feedback because they lack tools, but because they see it as confrontation. Tells of a coached manager who walked into a meeting and declared that management is not for him, because every professional correction felt to him like hurting the employee. The argument: developing and empowering employees is a central part of the role, and when managerial identity is defined and values are clear, staying in discomfort takes on meaning and becomes action in the name of values.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Four Toxic Employees, and What Managers Say to Each
A Passover post that uses the Four Sons structure: one wise, one wicked, one simple and one who does not know how to ask. A toxic employee is defined as someone who actively sabotages the team's dynamics and sense of belonging, and according to the data the performance quality of such teams drops consistently by 30% to 40%. The behavior is contagious like a rotten apple and signals to the rest of the team's amygdala that it is not safe here. The claim: smoothing over toxic behavior in the name of results is a mistake, and after one chance to improve you have to send them home. Closes with a Jack Welch quote on lack of candor as the dirty little secret of business.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What Cam From Bones Understands About Autonomy
Opens with an admission that last week he could not be proactive, so he decided to be proactive at idleness and sank into binge-watching the series Bones. He spots a recurring dynamic: the two scientists Zack and Hodgins drift into an academic debate unrelated to the mystery, and Cam, their manager, does not stop them, does not call them to order and sometimes simply leaves the room. The claim: Cam understood that her authority is not meant to force a path, which is the structure and freedom paradox in action.
Read the post on LinkedIn →From Micromanagement to Leadership
A manager who comments on every document and demands to approve every decision tells himself his standard is high and without him the output would be mediocre, and reality encouraged him to think so because he is the one who got promoted. The claim: micromanagement is not a standard but armor against the fear that if he lets go, people will say he is not right for the role, and perfectionism is meant to make him immune to criticism and blame. The move from control to influence is presented not as magic but as a process of building a managerial identity.
Read the post on LinkedIn →There Is No Single Management Method That Fits Everyone
A manager he coaches arrived exhausted and described three completely different employees: one motivated who wants the hard tasks but lacks knowledge, one with lots of knowledge who does not close corners, and a third it is better not to start with. The claim: most managers look for one fixed management method, but as in parenting there is no single way that suits every child. He presents the Situational Leadership model of Hersey and Blanchard and stresses that fitting a different approach to each employee is not discrimination, and effective management starts with the ability to see each employee where they are.
Read the post on LinkedIn →How Do You Know What Your Managers Are Actually Doing?
A new manager opened a meeting saying he had no choice but to micromanage, since he is measured on the output of several teams and dozens of projects. When asked what his management mechanisms were, whether there are 1:1s and weekly team meetings and at which junctions each manager is meant to report, he met silence. The conclusion: this is not classic anxiety-driven micromanagement but the absence of a system. The solution: specify exactly the desired reporting frequency, topics and format, then develop an open conversation about what works and what does not. Closes with a General Patton quote about stating the mission instead of dictating the execution.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Employee Who Is Hard to Manage Is a High Performer
A startup CEO wondered how to promote one of his best employees: she meets targets, spots opportunities, leads cross-department projects, shares knowledge and raises the bar in the team, yet everyone experiences her as direct, demanding and uncompromising, and she asks hard questions and is not exactly politically correct. The claim: what the CEO finds problematic is in practice a high performer, and a manager who knows how to identify and manage such people gains someone who can change the face of the organization.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Do You Have a Roy Kent on Your Team?
A manager opened a meeting with a statement meant to understand how to let go of an employee who always has something to say, who must understand the why of every task, and asks not to learn but to challenge, and in the end does not do what was asked but finds another way. Instead of agreeing, Ronen asked the manager one question: you said he is not wrong, so after the back-and-forth with him, do you add something? The claim: such people balance the group dynamic and bring truth into a space that is sometimes too polite, and it is worth checking whether this is not insensitivity but courage and caring.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Everything in Life Is Relative to Yourself
A conversation with a friend from Kibbutz Nirim, whose community is returning to live in the kibbutz these days: the kids insist on returning, her partner serving in a standby squad is determined to return, and she, after holding the safe-room door for long hours, really does not want to. He proudly told her he let his nine-year-old daughter walk alone for the first time to the grocery store in the evening, saying 'what a hero I am for facing my fears', and she smiled and suggested he look for a moment at what she is dealing with. From there to the managerial conclusion: an employee's difficulty is measured relative to their own world, not yours, and sometimes empathy and encouragement will help more than criticism.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Most Toxic Managers Are Toxic by Accident
A manager who advanced from professional team lead to group head, professional, sharp and appreciated, chose to work with him after one of his employees reflected that he is a toxic manager: when presented with a problem that seems trivial to you, you shrug; when someone raises a half-baked idea you roll your eyes and send it back to the drawing board in front of everyone, and people already know there is no point talking. Quotes Andy Stanley on managers who do not listen and end up surrounded by people with nothing to say. The claim: the toxicity is not malice or indifference, and development begins the moment we are willing to examine our behavior.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When the Superstar Is the Quiet Danger
A manager he coaches decided to part ways with his superstar, not because he is moving on but because he is toxic. The claim: we live in a time when everyone praises the zone of genius, which is true, but the zone of genius does not stand alone. A superstar with an ego believes his way is the only one, that he is above the team and that collaboration is a bad recommendation. As in a forest, growth begins only when something else clears space. The closing question: are you managing short-term successes or building a culture that brings results over time?
Read the post on LinkedIn →Before You Fire, Did the Employee Get a Real Chance to Succeed?
Opens with the accepted consulting heuristic that the right time to fire an employee is the first moment you think of it, meant to push managers who avoid firing to act fast. In the startup world it exists on steroids, alongside move fast and break things and the expectation that the employee will figure it out alone. The claim: before deciding there are two considerations to check, the first being whether this is really an employee problem or a management problem. The closing question: did your employees truly get a chance to succeed, because a strong organization is built not only from its people but also from the system that supports them.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Managing an Employee With a Contrarian Streak
A manager he previously coached asked him for a post on change management, and when he tried to get details she talked about employees in change. He heard between the lines that she has an employee with a contrarian, rebellious, stubborn or always-defensive character, and decided to write about what he heard. The first step he offers is to understand that we do have such an employee, with the honest caveat that sometimes managers are wrong too. The test question he poses: does this employee push the team forward, in action and morally, or hold it in place?
Read the post on LinkedIn →Active Listening at the Holiday Table
At the holiday table the teenagers handed each participant a card with a philosophical question, and he got the question of which historical figure he would like to have coffee with. After he answered, one of them asked why he would want to meet him; the table went quiet and everyone listened with great attention, not to respond or be clever but truly to understand him. This is exactly the active listening he talks about in his posts, and it surprised him that sometimes it happens naturally, while with managers you have to work on it. Points to an article by Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg of Harvard, and stresses that active listening is a lifelong process.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Who's Got the Monkey?
The manager of a 300-person group complained that he is overloaded, that everyone wants a moment of his time, and that his pile of tasks grows while his subordinates' piles shrink. Ronen introduced him to the question 'who's got the monkey?', an approach from one of the most popular Harvard Business Review articles. The monkey represents ownership of the problem: employees walk into a meeting with a monkey on their back and walk out without it. The claim: when you hand the monkey back to the employee, the manager empowers them, creates a positive work environment and enables professional growth, all while protecting their own workload.
Read the post on LinkedIn →When a "Hi" Sends an Employee Into Anxiety
A manager he coaches said the CEO is simply a nightmare and that every message from him sends him into anxiety. It turned out the problem is the form of the message: 'Hi', then waiting for an answer; 'when you arrive today come see me'; 'when you finish the meeting call me'. The manager fears he is about to be scolded or fired, and instead of working or enjoying time with family he spends it anxious. He notes that after October 7 mental resilience is low and negative interpretation intensifies. His simple solution: a Hi, Why, What message structure, meaning a greeting, a reason and an explicit request, which reduces anxiety, builds trust and streamlines the team's work. He demonstrates it with humor about himself and a request for a like on a post.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Annual Review Is Not April Fool's Day
Your employee should not be surprised at the annual review. The claim: as a manager you are responsible for employees' success, and part of the role is to build a professional and personal advancement plan with them and accompany its realization in the ongoing 1:1 meetings. When there are professional gaps they should be highlighted and a work plan built to fix them, and the discomfort and fear of the situation make managers postpone dealing with it until there is no choice, and then the employee is surprised. He offers a feedback structure that starts by anchoring the situation, continues by describing the behavior only and not the person, and ends by explaining how the manager or other employees experienced it, with example phrasings such as 'I notice that you say' and 'I want to reflect to you'.
Read the post on LinkedIn →I Hate 1:1 Meetings
A manager opened a meeting in frustration: instead of creating vision and developing strategy he spends all day babysitting his employees. Ronen's answer: true, you need people to follow you, but the role is called manager because most of it is management elements, managing employees and managing time, yours and theirs. Then he asked whether he holds structured 1:1s, and the manager replied that he hates them and they are the number one time thief. Ronen divides those who dislike 1:1s into two groups, those who see no importance in them and those who find them unhelpful, and what both share is that they are not run in a structured way. He offers a structure for an effective meeting, and notes that for the employee it is precious time of full attention and an opportunity to develop, and also a professional way to build a personal position without arrogance.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Secret to Success Is Aligning Expectations
A manager complained that her employee's output is mediocre, that he never meets deadlines and that she must fire him. Asked whether they had a conversation, she said yes, more than one: as usual she handed him the task, asked if everything was clear and said she is here to help. So he asked about defining the timeline, exactly which deliverables, what level of performance is required and how important the task is, and she answered, 'why do I need to explain such trivial things to him, it is his job'. The claim: many managers do not align expectations with employees, certainly not when handing over a task, even though aligning expectations is simple, easy and quick, and prepares the ground for productivity and stronger relationships.
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Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty
Leadership on a Day of Sirens
A response post for an operational day. The claim: on such a day leadership is measured only by supporting every request or message from an employee, and pressure may produce action today but will cost with the employee in the long run. Relies on Amy Edmondson's research: in uncertain environments, knowing the manager is there for the employee at the human level is the strongest predictor of success and retention. Includes a suggested wording for a manager who admits difficulty without losing authority, and a call to breathe and recall your managerial identity before answering messages.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Clear Is Kind, and the Return to Routine
Written after a sharp move from war back to routine, facing the uncertainty of parents waiting for an announcement from the authority about schools and kindergartens. Returns to Brené Brown's guiding principle (clear is kind, unclear is unkind) and argues that a manager must communicate simply and clearly the principles that guide them. As a live example he cites the principal of his daughter's school, who sent parents a transparent message detailing what was decided, what the goals are and what the considerations were, and attached it as an image.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Managing in Chaos
His first client meeting since Operation Rising Lion began, after the previous day's meetings were canceled and he too lacked the strength. During it, responses kept arriving to the previous post with presentations, articles and training material on managing in chaos, VUCA and BANI, and he even started reading an interesting article but had to stop and restart three times, because his mind just wanted to close everything and go be with family. The bottom line: a manager cannot move if they are falling apart inside, and if you hold a management role you have one task, to take care of your people, one step before the moment you expect them to function as in routine.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Sometimes There's Nothing to Do, and That Is Exactly What to Do
Written after the night we all woke up to a new reality: nights in shelters, reserve call-ups, people stuck abroad with no way back, schools closed. And despite everything, your department still has a KPI. His answer to 'what should I do as a manager today': there is only one thing, be attentive to your employees and support, as far as possible, every request or decision they make, because each employee needs different things depending on their personal reality and resilience. He ends with a list of actions: set aside time for personal conversations, ask what you need, offer help, and remember that a crisis is the time to build trust, not to demand functioning.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Transparency, Empathetic Listening and Empathetic Support
In the weeks after October 7, he received at least ten presentations on management and leadership in a crisis, all professional and accurate. The one topic they do not address: the manager is in crisis too, was shaken too, has a family and children too, and in this state is not available at all to learn a new communication style. Quotes Einstein that everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler, and narrows it to just three things: transparency (talk, share, explain and update, and do not hide problems from employees), empathetic listening and empathetic support. He adds that each employee's personal capacity should be treated sensitively, sit with them on their tasks and help prioritize, and that action itself helps start rebuilding resilience.
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Stage 4: Managing Teams
This stage deals with the team as a unit: psychological safety, organizational culture, retention, team independence and group dynamics.
To the full guide on managing teams →
Team Building, Psychological Safety & Culture
Deni Avdija and Building a Winning Team
Amid the justified hype around Deni Avdija, he reminds us that his chance of winning an NBA championship is almost nil, because one player does not win a title, a team does. Michael Jordan played six seasons until his first championship and testified that without a team working together he would not have won. The managerial claim: focusing on the talent of a single team member is an illusion that causes deep damage, and managers who build the system around one or two people pay for it. He recommends watching Ted Lasso.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Independence 2026
An Independence Day post. Independence is not doing things alone but a sense of capability, self-confidence and taking responsibility, and many managers complain about a lack of independence in the team while managing in a way that creates dependence. He parallels this with the dilemma facing the leadership of the Jewish community at the founding of the state, which had to build independence among hundreds of thousands of immigrants from two groups who had experienced uprooting and helplessness. The conclusion: building an independent team is not a technical action but a change in managerial context, from control to developing a sense of capability.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Psychological Safety Is Not Candy Floss
Written in response to a dilemma raised by Uri Ilan in a previous post: is a manager expected to be the nurturing parent at any cost, or is toxicity in small doses actually good? The claim: the dichotomy between a manager who wraps everyone in cotton candy and a manager who demands standards and is therefore toxic is a mistaken view. Psychological safety is not niceness or agreement, but creating the belief that you can speak, ask, admit a mistake and offer a different perspective without fear of embarrassment or punishment. And you cannot set a psychological safety policy, just as you cannot set a policy of working with motivation; it is built interaction by interaction.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Assumption About Gen Z That's Damaging Your Team
Opens with sentences he hears countless times a month, that this generation does not come to work and they are spoiled, and in a leadership workshop he led someone threw out 'that's Gen Z for you'. The claim: this is nothing new, every generation complains about the one that follows, as in the Lool sketch where each wave grumbles about the new wave. The real challenge is to adapt management style to a changing world, and instead of blaming, ask how I can be a better leader for the team. He closes that everything must be done from your values, walk the talk, because that is where inspiration and motivation among employees come from.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What a Scouts Ceremony Taught Me About Retention
At a Scouts tie ceremony, the host casually read out the numbers: about 135 kids in fourth grade and only 40 in ninth, meaning only about thirty percent continue. From there to the question of whether organizations really know how to retain talent or even try. Draws on Daniel Coyle's The Culture Code, with research showing that successful onboarding can retain employees about 270% more, and that success depends on creating a sense of belonging focused on the employee and not the company. He honestly admits he failed at this in the past too, including the time he forgot to introduce a new employee in a team meeting.
Read the post on LinkedIn →90% of Employees Don't Aspire to Be Average
In response to the previous post, a manager wrote to him: 'great post, now imagine the employees have tenure.' From experience with organizations that have tenure, he argues that more than 90% of employees do not wake up in the morning aspiring to be average, but years in the organization made them institutionalized. He quotes the walls of hope that first you hate, then get used to, and finally become dependent on. The claim: the employee cannot imagine another way, and only after you have created an environment of psychological safety can you offer new perspectives on the role and the organization.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Ball Boy Who Changed the Game
When he arrives at an organization where he is known, people stop him for hallway consulting, and the complaint is usually 'I am a small cog in the system and I want more.' From there to a story from a European cup match between Tottenham and Olympiacos: the ball boy realized Olympiacos' defense was not organized, returned the ball quickly, and it led to a goal that turned the game. Mourinho noticed the action, hugged the boy after the goal, mentioned him at the press conference and invited him to the team's lunch. From there, a list of actions for managers: appreciate every employee's contribution, encourage risk-taking, accept mistakes as a chance to grow, give authority to act independently, and celebrate small wins especially.
Read the post on LinkedIn →If Your Best People Are Leaving, You Are the Problem
This is what he told a manager who complained that his third protégé is leaving him, that it is like that with everyone he nurtured, and that today's generation only wants money and not to work. He insists such statements rest on fact and not personal opinion, so he cites a 2023 Gartner study of 10,000 employees worldwide, with the ten main reasons for leaving: lack of appreciation, lack of growth opportunities, unfair pay, poor management, negative organizational culture, lack of work-life balance, dissatisfaction with the work itself, lack of flexibility, lack of belonging and lack of trust in managers. The summary: employees look for a manager who is a human being and cares for them as people, not just for the KPI and Excel files.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Why I Don't Like the Term Soft Skills
From running workshops for managers on team building, handling conflict and improving collaboration, topics that management and HR circles customarily call soft skills. He explains why the term bothers him: these skills are called soft because of their supposedly intangible nature and the emphasis on emotional intelligence, empathy, adaptability and resilience, yet in his view they are the very core of a manager's role, to empower the team, connect it to the vision and move it to action. Quotes Marcus Buckingham, and argues that organizations that failed to turn their managers into good managers lose good employees along the way. The first step he suggests: call management skills simply skills, instead of a soft label full of mixed messages.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Why a Shortage of Resources Is Good for Managers
The market is shaken, resources are cut everywhere, and managers must still meet output while retaining employees and building team resilience. When there is money it is easy to throw it at problems and make them disappear: retention is solved by a raise, team building by an external bonding day. The surprising claim: this new challenge is actually good for managers, because the lack of resources forces them to acquire management skills they could previously do without. He notes that managers come to him in this period with higher motivation and real openness to examine their functioning and their impact on the situation and on employees, and that this ability is what will separate those who grow stronger from the change from those left behind.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Gen Z Wants to Make an Impact on the World
A share of a SodaStream post on equality, written in response to events around the status of women. He adds a managerial frame: a PwC study found that 77% of Gen Z members look for work that lets them have an impact on the world, and to enable that, the organization itself must be an active part of the doing. He ends by noting personal pride that a woman in his family is part of such an organization.
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Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty
Google's Model for Winning Teams, in Wartime
After the previous post ended with a call to encourage the team to keep carrying out tasks despite the difficulty, he received private messages like 'I do not have the strength for this.' Instead of going in an endless loop to the first post he wrote after October 7, he tried to understand why on one hand people cannot connect to tasks and on the other they are already starting to move. Since he is not a resilience or trauma expert, he turned to management models, first of all Google's model for building winning teams with its five components: structure and clarity, personal meaning for the employee, dependability, meaning the knowledge that I am not alone, and psychological safety. The practical recommendations: be there when an employee gets stuck, hold daily team meetings and personal mid-day check-ins, and ask simple questions like how are you today and how can I help.
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Stage 5: Strategic Thinking and Running the Business
This stage deals with the system beyond the team: organizational navigation and politics, the stakeholder map, strategic thinking, market trends and AI, entrepreneurship and business ownership.
To the full guide on strategic thinking and running the business →
- Managing Up & Organizational Politics 13
- Career Progression & Role Transitions 7
- Entrepreneurship & Founder Support 3
- AI & the Future of Work 2
- Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty 1
Managing Up & Organizational Politics
Deciding Your Response in Advance, With a Toxic Manager
A manager he coaches walked into the room and started venting before he even sat down. The story: after the kickoff of a new project, his manager said he trusts him completely and does not want to micromanage, and for a week now has been dodging the meeting where he is supposed to be updated about a problem, then he heard in the hallway that the project is delayed. The claim: even if your manager is toxic, you still need to be able to manage effective communication with them, which will not make you drinking buddies but will make the relationship productive.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Stakeholder Map
A stakeholder map is a simple strategic tool that helps any employee at any level navigate and build influence, and almost no one uses it. It is the first task he gives almost every manager he coaches. The tool maps who influences or is affected by the activity, what their interests are and how to communicate with them effectively, and quotes Simon Sinek that the goal is not controlling people but empowering them. He details the benefit by level, from the new employee who gets a compass for understanding the organizational system to the manager who must balance the business vision with the needs of the leading teams.
Read the post on LinkedIn →What, So What, Now What
A follow-up to the previous post about building a message for senior managers, now extended to any interaction with colleagues, partners or teams. Quotes Frank Luntz that it is not what you say but what people hear. The claim: when presenting a topic to a group, those present ask themselves three questions, why should this matter to me, what do I get out of it and what does it require of me. The framework he offers in answer is also built on three questions: What, So What and Now What. He adds at the end that sharp-eyed readers will notice many of his posts open with the drum roll model.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Communicating With Senior Leadership
A manager at a large organization said she had been preparing for a week for fifteen minutes with the CEO and still was not satisfied with how to present. The claim: you can learn this in five minutes, but first you must understand the state of mind of senior managers, who are very busy, responsible for many domains, and whose most precious resource is time that everyone wants more of. The result is low attention and strong filtering mechanisms, so they ask themselves three questions: why should this matter to me, why now, and why is the person talking to me the right one.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Maybe You Are the Problem
A follow-up to the previous post that gave red flags for identifying a toxic manager, now the reverse: in a relationship, including with the boss, it takes two to tango, and you may be the employee who cannot be trusted, which is why your manager is controlling and micromanages. He lists points for self-examination, among them not accepting authority (going behind the superior's back, not updating in conversations with colleagues from other teams) and competing with the manager instead of collaborating. The bottom line: take responsibility for the situation and adopt a proactive approach, because the key to a successful relationship depends on you too.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Red Flags for a Toxic Manager
The opening claim: no relationship in an organization is more critical than the one between an employee and their manager, and some say your manager is responsible for your mental health more than your therapist. He brings a statistic that 50% of employees and managers do not get along with their manager, and presents a list of red flags for identifying a toxic manager: a manager focused on themselves who makes decisions on personal considerations, lack of support and withholding resources for growth, micromanagement and control, and inability to listen or accept feedback.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Nemawashi, Laying the Groundwork Before the Conversation
A manager new to a senior role opened a meeting with an update on a crisis with the organization's veteran employee, a crisis that rolled up to the CEO, who summoned both for a conversation in two days. When asked what would happen in that conversation, the manager looked at him surprised and answered 'I don't know, I will find out in the conversation.' This reminded him of Nemawashi, an informal Japanese business process for building consensus and broad agreement before making decisions, through conversations with those involved and gathering support and feedback before the formal announcement. He closes that had the manager had an informal communication channel with the CEO, he could have gotten a picture in advance and even delivered his messages before the conversation.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Managing Conflict
Conflicts are a byproduct of every organization: every organization has teams with different goals, and wherever those conditions exist natural friction and competition for resources arise. The moment people are divided into groups, a game of musical chairs begins. He brings research by The Myers & Briggs Company showing that between 18% and 36% of managers' work time goes to managing disputes instead of projects and developing employees. Quotes Kenneth Kaye that every conflict is rich in both positive and negative potential, and suggests a graded exercise: diagnose the personal challenge, list tasks, rank them one to five by ability to perform them today, order from easy to hard and begin with the first task in a safe situation.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Being at Ease With Senior Leadership
In a workshop for first-time managers, one participant said that in the end he is just an employee responsible for other employees, and that every time he talks with a senior manager or a senior forum he feels they are testing him and making it hard on purpose, and the pressure makes him stammer. Quotes Grace Murray Hopper on leadership as a two-way street. His explanation: senior managers are very skilled, have no time to wait for an answer or make you comfortable, ask hard questions and expect sharp answers, and most will indeed test you to see what you are made of. The closing tip: know in advance what each senior person needs to hear, and build your answer in a structure of information, context and remaining actions.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Organizational Politics
He says he started writing the post four times from different angles, and all were advice on developing a culture that weakens organizational politics, but the odds of eliminating it entirely are low and you need to understand how to carve a path within it. He admits he does not like the term organizational politics because of the negative feeling it carries, and points out that this perception makes us attribute negative personal traits to colleagues and functions and turn them into a demon making illogical decisions. The conclusion: organizational politics is neither playing the game nor something to run from, but remembering when to stop, understanding the people we work with and working with them more effectively.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Gaslighting in the Workplace
A frustrated manager called to ask if he also works privately, and opened by saying his manager keeps changing the department's targets, promises to reward employees and then changes the promotion criteria after they have already met them. The last straw: after a year working on a project and succeeding beyond expectations, the manager explained why it was not good enough. Ronen told him this is actually gaslighting, and the manager laughed because he thought it existed only in romantic relationships. He explains that gaslighting is a kind of psychological abuse that undermines the victim's sense of reality and can exist in any relationship. He suggests coping steps, including using a feedback conversation tool to talk about the act itself, setting clear boundaries in communication, and, if it does not work, escalating to HR or to the manager's manager.
Read the post on LinkedIn →A Senior Manager Has to Be Multilingual
Not about international languages but about the ability to communicate in different languages inside the organization. The background: he was present at a shouting meeting the participants called a work meeting, among the sales, product and development departments. The salesperson explained the customer would buy only with one feature, the product person refused to give up another feature, and the developer explained the customer is simply wrong. What astonished him: each participant thought the others did not understand and were unprofessional. The explanation: every sub-specialty has its own work methods, starting assumptions, jargon and goals, and as at the Tower of Babel each speaks a different language. The tools he offers include clarifying terms to bridge the communication gap, and checking how the task connects to the organizational vision from the point of view of the department facing you.
Read the post on LinkedIn →I Wish I Were More Pragmatic
A manager opened a meeting not with a greeting but with a declaration, and the story burst out of her: she went to the CEO for a conversation about firing a poor employee who had already had two wake-up conversations and the team is collapsing because of him, and the CEO dodged the decision and explained why it was not the time and why to give another chance. The most frustrating part for her: it is always like this with him, she knew in advance it would happen, and once he started her brain said 'here it goes' and she just froze. The solution he offers is based on proper preparation, and is simpler than it sounds: ask yourself what my main goal is in this meeting, how I expect the other side to respond, build possible scenarios and responses in advance, and in what state, nervous, composed, inclusive or calm, I want to be in the meeting.
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Career Progression & Role Transitions
From Work Experience to Thinking in Terms of Skills
AI has already changed the way we work, and nobody really knows what the future will look like. The change requires organizations to move from hiring based on similar past experience to hiring based on a collection of skills and adaptability. The personal conclusion: stop seeing yourself as someone with relevant experience and start thinking in terms of skills. The guiding question: if you could not lean on your job title to explain what you do, what would you say? He lists a range of skills, including leadership communication whose role is to create trust and movement to action and not just transfer information.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Strategic Thinking, One Range Up
The fourth and last post in the series on what to do to advance in an organization, after the posts on changing self-perception, on communicating successes without being seen as arrogant, and on choosing the right tasks. He defines strategic thinking as the ability to look at reality through a systemic, forward-looking perspective, identify patterns and trends and make decisions based on them. The closing claim: when strategic thinking becomes a habit, visibility in the organization improves not because you made noise but because your impact is clear to those around you.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Management Tasks Worth Taking On Before the Promotion
The third post in the series on what to do to advance. The claim: most people believe the work will speak for itself, and in most cases that is not true. For people to see you as a worthy candidate, managers have to believe you will succeed at the management tasks of the next role, so you need to choose tasks from the next role and not only increase visibility. He shares that he worked that week with a coachee who was skipped in the promotion round. The summary: promotion to management roles usually does not happen by chance, it is the result of the right choices.
Read the post on LinkedIn →How to Communicate Your Successes
The second post in the series on advancing at work. Opens with the admission that the claim that those who make noise are the ones who advance is fairly true, because in most organizations the decision on promotion or a raise is made two or three levels above you, by a manager who will not know in detail what your contribution is. He addresses directly the recurring claim 'but I am an introvert and that is just not me', and admits it is harder for introverts. The bottom line: the responsibility to communicate your work is yours, and the way is to act in your own way and not someone else's.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Mapping Before You Step Into a New Role
Entering a new management role challenges everyone, and almost everyone has advice, usually bad and irrelevant: be assertive, do not share emotions at work, always know all the answers. That same week three coachees conveyed the same difficulty, though they are different people with different values, management levels and a different challenge each. On close examination he found a common denominator: none of them stopped at the entrance to the role to map the role and the organization and build a work plan on that basis. He presents a mapping process that examines, among other things, the gap between expectation and reality, employee and manager feedback, and the areas you know you struggle with, ending with choosing three big tasks for the coming quarter and approving them with management.
Read the post on LinkedIn →The Real Challenge Arrives in Your Second Management Role
Being a director or more senior in the hierarchy is a role that feels stuck in the middle: on one hand leading dozens or hundreds of people, on the other being squeezed from every direction, expected to think strategically at the macro level and to master all the small details, almost without support. The claim: most companies offer training and coaching for first management roles and very little, if any, for senior managers. He connects it to a previous post about the feeling that you cannot turn to the boss with managerial dilemmas without being seen as helpless, and notes that most senior managers advanced to get there on the run.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Don't Wait for the Organization to Train You
The claim: as managers you can forget about getting training from the organization, you need to take care of yourself. He cites a 2015 Gallup survey in which only 18% of managers reported receiving any training from their organization, and a LinkedIn survey in which 27% of respondents do not want a management role because there is no training. Then the reversal: he thinks it is good that this is the situation, because we live in a world where there is no more ownership of knowledge and anyone can find with a simple search all the models relevant to their problem, especially since every manager, role and situation is unique. We moved from a world where the holder of knowledge and answers is whoever is appointed to a management role to a world where the manager is the one who knows how to ask the right questions. The practical recommendation: be the first to volunteer for any complex project, because those allow learning by doing and come with access to other managers and forgiveness for mistakes.
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Entrepreneurship & Founder Support
The Courage to Pivot
Two young founders he coaches concluded that their demo does not work and they need to change direction, and their courage surprised him, because after hours, budgets and emotional resources it is easier to convince ourselves the problem is external, the timing is wrong or the audience is wrong. He recalls the sunk cost research and Churchill on success as the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. A third founder asked him why you need to derive the MVP from the vision at all. The bottom line: a pivot is not failure but progress based on real learning from the market.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Getting Off the Hamster Wheel
The English term hamster wheel describes someone who runs and strains and in practice does not advance, and Hebrew has no equivalent expression but the experience exists. He brings data that 58% of small business owners feel stuck and only 8% of people manage to realize their plans. He understands the entrepreneur who comes to him: when you see only the mountains of tasks and everything is urgent and important, it is hard to see other options. He offers five steps for getting off the wheel, and stresses you should not wait for the perfect moment and that the way requires courage and persistence. He signs off with a pointer to a post on building an advisory panel.
Read the post on LinkedIn →Even a Solopreneur Needs a Support System
One of the hot definitions today is Solopreneur, someone who starts a business and in the early stage does everything alone, and he is one himself despite the collaborations he initiates. It took him time to realize that even with a defined vision and work plan he needs a strong support system, not to ease loneliness but to deal with dilemmas and decision junctions: how to decide, what my decision-making mechanism is, and above all who challenges my decisions. He admits the cobbler's children go barefoot, since this is exactly the service he gives CEOs, and recalls that even Steve Jobs took walks with Bill Campbell. The recommendation: surround yourself with people you trust and use the power of the group.
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AI & the Future of Work
Vertical Multi-Layer Managers
AI agents are erasing the classic management layers. A 2026 article by Van Quaquebeke, Gazdag & Lee calls an employee who manages a fleet of semi-autonomous agents a vertical multi-layer manager, a person who through the day switches hats between strategist, coordinator and supervisor. An entire hierarchy collapsed into one person, with a price of cognitive load, loss of meaning and damage to the sense of contribution. The solution the article proposes: reflection spaces and identity anchors.
Read the post on LinkedIn →AI Isn't Replacing Employees, It's Forcing Organizations to Move Faster
YouTube offered its employees severance grants as part of a reorganization around AI, Amazon announced layoffs of over 10,000 employees, and the HP CEO announced a similar intention. The automatic reaction is that AI is replacing employees, but anyone who works with the tools knows the agents are still far from that. The claim: AI is a disruptive technology, and as Amazon understood in 1995 what a store on the internet would look like, it now has to understand what a store in the AI world will look like. The managerial conclusion: on the way to change you must preserve or rebuild the sense of value and belonging of the employees who stay, because on stable ground people start to run.
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Leadership in Crisis & Uncertainty
Why 2,000 CEOs Left in 2024
In 2024 about 2,000 CEOs left their roles, a record number, while fewer people are willing to step into their shoes. According to a Harvard Business Review article, they left not because they are not good but because nobody prepared them for an era in which leadership is measured by the ability to stand and lead through the amount and frequency of chaos that exists, from the technological chaos of the AI revolution to pandemics and wars. The claim: we are at a fundamental turning point in the CEO role, which requires a new set of behaviors and skills and not hard skills.
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