Last updated on June 10th, 2026

In the News · The Post-Standard / syracuse.com

I was honored to be featured in The Post-Standard’s Sunday “Conversations on Leadership” series, in a wide-ranging interview with Marie Morelli about how leadership has changed in the 21st century. The piece ran in the March 15, 2026 print edition and online at syracuse.com and thisiscny.com. We talked about why I believe leadership today is less about one person’s brilliant idea and more about what committed teams can accomplish together — along with psychological safety, the changes the pandemic brought to the workplace, AI, work-life harmony, and what I’d most want to change about our community.

As it appeared in print — The Post-Standard, March 15, 2026. Click to read the full interview at thisiscny.com.

A few of the themes we covered

On collective leadership: so much of my work is about helping organizations move past the old command-and-control model toward distributed, collective leadership — building teams that share information, understand one another’s strengths, and make decisions together rather than relying on a single person at the top.

On psychological safety: one idea I come back to often is how much it matters for people to feel safe being honest at work. As I put it in the interview:

“Psychological safety means I can make a mistake and apologize, I can ask for help, or I can say, ‘I don’t know.’”

On everyday leadership: I believe leaders are made, not born — and you don’t need a formal title to be one. Being a leader simply means influencing other people to act, which is something any of us can do from wherever we sit.

We also talked about the BANI world we’re navigating since the pandemic — brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible — and why adaptability and flexibility have become the most important leadership competencies, along with cultures of trust and emotional intelligence.

One quote I shared that captures my whole philosophy is the line often attributed to Margaret Mead — that a small group of thoughtful, committed people is the only thing that has ever changed the world. That belief in the power of teams is really at the heart of everything we do at Insight Business Works.

Read the full interview →

Published by The Post-Standard / syracuse.com. © Advance Local Media LLC; shared here with a link to the original.