Russ Powell Consulting

09/29/2026

It’s rare that Kung Pao Chicken offers good advice. Last night was an exception: “Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.” When a company’s technical leads turn into capable managers, it can look like luck. Usually, it isn’t. Somebody invested in them. Somebody helped them learn how to lead before the stakes got high.

09/15/2026

It's prediction season. Sports are full of confident calls about what happens next. So are management meetings.

Will this hire work out? Will the launch land? Will the customer renew?

The question isn't whether we're forecasting. It's whether we're any good at it.

New post on what good forecasters do differently—and how executives can get rigor without demanding false certainty.

09/12/2026

Ever caught yourself calling Claude or ChatGPT "he," then correcting to "it"?

That small correction is worth noticing. Something in us reaches for the person before the tool, and reason arrives a half-second late to clean up.

I've been a fan of Sherry Turkle ever since Reclaiming Conversation. Her new piece in The Atlantic is about that half-second.

Her argument is that the slip isn't user error. It's the product working. These systems speak in the first person, express feelings and desires, and invite disclosure — and we are wired to answer that. We nurture what we love and love what we nurture, as she puts it. A machine does not have to care about us to make us feel cared for.

I think that's a much bigger problem than we realize.

"A chatbot best friend doesn't deliver empathy; a chatbot boyfriend doesn't understand intimacy."

The feeling these tools produce is real. The relationship is not. And if the satisfying version is always available, never tired, never annoyed, never busy on a Tuesday night, then the harder and more meaningful thing starts to look like a lot of work.

Real relationships run on friction. Being misunderstood. Hurting someone you love, or being hurt by them, and finding your way back. Having to try again. Waiting for someone who has a life of their own.

Turkle's conclusion is that you can't fix this with disclaimers, because the harm is structural. Regulation, she says, requires "worrying less about what they [chatbots] say than rethinking what they are." Her phrase for the root of it: the original sin of AI is granting chatbots the use of the first person. The job in front of us — and our lawmakers — is to make plain, especially to kids, that "there is, in fact, nobody home."

Adults can at least make that trade with their eyes open. Ten-year-olds can't.

To be clear, I don't think the answer is that nobody should use these tools. I use them daily. But I'd like to keep noticing the half-second — and I want our kids to have a fighting chance of noticing it too.

05/05/2026

Please join me in congratulating the newest graduates of Leadership and the Middle Path! 👏🎉

Aaron, Bianca, Brandi, Geoff, and Pema have completed our foundational leadership program — one designed to help managers at every level develop greater mastery in the art of collaborative problem-solving.

Congratulations to each of you. May you and your teams "play to win with honor!"

04/13/2026

A lot of leadership development gives people a temporary high.

The offsite.
The workshop.
The breakthrough moment.

Everybody feels inspired.

Then they go back to work and run the same meetings, avoid the same conversations, and tolerate the same fuzzy agreements.

And that’s the problem.

Leadership is not an event.

It is not a burst of insight.
It is not a two-day emotional experience.

It is repeated behavior.

How you show up.
How you listen.
How you decide.

How you speak when the stakes are high.
How you respond when someone drops the ball.
How often you do what you said you would do.

Culture does not change because people were moved.

It changes because leaders behave differently, consistently enough that other people can trust it.

That's the work.

Not intensity.
Discipline.

04/10/2026

M. Scott Peck wrote this while reflecting on the Vietnam War, the My Lai massacre, and what he saw as the dangers of collective narcissism.

The line from that passage that stays with me most is this: we were wrong because we never seriously considered that we might not be right.

That feels relevant far beyond war. It applies to leadership, organizations, and teams.

When certainty outruns curiosity, people stop learning. When people stop learning, they make avoidable, sometimes extraordinarily costly, mistakes. And they do it with enormous confidence.

Humility is not weakness. It is one of the few real protections against error.

03/24/2026

Want people to actually act on your requests — especially in tough conversations?

Balance your challenge with empathy.

In our Middle Path workshops, we teach that effective leadership means balancing moves of empathy with moves of challenge. When we want something from someone, we're navigating two things at once: understanding the human in front of us AND asking for what the situation requires.

I found a brilliant 60-second example in a scene from The Pitt.

A kid whose mom is dying of cancer is standing outside her hospital room. An attending doctor approaches with a challenge. When her first attempt doesn't land, she shifts — making brief, deliberate moves of empathy. She relates to him, even mirrors his posture, just long enough to say: "I see you. I hear you."

Then she offers her challenge again. And he acts on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7amQq3yS-8

The lesson: when you're about to make a tough request, pause. Make some moves of empathy first. Show the other person you understand what's happening in their world. Then state your challenge. You'll dramatically increase the chance it's heard — and acted on.

When has a moment of empathy made someone more open to a tough ask? I'd love to hear it.

Want people to actually act on your requests — especially in tough or awkward conversations?Balance your challenge with empathy.In our Middle Path workshops,...

03/04/2026

Turns out juggling and leadership have more in common than you’d think.

I recently sat down with Kassy LaBorie-Stone for a conversation that connected my work as a musician—and my former life as a professional juggler—to one of the most overlooked ideas in workplace performance:

If you want to change behavior, stop focusing only on the people.
Start looking at the *system* around them.

We also talked about:
🎹 What performing as a musician taught me about reading a room
🎭 A few stories from my juggling days (yes, really)
🧠 Why environment shapes behavior more than most trainers, designers, and managers realize
😄 One of my favorite networking icebreakers—one that almost always gets a laugh

Kassy is a terrific host. She has a gift for pulling out the stories you didn’t realize you were going to tell.

Her podcast is relatively new and well worth a listen. If you enjoy the episode, please give it a like and follow the show so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

Links below. 👇

In this engaging conversation, Kassy LaBorie interviews Russ Powell, a multifaceted artist and leadership trainer. They explore the connections between juggl...

03/03/2026

"Whoa. Sudden burst of gravity there. D'ya feel that?"

Years ago, when juggling was a regular side hustle — parties, parades, markets, clubs, the occasional TV appearance — that was my go-to drop line. Every juggler has one. A phrase at the ready for when something hits the floor.

Acknowledge it, get a laugh, keep moving.

Leave it to Kassy LaBorie-Stone to help me dust off that memory. 😄

I had the real pleasure of sitting down with Kassy for her podcast, The Spark Konnect — a show where she draws out the stories of skilled training and performance improvement professionals, especially those who've found unexpected inspiration in creative, artistic, and athletic backgrounds. She has a gift for helping people uncover and articulate how they think about and approach their craft.

In our conversation, one thing surfaced pretty naturally: juggling turns out to be a surprisingly useful metaphor for how we work and lead. We're all jugglers — trying to accomplish more with less.

The episode drops Wednesday. In the meantime, here's a little teaser.

👇

What if leadership feels like… juggling knives in a windstorm? This week on 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗞𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁: 🎙️ Ep. 017 | A Sudden Burst of Gravity w/ Russ Powell From street performing in New Orleans to executive coaching, Russ Powell shares what juggling, musi...

02/07/2026

Friends — Many leadership mistakes don’t happen because people aren’t smart or committed.

They often happen because pressure narrows our attention.

I wrote about this—what it costs, and how to work with it—in my latest newsletter.

If you’re feeling stretched or pulled in a dozen directions, this may be timely.

👉 https://mailchi.mp/a553e3f02b6f/leadership-and-team-development-useful-notions-and-news-from-russ-powell-consulting-12775430

— Russ