ClickCease
Communication, Leadership, Networking, Relationship, Social Media
Mike Edwards
Business Blind Spots: Your customers’ insights ...

The fastest way to lose sight of your business is to stop listening to your customers. What you think is happening inside your company and what your customers are actually experiencing might be two completely different stories. Too often, leaders rely on assumptions instead of real feedback—and that gap can cost you growth, loyalty, and trust.

In this post, Convene Chair Mike Edwards shares how to check in with your customers in meaningful, non-intrusive ways—and how to turn their insights into quick, high-impact improvements.

Business Blind Spots: Your customers’ insights are your biggest growth opportunity—if you listen
Michael Johnson
A Christian Business Owner's Guide to Scale

Are business growth and your faith opposed? Christian leaders often find themselves at a crossroads, seeking to balance ambition with their faith-based values. The desire to scale operations and achieve greater impact can sometimes feel at odds with the principles of service, integrity, and stewardship that underpin their beliefs.

Yet, scaling a business and adhering to Christian values are not mutually exclusive. In fact, by integrating biblical wisdom with sound business practices, Christian leaders can unlock a path to sustainable growth that aligns with their faith and honors God's purpose for their endeavors.

A Christian Business Owner's Guide to Scale
Dave Ulrich
Discovering Clarity in Chaos: How to Become a ...

In an ever-changing world filled with uncertainty, leaders face a critical choice—become a hostage to chaos or a master of clarity. In this insightful article, Oleg Konovalov and Dave Ulrich explore how leaders can navigate volatile times with confidence. Through research-backed strategies, they provide seven actionable steps to transform uncertainty into structured success. If you’re ready to rise above the noise and bring clarity to your leadership, this is a must-read.

Discovering Clarity in Chaos: How to Become a Master of Clarity—Not a Hostage of Chaos
Faith, Leadership
Andy Beal
Leadership Lessons from Jesus’ Example

What if God was one of us?

Convene Chair Andy Beal recently shared a powerful reflection on leadership, inspired by The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey.

When we think about Jesus, we don’t see power and prestige—we see humility, approachability, and courage. Isn’t that the kind of leader we all want to follow?

As leaders, we must ask: Are we leading with these same godly qualities, or are we relying on power and position?

Great leadership starts with character worth following.

Leadership Lessons from Jesus’ Example
Marketplace Chaplains
How Leaders and Chaplains Transform Workplace ...

Loneliness in the workplace is more than just an emotional struggle—it’s a leadership challenge that can impact productivity, employee engagement, and overall company culture. In today’s fast-paced business world, many leaders feel the weight of isolation, and their teams often experience the same sense of disconnection. But the good news is that leaders have the power to create environments where people feel valued, supported, and connected.

At Convene, we are passionate about helping faith-driven business leaders cultivate workplaces where people thrive—both professionally and spiritually. That’s why we’re excited to share an insightful article from our friends at Marketplace Chaplains, an organization dedicated to providing care and support to employees through workplace chaplaincy.

We encourage you to read the full article from Marketplace Chaplains and discover how you can implement these insights into your own leadership journey.

How Leaders and Chaplains Transform Workplace Loneliness

A Safe Place To Fall

Leaders often overestimate how likely others are to share important information with them.  My own painful experience illustrates this truth.

When my firstborn (now 24 years old) was in high school, she woke me up at 2am to share something that was intensely personal and important to her.  I got irritated at being awakened.  I snapped at her to go back to bed– that her issue wasn’t that big a deal.  And I promptly fell back to sleep.

I forgot all about this until 4 years later, when she reminded me of the incident and revealed that she counted that as the worst day of her life.  She had felt devalued and abandoned.  And she stopped believing that I was a safe place to fall.

It grieved me to hear how my carelessness and selfishness was so damaging to our relationship.  I had been living for four years under the delusion that if she got in a bind and needed help, she would confide in me.  But I had lost the right to be her confidante, because when she courageously revealed her truth years ago, I didn’t give her a soft landing.  Instead, I punished her revelation.

Psychological safety is the condition in which members of a team courageously reveal their thinking and are supported in that revelation.

Imagine a high-jumper at a track meet leaping over the bar.  She is taking a risk by jumping (analogous to the team member sharing his or her truth).  The thick landing pad cushions her fall (analogous to the supportive response from the rest of the team).  If there is no landing pad, she falls onto the pavement and incurs pain (at minimum) or serious injury.  If the pad is soft, she hustles off the mat, readies herself for the next jump, and risks again.

What does a leap look like?  Here are five categories of truths that take courage to reveal:

  • Uncomfortable chapters in our life stories

  • Errors, ignorance, failure

  • Ideas that are zany, risky, even foolish

  • Performance feedback that will be hard for others to hear

  • Challenges to sacred cows

What does a soft landing look like?  Some ways teams actively support courageous revelation:

  • Acknowledging  (“What stands out to me…”)

  • Accepting others’ emotions  (“It seems like you feel…”)

  • Curiosity to learn more  (“Tell me more about…”)

  • Thankfulness  (“I’m glad you shared that because…”)

What does a hard landing look like?  Some ways teams punish revelation:

  • Hijacking  (“That reminds me of a story…”)

  • Fixing  (“So here’s what you need to do…”)

  • Spinning Positive  (“I’m sure it will work out…”)

  • Apathy  (“No questions.  Is it my turn?”)

Recent conversations with different CEO clients (who are each working to build psychological safety on their executive teams) have led me to several conclusions:

  1. Trust and psychological safety share a common characteristic:  they both take time to build and can be lost in an instant.  Take care as you build, and safeguard what you’ve built.

  2. You may not be as safe for others as you think you are.  Just as I assumed I was safe for my daughter, there might be incidents that you’ve forgotten (but others haven’t) that are keeping them from taking the leap.  There’s a simple way to find out if such incidents have occurred, so that you can start repairing the damage: access your humility and curiosity, then ask each individual on your team.

  3. The team leader can’t create psychological safety on their own– it’s too heavy a lift for one person.  Even if you are modeling the behaviors required (revealing, and supporting others’ revelation), it won’t be enough.  You personally being supportive (as the team leader) is necessary but not sufficient.  Whereas trust is a 1:1 construct, psychological safety is a team construct(thanks to Kate Price for this insight).  It requires full group participation.

  4. The bigger the team, the more challenging it is to build psychological safety.  With more relationships to manage, each individual has to invest greater energy to reveal, and to support others.  Beyond 8 members, it starts getting more difficult.

  5. Creating psychological safety requires active support, not just the absence of punishment.  Think of a neutral response to courageous revelation as a 1.5-inch-thick mat.  It may be enough to prevent catastrophic injury, but it isn’t enough to make a jumper want to leap again.  Creating an expectation (and shared accountability) around desired behaviors builds a thicker landing pad.

This is a journey.  I know we have work to do on the Kairos team to build more psychological safety.  We’re making progress together, and I’m striving to fully own my part.

More importantly, I’m re-earning the right to hear my daughter’s truth.  When she does take a risk, I’m providing her as soft a landing as I can.  She has fierce courage.  And I’m maturing into deeper levels of safety as her father.  It’s a good combination.

There is much work ahead, and I like our trajectory.

About The Author

Chip Neidigh is Founder and CEO at Kairos, where he and his team help CEOs and their executive teams build new awareness and capabilities to navigate inflection points and enter new chapters of growth. 

3 Principles of Hope That Enable Transitions

3 Principles of Hope That Enable Transitions

As we find ourselves mid-October and a blink away from a new calendar year, it is an opportunity to prepare for how we view transitions. Transitions allow for reflection and renewal, for letting go and beginning anew, and for learning from the past and creating the future. Instead of laying out trends for the next year, I would like to comment on a fundamental enabler of any transition: hope. Leaders who want to improve, CEO’s who work toward excellence, HR professionals who aspire to deliver more value, and employees who seek well-being all achieve their transitions by realizing hope.

Hope integrates many of the positive traits that shape transitions for others and matter to me personally: learning, patience, service, faith, humility, optimism, gratitude, and so forth. I send hundreds of formal and informal e-mails every month to invite people to programs, to thank people for attending programs, to check in on those I mentor, and to stay connected to those I care about. I begin almost every one of these notes with “Hope you are well.” Hope is one of my personal desires, tag lines, and biases and an enabler of any transition.

If I could implant one trait in my family, friends, and colleagues who are undergoing continual transition, it would be hope. 

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Five Reasons to Build a People-first, Purpose-driven Company

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Five Reasons to Build a People-first, Purpose-driven Company

If you're a business owner or a CEO looking for ways to grow and improve your company, then Five Reasons to Build a People-first, Purpose-driven Company, by Brian Audia will give you a front-row seat to learning key principles you can implement in your business to outperform your peers!

World Vision is Responding Across Multiple States

World Vision is Responding Across Multiple States

Ten days after Hurricane Helene made landfall in the U.S. as the second deadliest storm to hit the U.S. this century, World Vision response teams are still on the ground working with partners to address the most urgent needs. 

In North Carolina and other areas, catastrophic flooding has destroyed many roads and bridges, cutting off communities without basic supplies like food and clean water. Communication has also been very challenging for the region, as many cell towers are down.

Three Key Elements of a Flourishing Business

Three Key Elements of a Flourishing Business

In today’s competitive landscape, businesses relentlessly pursue results, but not all results are created equal. While financial profit is often the primary goal, focusing solely on maximizing shareholder value can lead to negative consequences like labor abuses, environmental damage, and unethical practices. Instead, businesses should aim for something greater: fostering Economic, Social, and Spiritual Capital, creating a flourishing environment for all stakeholders.

To achieve this, leaders need three key components: a long-term coach to guide them through challenges, a trusted group of peers for support and accountability, and a principle-driven operating system to ensure that values are integrated into the business. By embracing these elements, businesses can pursue not just financial success, but true, holistic flourishing.

Ready to learn more about stewarding a High Impact Business?