Time is our most coveted and non-renewable resource. My research holds a huge amount of substance, and I have huge passion to share it — and I respect that not all of it is relevant for a particular client or team, while the time they can spend with me is often limited. As a way to practice my respect for the time and attention people give me, before starting a course I ask them about their most difficult struggles around leadership, relationships, and workplace culture. Based on their answers, I develop the distillation of my data the best serves their needs, and then follow up on their feedback about how efficient is our time investment.

As values are always reciprocal, I expect my clients to respect my time in kind. If a team or an individual client thinks my work isn't the right fit for their tasks, I ask them to be clear about that as soon as possible. The last thing we all want to invest our time into activities where we don't contribute value and don't obtain value — even if corporate headquarters are okay with spending funds on those.

"Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." One of my academic mentors, the NYT-best-selling author and researcher Brené Brown, chose this sentence as a tagline for her most recent leadership book. I can't emphasize enough how urgent this finding is in the Western corporate world. We're all conditioned to believe that niceness is the utmost virtue when navigating our relationships with customers, colleagues, or supervisors. That always keeping on a smile and saying "Fine!" and "Great!!" and "Sure!!!" and mastering evasive replies to tough board meeting questions and uncomfortable feedback sessions makes us safe and successful.

In fact, niceness keeps us miserable and inefficient. Collectively and individually. And, sure as hell, it has nothing to do with kindness.

Long-term efficiency, just like kindness, requires clarity around intentions, feelings, and proceedings. It requires being clear about what you're willing and not willing to negotiate. It requires developing the skills to say "No" in an appropriate way when you're not going to do something, instead of "Maybe"; to communicate tough feedback in a empatethic and generous way when someone has to be transferred away from their current position; and to put closure on relationships that despite your best effort no longer serve, as opposed to ignoring emails and not returning calls.

Clarity has also to be practiced around our mistakes and shortcomings, which leads me to the its closest sibling: courage.

In my work and my life, I choose what's right over what's fun, fast, and easy; I choose truth over comfort; and I make both strategic and small decisions from the heart, not from the fear. I show up, speak up, and stand for what matters to me and what impacts other people. I speak truth to bullshit, and truth to power, staying civil at the same time. I challenge my own assumptions by practicing critical awareness and explore my own biases to deliver best results to my clients. I stay away from using how-tos, easy fixes, unrealistic promises, and other rhetorical manipulations to sell my work — even though my training in cognitive biases allows me to leverage those.

For me and the leadership students I've taught over the years, courage also means knowing to distinguish smart risks from reckless endeavors — especially when we're in positions where our actions have big and long-lasting ramifications. Being truly brave involves accurately assesing costs and benefits, monetary and non-monetary, short-term and long-term, before making every decision. I would be happy to tell you that courage only requires you to proceed knowing that you may fail. But in fact, it demands that you realize you will, at some point, fail. Therefore, when incorporating courage into our culture, we have to develop the skills to judge what projects, decisions, and policies are worth implementing even if they fail — and have a contingency plan to deploy when they do.

I question "either... or..." framings and often end up evolving to "both .. and..." framings. I come from both quantitative and qualitative research. And, in qualitative research, one of the best measures of our individual and collective intellect is the capacity for paradox — i.e. the ability to hold in your mind, and act upon, seemingly competing ideas. In neuroscience, that's how they say you stretch your brain and start to see beyond the perspective of your individual nose.

Our general culture is full of dichotomies: black or white, good or evil, us or them, emotions or logic, money or ethics, crush or be crushed... The list could go on for pages, but these false, contagious narratives exploiting our hardcoded cognitive biases not only cause wars, political clashes, and authoritarian backlashes. They have become pervasive in our corporate cultures as well. Ironically, when doing my work in the most progressive countries, I was quite shocked to see how trivialized, distorted narratives around identity (falsely marketed as feminism and diversity policies) were heedlessly implemented at the cost of excluding talent from opportunity, reinforcing oppressive models of power, fostering shame culture and sabotaging accountability.

What was missing here the capacity for paradox, the ability to spot bullshit, and the failure to adopt a multifaceted perspective around complex issues related to identity, such as patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, ableism, classism etc. While tackling them has a huge impact on the long-term success of an organization, they cannot be tackled in trivial ways. Essentially, we had to work on the same concept that underpins real empathy and quality forecasting — the so-called dragonfly eye. The metaphor here refers to the fact humans have the one and only lens that we see the world through, and that lens is soldered into our eye. A dragonfly eye, by contrast, has a huge surface covered by thousand of lenses, each looking at the world from a different angle, and then the visual information from each flows into the processing brain. The dragonfly, in fact, sees more and better than a human.

While we cannot change the single-lensed anatomy of our visual system, we can — and should — do that with our cognition. Our lenses on everything, including corporate tasks, policies, and struggles, are shaped by age, education, race, gender, and other arbitrary circumstances. Making best decisions requires seeing beyond our lens and aggregating other people's perspectives into our judgment, without losing our own. That's uncomfortable and difficult, but doable. That's why neuroscientists call it the stretching of the brain. The brain you get as a result is truly worth it.

I do what I say and I say what I do. I only take commitments that I've reasons to believe I can deliver, within the arranged timeframe and at the arranged quality. I don't overcommit to boost someone's perception of my worth, because I know my worth, and I'm not in the business of negotiating it.

By modeling reliability, and helping my clients understand things that get in its way amidst corporate routine, I contribute to creating a culture of trust in the workplace. We cannot trust each other unless we know that we can rely on each other, and that our words reflect our true intentions, thoughts, and feelings. That's how reliability brings us full circle to clarity and courage.

We humans are a social species. Much as our culture perpetuates the mythology of individualism and self-sufficiency, it cannot change the reality that we are inherently dependent upon one another in ways we often don't even realize. What it also means is that belonging is a basic human need — and that holds true across family, workplace, school, and all areas of life. In the absence of it, we cannot feel safe and bring forth our best potential. Belonging, especially for non-native English speakers, is often confused with fitting in, and both small teams nad large corporations often have this confusion embedded into the culture.

The difference quite simply is that fitting in requires you to change who you are, while belonging demands that you be who you are. If this still sounds too poetic, let me break it down prosaically: a fitting-in culture makes every employee to fit a certain cognitive, emotional, and behavioral mold, in order to be approved, promoted, and rewarded. A belonging culture not just permits, but celebrates people for showing up as they are in the workplace, because it operates on the understanding that diversity of ideas and perspectives underpins resilience, innovation, and creativity.

Fitting-in cultures are inherently related to power-over and shame, while belonging cultures fairly distribute power and accountability. If you're a corporate leader in the modern highly competetive global economy, the last you want is for your employess to have to fit in, instead of belonging, at the workplace.

Another consequence of the social nature of our species, empathy is crucial to practice — but somehow there's so many cultural misconceptions surrounding it.

Empathy is the skillset and practice (not just an attitude) of being fully present with someone in their emotion and accepting that emotion as valid regardless of how we see the situation that caused it. Empathy is at the core of human connection, and it's as crucial for the functioning of organizations as it is for our personal lives. In my work ethics, empathy shows up as the practice of listening to, and unconditionally accepting, the emotions that the toughest issues my clients experience — from losing to their market competition to forced layoffs to major disruptions of operations due to geopolitical events — and then analyzing if there are collective cognitive patterns and organizational dynamics contributing to those issues. Both as an individual therapist and a corporate coach, you cannot get to the heart of a struggle, and see possible solutions, without first seeing and accepting human emotions that surround it.