Do you experience the feeling of swimming in quicksand as you deal with a million issues while leading your team? In this episode Chris and Mark Miller, Chick-fil-A's Vice President of High Performance Leadership, walk through 4 key choices leaders can make that will be game changers for you and your team.

How do we move away from mundane, boring and unproductive one-on-ones to having dynamic, meaningful conversations? In this episode Chris explains the steps to have conversations you might never have imagined with your team members.

Different people respond to the need for accountability in very different ways. Some love it. Some hide from it. In this episode, Chris and Michael talk about 3 team member perspectives on accountability and how you can lead them effectively in your 1:1s.

Performance reviews are hard, but the fact that not every area of evaluation is objective will make them harder, and even feel unfair to team members. In this episode Michael and Chris talk about ways to counter manager bias and make a review feel more balanced to the team member.

Whether you work for a company who has a review process or not, as a manager you can still give a great performance review to your team. In this episode Chris looks at some ways to serve your team well with a meaningful review process.

No one likes dealing with conflict, but managers have no choice but to enter in. In this episode Chris summarizes a recent Uptick blog post that details the conflict management skills hostage negotiators use to diffuse high stress situations. You can use these techniques in your 1:1s to improve your team's trust and cohesiveness.

Whether you have one team member or 10, sometimes preparing for a performance review can seem like climbing Mt. Everest. But there are strategies you can use, as Chris points out in this episode, that can help you not just have better performance reviews, but better relationships with your team.

Not understanding what the organization needs from reviews is a problem. But you also need to know what your team member needs in a review. In this episode Chris shares that it reviews don't need to serve one of the other, but can serve the team member, the manager and the organization.

Why are we giving bad performance reviews? Why do they give both managers and team members sweaty palms? They're uncomfortable, and no one like them. In this episode Chris shares some of his experience of being too rigid, and give some input on how to make the experience useful for both managers and their team members.

Everyone is doing one-on-ones, but do we really need another meeting? Can we replace them with other forms of communication? In this episode Chris revisits the "Why" behind one-on-ones, and how they can be the most important thing you can do to build a healthy, productive team.

It's simple, right? Uh...not really. In this episode Chris outlines 6 important keys to being a the kind of leader people want to follow – a consistent leader.

Do you want to get to know your organization? Or would you like to tap into the knowledge and expertise of people you don't directly manage? Skip level meetings can be a great way to do that, if you're careful. In this episode Michael and Chris talk about some ways to make them safe and effective.

In small companies, everyone knows each other and the organizational chart tends to be flatter. So how do you handle change? At Uptick, we're going through that process now, and in this episode Michael and Chris talk about how they're handling the challenges.

What is a good goal? Why is it important, and what will inspire the team members to get behind it? In this episode Michael and Chris talk about their recent experience putting together goals for the Uptick team, while in the middle of building a new goals module for Uptick customers!

As much as we'd like everyone to communicate like we do, in order to make a real difference on our teams we need to learn how to communicate with our teammates in a language they can understand. in this episode Michael and Chris discuss the importance of adjusting our style to account for the needs of others.

When we're going 100MPH, we are often confronted with unanswerable, uninvited questions that only bring us stress. In this episode Michael and Chris talk about how to remove the anxiety of those questions by focusing on questions we can actually answer.

Many of us build useful routines that help us accomplish our every day work. But we'll also continue executing those routines long after they were actually effective. In this episode, Michael and Chris discuss the importance of revisiting those routines.

How much should I share with my team when speculative conversations are happening "behind the scenes"? In this episode, Michael and Chris discuss what, when and with whom you can share important issues while they're still in process.

We've been looking to hire some new people at Uptick, and we realized it's easy to look for people we can easily relate to – people like....us! In this episode Michael and Chris talk about how that to build an effective team, we need people with a multitude of gifts, abilities and personality types to round things out.

Sometimes managers feel like they're actually helping their team members by keeping them from the raw truth. But people are smart, and they often figure it out anyway! Chris and Michael discuss how the truth is best coming straight from your mouth, and how being honest with your team builds trust.

Most of us know what it's like to have an important project with pre-determined deadlines. What happens to your team's morale when those deadlines are missed, or extended over and over? In this episode, Michael and Chris discuss the delicate dance managers do to keep the fire alive and morale high when moving project deadlines.

Many management blogs talk about "getting more from your team", but is that the right way to think about it. In this episode Michael and Chris discuss how giving TO your team, not getting FROM your team, is a more effective way to prepare your team for success.

Should I allow my team members time to develop professionally? How much initiative do THEY need to take? Will it affect my team's productivity negatively? In this episode Michael and Chris talk about how your team's success might depend on how you answer these questions.

By now, most of us have experienced some version of remote work, and many find it difficult to be transparent with their team members. In this episode Michael and Chris will give you some tips on how to cultivate transparency in this new remote, Zoom world.