Charmain Bogue

  Wise-sounding advice is often the most expensive kind, because it feels like enough. The advice most commonly given to people early in their careers is also, in my experience, the least useful. Work hard. Be patient. Find a good mentor. Build your brand. Treat every interaction like an interview. Show up and stand out. None of it is wrong exactly. It just does not tell anyone anything they can do tomorrow. Why vague advice is so popular Broad advice travels easily. It can be applied to almost anyone because it specifies almost nothing. "Find your voice" works as advice for a twenty-two-year-old in her first job and for a forty-five-year-old executive trying to communicate more effectively in the boardroom. The fact that it works equally well for both is a sign that it is not really advice. It is a sentiment. Sentiments feel good to receive and to give. They communicate care and encouragement, which are real things. But they do not produce behavior change, because they conta...

Returning was not a step backward. It was the most clarifying thing I did for my sense of professional identity. When I moved from independent consulting back into a public sector role, I got a version of the same question from a surprising number of people: why would you go back? The implication was that leaving government and building an independent practice was the arc, and returning was a reversal of it. That framing missed something I had spent three years learning. What the independent years gave me Working on my own for several years changed how I see organizations from the inside. When you advise an organization, you see the whole system more clearly than when you are embedded in it. You notice the places where the stated strategy and the actual decisions diverge. You see how much of an organization's culture is invisible to the people inside it. You learn, quickly, to ask the questions that insiders have stopped asking because the answers became too uncomfortable. I carri...

What you are called and what you actually do are frequently not the same thing. I have a habit , when I start working with a new coaching client, of asking her to describe what she did yesterday. Not what her title says she does. Not what the job description says. What she actually did, hour by hour, decision by decision, from the time she started work until the time she stopped. The answer is almost never what the title implies. The gap between the title and the work A Chief Operating Officer who spends four hours a day in tactical coordination meetings and twenty minutes on operational strategy is not operating as a Chief Operating Officer. A Vice President of People who has no authority over compensation structure and cannot hire without three layers of approval is not a vice president in any meaningful sense. The title promises a scope of authority and accountability that the actual work does not reflect. This gap is not unusual. It is the norm. And it causes two distinct problems....

We are tapping women to fix what men broke, then calling it opportunity. There is a pattern in how organizations handle succession that I have watched long enough to name directly. When something is going well, the candidates considered for the top role are almost always men. When something is going badly, when the board is frustrated, when a program is underperforming, when the organization needs someone to walk into a mess and clean it up, suddenly the women are being mentioned. This is not a pipeline problem. It is a risk assignment problem. And it should not be celebrated as progress. What the research keeps finding There is a body of organizational research on what is called the glass cliff, the phenomenon where women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions during organizational crises or in situations of high risk. The theory is that boards and selection committees, consciously or not, are more comfortable placing women in situations where failure is already buil...

  Endings are data. I started paying attention to what they were telling me. The professional development content almost nobody writes is the ending. We write about starting coaching relationships, building trust, the early breakthroughs. We do not write much about the client who wraps up without getting where she intended, the engagement that ends before the change takes hold, or the leader who finishes the work and goes back to every habit she said she wanted to leave behind. I have had all of those. And I have learned more from them than from the ones that went well. The patterns I kept seeing Some endings are genuinely successful and complete. The leader set a goal, did the work, changed the behavior, and the coaching relationship served its purpose. Those are good endings and they feel like them. But there is a category of ending that looks like completion and is not. The client wraps up the engagement politely, says the right things about what she learned, and within a few m...

The plan was never the problem. The meeting after the plan was the problem. I have read a lot of strategic plans. I have helped write some of them. And the thing that strikes me every time is how much intellectual effort goes into producing a document that most of the people it is meant for will never read again after the launch presentation. This is not a document design problem. It is a behavioral problem, and it has a specific cause. What actually happens after the presentation The plan gets launched with some combination of ceremony: a leadership retreat, a slide deck, a message from the executive director. People nod. Some of them are genuinely energized. Then everyone goes back to their inboxes, and the daily work reasserts itself, and nobody has built a mechanism to connect the decisions being made every day to the priorities in the plan that took months to write. Three months later, the plan is in a shared drive. Six months later, nobody can remember what the four strategic pil...