Leadership Advantage
One leadership idea. Pressure-tested in real life. Every issue. Leadership Advantage shares practical frameworks and honest reflections to help you design the conditions where breakthroughs become possible.
The advice I stopped giving women
#48 Leadership Advantage by Andrea Michalek Take a picture of my whiteboard. Grab the eraser. Start fresh. For as long as I’ve been working, I’ve had a whiteboard in my workspace. Early in my career, I was a software developer, and my whiteboard held the latest architecture diagrams of the systems rattling around in my head. Later in my career, you’d see project plans and milestones, of all the projects I was juggling. Figuring out what was interconnected and what needed to get done next....
I thought I'd answered this fifteen years ago.
#47 Leadership Advantage by Andrea Michalek Every so often, life hands you a question you swear you've already answered. You expect to revisit it for old time's sake. Instead, you realize it has been waiting for you to catch up. That's what happened to me last week. I was invited to give a talk about altmetrics and Plum Analytics, the company I co-founded fifteen years ago. As I started preparing, I expected to spend time looking backward. Instead, I found myself staring at the exact same...
The fastest way to stop learning
🔹 Leadership Advantage - Issue 46 by Andrea Michalek I'm a big believer in trusting your gut. I also think following your first instinct gets smart people into trouble. Those two statements sound contradictory. They're not. One is about intuition. The other is about reaction. My dad used to joke that he never had an idea he didn't like. We are all like that to a certain extent. And lately I've been reminded exactly how much trouble it can cause. While building Full Moon Forum, I've been...
What does your to-do list say about you?
🔹 Leadership Advantage - Issue 45 by Andrea Michalek I took a hard look at my to-do list today. I didn't like what I saw. It’s been a little while since I’ve written a newsletter. Not because I haven’t had ideas, but because I’ve been building, traveling, and saying yes to some new adventures. As it turns out, that’s exactly what led to today’s realization. I've been feeling it for weeks: too many things to get done, strategic and tactical, all swirling around in my head at once. Whenever I...
I bought a van. Here's what I learned.
🔹 Leadership Advantage - Issue 44 by Andrea Michalek Too much of our professional lives run on autopilot. Meetings. Obligations. The next logical step. We keep moving forward without ever stopping to ask a simple question: Is this actually the life I want to be building? In the swirl of everyday responsibilities and adulting, it’s easy to lose track of the why, and even easier to to assume the path you’re on is the only one. I’m here to tell you that it’s ok to take a break.Hit that pause...
🔹 It's NOT business as usual, and that's ok
Leadership Advantage - Issue 43 by Andrea Michalek The holidays bring stress and so many “shoulds.” I should go to all the holiday events I’ve been invited to.I should catch up on everything before year end.I should be spending this time to build a rock-solid plan for the new year. Here’s my counter-proposal: Give yourself permission to NOT do these things unless they truly serve you. (And, if that’s not good enough, I give you permission too.) It’s ok for it to be business NOT as usual right...
🔹 When the idea finally clicks
Leadership Advantage - Issue 42 by Andrea Michalek My book didn’t start with an outline. It started with fear.A talk I over-prepared for.And one drawing I couldn’t stop thinking about.That was the moment it became a book I had to write. When I talk to other authors about should I write a book, I usually get a wry smile. “Don’t do it.” “I don’t advise it.” But the best answer I’ve heard to this is wait until you have the book burning inside of you that you can’t not write. My origin story...
🔹 Burnout isn’t what you think
Leadership Advantage - Issue 41 by Andrea Michalek Once the holiday season starts, it has a way of revealing what leaders ignore the rest of the year. You are still hitting deadlines. You are still showing up to every meeting. You are still holding everything together. But under the surface, something feels off. You are more tired than usual. You feel stretched thin. Even wins do not hit the way they used to. This is quiet burnout, the kind that creeps in at year’s end. Not exhaustion from...
🔹 Don't drift into 2026. Start in motion, with a breakthrough plan
Leadership Advantage - Issue 40 by Andrea Michalek Hello Reader, Don't drift into 2026. Design it. This is your complete system to go from reflection to action, so you can lead with clarity, confidence, and momentum in the new year. If you've followed my work this year, you know I've been immersed in writing my Beyond Incremental book and refining the framework at its core. You also know I recently launched the Beyond Incremental Assessment, which helps leaders see clearly where they excel...
🔹 Great leaders don’t just lead well, they know exactly where they’re stuck.
Leadership Advantage - Issue 39 by Andrea Michalek Most leadership advice pushes you to do more: More clarity.More delegation.More velocity. But doing more doesn’t help when you’re solving the wrong problem. You don’t need more output. You need a better diagnosis. Great leaders don’t just lead well. They know exactly where they’re stuck. That’s what makes forward movement possible. It took me months to figure that out. I've been working on my book framework since January. Three circles:...
One leadership idea. Pressure-tested in real life. Every issue. Leadership Advantage shares practical frameworks and honest reflections to help you design the conditions where breakthroughs become possible.