Author Archives: Amy Kay Watson

The Leader’s Quick-Start Guide to Clarity, Compassion, and Results

A split-color background of soft blue and yellow displays a visual metaphor: wooden blocks with black arrows move in a straight line across the blue side, ending at a block with a question mark. From there, on the yellow side, blocks with arrows branch upward and downward, suggesting decision-making and multiple possible paths.

Find what you need to lead with clarity, compassion, and confidence. You care about your team. You care about results. But some days, leadership just feels heavier than it should. Whether you’re holding back because you don’t want to hurt someone—or pushing hard and not getting the response you hoped for—this guide will help you

The Leader’s RESET: How to Handle Difficult Conversations with Empathetic Accountability

A leader I coach recently described a frustrating pattern. During a critical planning session, she saw her engineers and Scrum Masters repeatedly stepping in to cover missing work from product managers who were on planned leave… work that should have been completed in advance. While she was grateful for the stopgap effort, she recognized this

The Architecture of Repair: A 5-Step Protocol to Operationalize Conflict Resolution

How to move your team from “who is to blame?” to “how do we fix it?” using restorative principles. Conflict is not just an HR issue; it is operational drag. When trust fractures in a high-performing team, information flow slows down, decision-making creates friction, and innovation stalls. Most managers default to one of two modes

The Leader as Regulator: A Practical Guide to Navigating the Change Dip

Summary: When change moves faster than our team’s capacity to adapt, leaders need more than resilience—they need the skills of a Leader as Regulator. This post explores the predictable performance “Change Dip,” the observable data that shows your team is stuck in “The Labyrinth,” and provides a Leader’s Diagnostic Toolkit to restore performance by rebuilding