Right as we'd all adapted to Delta and adjusted our lives around it into a revised but passable semblance of normalcy, in swept Omicron, upending the status quo once again and reminding us that the one thing we can be certain of in the current climate is perpetual uncertainty. Rather than resigning ourselves to merely bemoaning the dips and swells (although venting is understandable), this New York Times piece suggests some actionable tips for handling the volatility that has become the baseline of our shared world. There are a few helpful pieces of advice in the article but one of the most compelling is the guidance to "focus on what you can control," because "when the world feels unpredictable, we can create a sense of safety and security by following routines," and finding the corners of our lives that we are empowered to influence. While this refers to health behaviors that protect you from illness it can also extend to the way you show up in your leadership—finding the areas in your organization or your community where you can make a difference, uncertainty be damned. Read the full article here.

2021's Lessons for Living a Meaningful Life

The team at Greater Good Magazine solicited nominations from 350 researchers to compile this helpful end-of-year compendium of the top insights from 2021 that can guide us towards greater well-being. Findings from researchers that made the cut include: The discovery that uncertainty drives appreciation of "the little things in life," the revelation that daydreaming is good for humans and spurs creativity, and many more. Perhaps the most relevant findings for leaders came from research around empathy: Studies showed that caring for others contributed to better resilience and also revealed that people who "saw more empathy opportunities and empathized more were happier." Researchers found we have, on average, "about nine opportunities to empathize" per day and the more we seize those, the better off we'll be. Explore all of the 2021 findings here.

**For more on seizing opportunities for empathy, read our advice for leaders to "declare that you care."

An Interview with Ursula Burns

In this Fortune feature, Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox and the first Black woman to run a Fortune 500 company, reflects on her life and leadership, her new memoir, and the fight for racial parity in corporate America. If you ask Burns's colleagues, and her interviewer, a defining characteristic of her prowess is her "astonishing candor," marked by her "courage to tell you the truth in ugly times." And in her post-CEO chapter, she continues her unflinching commitment to telling the truth about business and society. In September 2020, Burns helped launch the Board Diversity Action Alliance to increase Black representation on corporate boards in an environment where "the nearly 1,000 venture-backed companies that have gone public since 2000 have had about 4,700 available board seats during their life spans," and only 49 of those seats were filled with Black directors. Why? Burns explains: "These organizations are started by white men," who shape the corporate leadership in their own image, and "the structures in the world," have been designed "around a white male ideal." Now, she's looking for people to help her reshape the world more inclusively to give everyone a seat at the table: "I want to join them; I want them to join me." Read the full interview here. (This article may appear behind a paywall.)

Chase Excellence, Not Perfection

"Forget Perfection" is one of the central rallying cries in The Blueprint, a practical six-step process for transforming your leadership which includes prompts for reflection, a companion workbook, and a leadership manifesto for making an impact in a rapidly changing world.

In this Harvard Business Review interview, Hubert Joly, who led a turnaround of Best Buy over the last decade, explains that one of the secrets to his success was cultivating the conditions for "human magic." Human magic is a phenomenon that occurs at scale when "you have employees that do things for each other and for customers that nobody has told them to do." The magic lies in the fact that people are empowered to make decisions on-the-fly even if those choices may not comply with official policies. To achieve the magic, leaders must subvert their own ideas of how a company is run—including re-envisioning the meaning of "SOP" which usually stands for "standard operating procedure" but at Best Buy stood for "service over policy." Joly recommends that leaders throw out the old "top-down" management style in favor of creating an environment defined by "genuine human connection," so people feel safe to take action that aligns with their values. It's about helping people feel known and understood. In order to alchemize human magic, colleagues must feel "my boss knows what drives me," and "respects me as a human being and is interested in what my dreams are," so the culture is conducive to positive change. Read the full interview here.

ConantLeadership Founder Doug Conant has two wishes and a dare for leaders as we welcome 2022. The first wish? That you find ways to catch your proverbial breath and restore your energy for the year ahead so you have the capacity to make a difference in other people's lives. Read the full post here.

This past fall, at our second bi-annual BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit, Amy Edmondson, the scholar who coined the term "psychological safety," joined Doug Conant in conversation and you can read a summary of their tips and advice for creating psychologically safe workplaces in this blog post.

Here is Doug's 2020 end-of-year letter to leaders which still holds great resonance a year later as we transition from 2021 to 2022. In a time of uncertainty, these words remind you that you must be a "port in the storm," and contains evergreen advice for leaders looking to empower people in a more enlightened way.

October marked our ten year anniversary! In this post, we celebrated a decade of "Championing Leadership That Works" through resources, training, philanthropy, and more.

In this post from the ConantLeadership archives, ConantLeadership Founder & CEO Doug Conant gets at the "reason for the season" with ten leadership tips for making people feel valued.

In last month's newsletter: 'Megatrends' of the future, getting through the end of the year, challenging the status quo, and more.