We’re knee deep in September now. Let’s enjoy the changing weather, the new semester full of promise, and the infusion of pumpkin spice.
In a recent survey of the attendees of our anniversary celebration, we asked members how they use Planners’ Picks in their environment. Julie responded with this:
“At our monthly Department Office Meeting, we go around the room and each talk about a CSN article from the archives. Our meeting has a lot of non-supervisors in it, but it helps them create dialogue of topics that may not want to bring up i,e difficult people or any frustrating situation without giving specifics. and it allows them to talk through how they would handle the situation and builds their leadership skills too. I love the images, too. I have cut out 4 or 5 of them and posted them on my door. Thanks for all you do!” – Julie
How about you? What is your favorite part of receiving this newsletter on Tuesday morning? How do you take action with some of the content? We’d love to hear from you. Go to
https://campussupervisorsnetwork.wisc.edu/planners_picks_action/ to give us a shout.
:: Image of the Week
If you haven’t created your inner world, you rely on the outer world to fill the void. You need the trip, the attention, the nice apartment, the restaurants, the hobbies, the shows, the constant social outings. Without them, you feel empty. Maybe even depressed.
But when your inner world is rich, the outer world becomes just background noise. You don’t need it to feel full because you carry an inner sense of purpose. You have a mission, a goal, something that makes your inner world vibrant and alive.
Ash Lamb
:: CSN’s Book of the Week Recommendation
Just Keep Growing: 25 Servant Leadership Lessons
Servant leadership is a style of leadership that prioritizes the needs of followers and emphasizes personal integrity and growth in a safe and supportive environment.
Each of the 25 chapters features a short story that exemplifies a servant leadership lesson. The stories are real, relatable, and relevant. They feature people with different backgrounds, professions, and experiences. At the end of each chapter, you’ll find reflection questions and action items.
This book is for people who want to be known as compassionate and confident leaders who take care of the people they serve. Young adults starting their career will benefit from this book as they determine the type of leader they want to be. People who are placed in positions to lead a team will benefit from this book as they navigate the various needs of their followers. Established leaders will benefit from this book as they are reminded about the importance of lifelong learning.
You will quickly discover servant leadership is practical, and you’ll be able to apply the lessons learned into your personal or professional life. Just keep growing.
https://a.co/d/e2Jwt0W
Martha is speaking at an upcoming Sophia Partners Servant Leadership meeting! Details here:
https://www.sophiapartners.org/event/community-of-practice-3/?mc_cid=6b8f1d6c68&mc_eid=0090d7a227
“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. ” –JIM ROHN
:: Kindness in Leadership
Leading with Empathy and the ROI of Compassion with Linda Cohen
Join Cindy Cohn as she sits down with Linda Cohen—keynote speaker, corporate consultant, and author of The Economy of Kindness—to explore why kindness isn’t just a nice-to-have but a business imperative. Learn how a kindness mindset boosts recruitment, retention, morale, and even your bottom line. Linda shares powerful real-world examples, including the rising expectation for flexible, empathetic leadership post-pandemic, and the unexpected benefits of virtual speaking in building authentic connections.
Highlights from our chat:
>>Embedding kindness in recruitment, onboarding & self-care routines
>>Empowering employees to take compassionate action
>>Adapting virtual keynotes for genuine connection—and why it matters
>>Rolling out sustained kindness programs with workshops + accountability
https://open.spotify.com/episode/75k8CxG75LoH9uOYhbwXTo?si=KIQ4z20QQTGBS-gf8Nqciw&nd=1&dlsi=b0de80a561e44f86
“We don’t say that some of us are born to be kind, or some of us are born to be fair, or some of us are born to be trustworthy. We say it’s the responsibility of all of us. The same should be true of courageous action.” – JIM DETERT
:: Developing Better Habits
Pomodoro Technique of Time Management
Struggling with focus? There is one tool the founders and CEOs swear by to complete deep work during the hectic period of hyper-scaling their startup. It works for your daily list of work too, and that tool is Pomodoro. See this quick post and link to an online tool for keeping you on track.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathan-parcells-21020314_struggling-with-focus-there-is-one-tool-activity-7364762991042498560-68jB
:: Communication
Communication Coaching: How to approach difficult topics
Effective verbal communication skills are essential for the workplace, especially for professionals who supervise employees or work closely with colleagues in team structures. Like many skills, however, they can take years and a lot of practice to develop and master. Effective interpersonal communication can help reinforce workplace relationships and encourage a team culture that is committed to continuous improvement. This can be true even when communication involves addressing difficult news, tough topics, or sensitive issues. The following resource document was developed to offer foundational insights on how to navigate difficult scenarios and topics across a variety of contexts. Thinking about how to structure your communication is intended to help you approach and guide the conversation toward a successful outcome.
Check out this guide from the folks at DoIT’s Office of Community, Climate, and Engagement.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11TvKWc5Y3owAnEdVs8A0XOOKkAPayclH/view
:: Work Culture & Team Development
When Good Intentions Go Extra: How to Help Your Team Stop Overcomplicating Everything
Imagine this: you ask your enthusiastic team member to get your lobby ready for a client visit. Simple, right? Twenty minutes later, they’re back with a professional interior decorator, a receipt for a velvet chaise lounge, and a tearful testimony about how the room “finally reflects its true potential.”
You’re standing there, feather duster in hand, wondering how a five-minute job turned into a Home and Garden feature spread.
You love their energy. You adore their heart. You wish you could bottle that drive and sell it on Etsy. But you don’t need a velvet chaise. You need the dust gone.
So, how do you maintain their passion and channel it into scrappy, efficient action?
https://letsgrowleaders.com/2025/07/21/when-good-intentions-go-extra/
“Moving away from being defined by title and more by the impact we create will eventually help people realize their true value to their organizations and community.” – Ed Brenegar
Made a Big Mistake? 7 Things to Do When You Mess Up at Work
Missing a deadline or dropping the ball can feel career-ending. But what you do next matters more than the mistake itself. Inspired by a Reddit question about how to recover from mistakes at work, here’s how to take responsibility, rebuild trust, and move forward with integrity—without losing your mind from the team at Radical Candor.
https://www.radicalcandor.com/blog/7-things-to-do-when-you-mess-up-at-work?_hsmi=12701323
:: Self-Leadership Development
Navigating the Jump from Manager to Executive
Becoming a leader of leaders is a change of both scope and attitude. Your decisions may now affect dozens (or hundreds) of employees. Your results depend on how well other experienced professionals do their jobs, not on what you can personally make happen. Stepping into these shifts doesn’t happen overnight and it can feel nerve-wracking for a while. This article outlines three key shifts you need to make: 1) Going from expert to coach, 2) Moving from execution to driving impact
through others, 3) Evolving from oversight to scalable systems. Leading leaders isn’t “more of the same” just with bigger teams and budgets. In reality, you have to fundamentally shift how you think about your role, how you spend your time, and how you measure success.
https://hbr.org/2025/06/navigating-the-jump-from-manager-to-executive
“Your actions are speaking so loudly, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
LTD’s Enhance Your Supervision and Management Fall Series
The
Enhance Your Supervision and Management (EYSM) series offers timely topics to enhance supervisors’ impact. It equips leaders with the skills, knowledge, and strategies to confidently lead and inspire their teams beyond the
Principles of Supervision and Management (PSM) program.
These courses are highly interactive, including small breakout rooms. Participants will work together to explore techniques, share best practices, and foster a collaborative environment to thrive as leaders.
EYSM topics will evolve with each offering of the series. You are welcome to attend one, some, or all of the courses in the series. It is not a sequential curriculum or associated with a certificate. EYSM is limited to participants who are people managers and will be held virtually on Zoom. To show interest in registering for a class topic, complete the respective Google form.
Fall 2025:
:: Mental Health and Self-Care
What’s Beneath Burnout: Finding Meaning in the Mess
Rachel Druckenmiller invites you to take an honest and compassionate look at yourself and why you might be burned out or on the brink of burnout using some of the questions below. Journal about them. Talk about them with a friend or trusted colleague:
- What assumptions are you making about what will happen if you slow down, ask for help, say “no,” leave your job, or let people in to see your struggles?
- How much of what you’re experiencing related to burnout is brought on by the outside or by work and how much is self-inflicted by your own assumptions, expectations and even pride?
- What is the need beneath your striving and achieving, and can that need be met in another way other than working harder?
- Do you have a consistent practice of expressing and processing your thoughts and feelings through journaling, therapy, coaching or spiritual support?
- Think about all the commitments you’ve said “yes” to lately. How many of those “yes”es were said out of guilt or obligation? Can you either drop, delay or delegate any of those commitments to create more margin for yourself?
We often say “no” to rest and our health and wellbeing and to expressing what we need, think, want or feel. Read her story from 2022 on finding meaning in the mess of burnout.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whats-beneath-burnout-finding-meaning-mess-rachel-druckenmiller-/
Rachel was our keynote speaker at the CSN anniversary event in August.
The Trouble With Self-Love
Scientists have a problem studying self-love. Research abounds on self-compassion, self-esteem, self-care, and even unconditional positive self-regard. Scholars have published definitions of these concepts, established scales for measuring them, and explored their practice and impact on people’s well-being.
But self-love, on its own, not so much. One of the few scholars who published a definition of self-love, Swiss psychologist Eva Henschke, was shocked when her initial literature review turned up little more than a handful of dissertations on self-love.
“I was surprised how little work was out there, compared to the amount of work in arts and philosophy, online, and in the bookshops in the genre of self-help,” says Henschke. “There are so many books on self-love.” Despite its popularity, however, scientists have largely avoided the topic.
Read this article from The Greater Good Magazine on how self-love gets us in a place to love and lead others.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_trouble_with_self_love
:: LinkedIn Learning
Leading and Motivating People with Different Personalities
A person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, taken together, form a pattern psychologists call “personality.” As a leader, you deal with so many personalities daily. To be an effective leader, you need to know how to motivate, lead, and persuade these diverse personalities. In this course, instructor Kwame Christian—business lawyer, Director of the American Negotiation Institute, and host of the Negotiate Anything podcast—steps through how to gain the skills you need to lead and motivate anyone on your team. Kwame explains how understanding personality and motivation can help you lead and manage. He goes over ways you can successfully influence and lead individuals with recognized personality traits. Kwame goes in-depth on how you can motivate people with different personal motivations. He concludes with a discussion on how combining personality and motivation gives you the leverage to create new and better results with your team.
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/leading-and-motivating-people-with-different-personalities/leading-and-motivating-people-with-different-personalities?u=56745513
:: Upcoming Events
The BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit
The summit is a virtual meeting of top leadership luminaries spanning diverse realms of the business landscape. Sign up to benefit from hundreds of years of collective leadership acumen at this week-long special event.
- Hosted by Globally-Renowned Top 50 Leadership Innovator & Award-Winning Fortune 500 CEO, Doug Conant
- Multiple Sessions from World-Class Leaders
- Insights Inspired by the WSJ Bestseller, The Blueprint
- FREE! Space Is Limited, RSVP Today
- 5-Day Event—1 Session Per Day from 12-1:15 PM Eastern
- Can’t attend during the event? Register anyway and get a link to the recordings to listen to later
Dates: 9/15-9/19
Time: 11:00 am-12:15 pm CDT
Location: Online via link
Register here:
https://start.conantleadership.com/blueprint-leadership-summit/
Storytelling as Servant Leadership – Honoring People’s Stories
- Are you a young adult starting your career, wondering what type of leader you want to be?
- Are you a middle manager leading a team and navigating the various needs of your followers?
- Are you an established leader looking for a reminder about the importance of lifelong learning?
If you said, “YES!” to any of these questions, then join guest facilitator and published author, Martha Boehm, for September’s Sophia Partners Servant Leadership Community of Practice, as she leads a discussion about her NEW book: Just Keep Growing: 25 Servant Leadership Lessons.
Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (CDT)
Location: Online via link
https://www.sophiapartners.org/event/community-of-practice-3/?mc_cid=6b8f1d6c68&mc_eid=0090d7a227