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Being an effective leader requires a matrix of skills and abilities working in tandem. The ability to foster hope, cultivate trust, and motivate people to action can make a difference in your company’s ability function effectively and retain employees80% of employees responded that theyd stay in a job because they have a manager they trust. And no small part of the ability to lead is executive or leadership presence. A well-publicized study by Coqual (formerly the Center for Talent Innovation) found executive presencelooking and acting the part of a leadermakes up 26% of what it takes to ascend to top jobs. If I were to boil everything down, the two fundamental core principles of good, successful, solid leadership is strong and unquestionable authenticity and trust, says executive and leadership development coach Serena Palmer. However, there are some common behaviors and habits that undermine those leadership essentials. Palmer and other experts say being aware of them is the first step to correcting them. Shifting from ‘me’ to ‘we’ Some leadersespecially those who are new to their roles and may be feeling insecurehave trouble shifting from being individual contributors who need to toot their own horns to get ahead to being a leader and responsible for a teams performance, says leadership expert and coach Emily Walton. This can take a few forms, she says, including emphasizing your own importance in a situation, micromanaging, and failing to give credit to others for the teams success. Sometimes, people will take these actions because they might be feeling insecure about themselves in their role or [about] their contributions, Walton says. When you shift into leadership, it’s a we thing, and you want to do that because it strengthens your network, and it also strengthens the trust that people have in you: that you’re going to speak up for them, whether they’re in the room or not, and that you’re honest and authentic. Avoiding the tough parts The Coqual survey found that gravitas was the No. 1 factor in leadership presence, according to 67% of respondents. Key components of gravitas include exuding confidence, showing grace under pressure, and speaking the truth, even when its difficult. One of the quickest ways to erode the trust of your team, Watson says, is people-pleasing, especially when it comes to making tough decisions and standing up for your team. If you’re constantly trying to please everyone else, it’s going to frustrate your team, and it’s also going to frustrate your colleagues, because they’re not going to know where you stand, and you’re no longer dependable, Walton says. Another version of this behavior Palmer calls, dont shoot the messenger. In other words, when difficult decisions are made or bad news surfaces, the leader abdicates responsibility for the decision or news, saying it was someone elses to make, she says. In other cases, the leader just avoids making a decision, such as allowing bad behavior on a team to continue rather than addressing it head-on. Both undermine authenticity of the leader, and again, you will lose people that way, she says. Being busy without impact Wearing busyness as a badge of honor without making a significant impact is another action that will erode the trust and confidence of teams in their leaders, says personal branding expert Nicole Hart. When someone is proclaiming how busy they are and the results of that work arent evident, the people around you or your superiors are going to be like, Oh, I don’t have the faith that I can put more on their plate’, she says. And so, it kind of decreases faith for leaders when I think people are actually trying to do the opposite. Hart adds that insecure leaders may do this to this to try to solidify their place as necessary to a company or organization. However, effective leaders know how to prioritize where their efforts are best devoted. Spewing negativity Chronic negativity can also wear on a leaders presence, Hart says. Bringing up negative personal issues when theyre not relevant, being cruel or overly negative when giving feedback, and even being negative about your own ideas as you pitch them, all damage credibility and relationships with the team. Leadership requires vision. Vision requires the ability to see untapped, positive opportunity. Negative leaders cant inspire innovation or loyalty, Hart says. Avoiding vulnerability Walton says that communication issues like being a know-it-all and having an inability to apologize can also undermine leadership presence. Similarly, an inability to show vulnerability can do the same, says Palmer. By not doing that, you don’t give permission for people in your team to be able to have a safe space to share whatever it is that they’re having difficulties with, she says. Leaders who feel like they may be undermining their own leadership presence should try to get to the root of why trust is being lost, Walton says. Own up to it and then, outline what you’re going to do differently and then actually do it, she says. Otherwise, it’s just lip service, and that’s not going to change how people feel.
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An intense dream can leave you in sweats and existential wonder. But just moments later, it evaporates from your mind to never be experienced again.The fleeting nature of dreams is why many keep a dream journal by their bedside to jot down the story before it disappears. The design studio Modem imagined another, more modern recording device. Called the Dream Recorder, its something like a bedside clock radio that uses AI to log your dreams and play them back to you.[Photo: Courtesy of Dream Recorder]When you wake up in the morning, you pick up the recorder and dictate what you remember of your dream. That ensuing transcript is sent to an AI video generator in the cloud, which creates a short video of it. Whats important to Modem is the ritual, done without an app or phone, is performed with an object dedicated to youa sort of generated visual diary of dreams.The thing that happens in your head isn’t going to be magically recreated by this video generator, says project contributor Mark Hinch. But it will hopefully capture the essence of the perhaps bizarre, weird, fragmented ideas of what happened in your head in the story.The dreams themselves are rendered through an intentionally ethereal aesthetic, at a low fi 240-by-240-pixel resolution thats meant to mirror the way we remember a dream, but also sidestep too much literality when things naturally dont match up. For instance, it blurs faces so that you never see someone who doesnt match up with what you remember. And rather than saving every dream you ever have forever, the Dream Recorder has been designed to flush its memory much like you doholding onto dreams for a week at most before overwriting them with whatever you dream up next.[Photo: Courtesy of Dream Recorder]Instead of selling the device, Modem shares the code on Github, along with all the items you need to buy to build it, ranging from a Raspberry Pi processor to USB microphones and capacitive touch sensors, via Amazon links. The body can be printed via an online service like Shapeways, and it all connects together without soldering. (Dreams cost between about a penny and 14 cents apiece, depending on the AI service you connect to render them.)But the Dream Recorder is admittedly less interesting as another product with features to be scrutinized than it is as a greater idea, and model of experimentation thats been lacking in the race toward AGI or building the next unicorn. With so much of the AI conversation focused on companions, productivity tools, or generative whatever, its easy to block out the more transcendental possibilities like being able to literally speak to whales. Modem cut through the productization of AI with a new dose of wonder. The Dream Recorder is fascinating not just for what it literally does, but as a rare, tangible beacon for a future that feels just within our grasp. (Dream recording inherently seems feasible within our electrical brain patterns and new AI capabilitiesso much so that Samsung filed a patent around a UI to control your dreams.) And much like a good sci-fi novel, it offers us an anchor to discuss and debate what it all means until a world of inventors actually leads us there.We hope to inspire the new generation coming of age in the age of intelligence . . . showing them that there’s a more mindful alternative to the very distracted world, says Bas van de Poel, cofounder of Modem. Perhaps using the engines of wisdom and mindfulness, and combining them with the logic of computer science, will be sort of like the ultimate dream, he says.
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There have been five 1 in 1,000-year floods” this summer alone in the continental U.S. Heavy rains have poured over Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico, Illinois, and Florida over the past months causing streets to flood, homes to suffer irreparable damage, and people to lose their lives, loved ones, and pets. The death toll alone in Texas is at 135 as of July 25, as search efforts begin to end with only three more persons still missingthe result of over three weeks of searching. The 0.1% chance of these floods occurring makes their recent frequency alarming. This, coupled with other recent flash floods across major East Coast states like New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey and projected flash floods in central and southwestern U.S., makes for increasingly unsettling future forecasts. But are these weather patterns actually out of the normor are these floods becoming more common? How rare are 1,000-year floods? The phrase “1 in 1,000-year floods” comes from the fact that statistically, floods of that intensity and destruction are likely to happen once every 1,000 years (or a 0.1% likelihood). In 2024, there were 35 1,000-year floods across the U.S. and more than triple that number of 100-year floods, which have a statistical probability of happening 1% of the time. As far as I’m aware, if we tracked 1 in 1,000-year flood events over time, you wouldnt necessarily see a discernible increase in the number of events per year, says Allie Mazurek, a climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center. However, on a more general scale, we are expecting to see more extreme precipitation events in a warmer climate. An interactive map from the Colorado Climate Centerwhich is updated in near real-timetracks high precipitation events across the country. It combines past research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Atlas 14, a precipitation frequency data interface, to track high-precipitation events from 2002 to today in every state but Washington and Oregon (their data has yet to be updated on NOAA’s precipitation server). The data sets visually depict the number of 1,000-year heavy precipitation rates from 2002 to 2024. Each year follows similar patterns and frequency. But that doesnt mean rainfall and subsequent flooding isnt intensifying. Mazurek says there are two factors at play for these natural disasters: the frequency in which rain falls, and the intensityhow much it rains in a short amount of time. According to independent climate research group Climate Central, 88% of 144 locations across all nine climate regions in the U.S. have experienced a 15% increase in hourly rainfall intensity since 1970. Nearly two-thirds of those locations experienced at least a 10% increase in the same period. Mazurek says these trends come down to one primary effect of climate changehumidity. Rising temperatures create wet air Essentially, when you have warmer temperatures, that allows more water to exist in the vapor phase, and therefore, you get more water up in the atmosphere, Mazurek said. Then when you get a thunderstorm, there is more water available to it when it starts to precipitate and make rainfall. If youre adding more water to the atmosphere, you’ll get more rainfall as a result. Climate Central says that for every single Fahrenheit degree of Earth warming, the air holds 4% more moisture. Give that the Earths temperature has risen by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the preindustrial era, there’s simply often more water available to create intense rainfall. So while the statistical probability of these floods occurring won’t change, their severity could get worse Mitigation and adaptation Flash floods arent expected to subside anytime soon this summer, with Accuweather meteorologists warning that additional flooding events can be expected due to this summers continued trend of high precipitation predictions. I think there’s definitely more work that all of us together could work on for extreme rainfall and flood events from meteorologists to emergency managers, Mazurek said. We all obviously have more work to do communicating those kinds of events and keeping people safe. I think that is still a very active area of research. However, with recent Trump administration changes to climate policy, emergency weather cuts at NOAA, and the dismantling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), these efforts may become more and more difficult, even as climate-driven natural disasters increase. “We expect kind of both sides of the extremes to get more extreme, Mazurek said. Heavy precipitation, extreme rains, flooding events, as well as drought. They each work off their own feedback.”
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