Help Your Team Spend Time on the Right Things

by Ron Ashkenas HBRRon Ashkenas and80-Amy_McDougall Amy McDougall

 

What is the most common resource that’s always in short supply? The answer, of course, is time. This applies not only to your time, but to your team’s. It’s the one organizational resource that is neither expandable nor renewable. Therefore, making sure that time is spent in ways that will have the biggest impact is a critical determinant of organizational success. Continue reading

Why The Best Leaders View Vulnerability as a Strength

by Jim Haudan, CEO with special contribution by Katharine Lind, Root Inc.

Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks, once said, “The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability… When the leader demonstrates vulnerability and sensibility and brings people together, the team wins.”

Almost everyone seems to think that being vulnerable is a bad thing – it implies that you’re weak or defenseless. In fact, when someone is willing to admit they’re vulnerable, it demonstrates a level of trust and respect with the person or people they’re opening up to. Great leaders recognize the importance of bringing vulnerability to work because it is the foundation for open and nonjudgmental communications. The boldest act of a leader is to be publicly vulnerable. Continue reading

What New Team Leaders Should Do First

80-Carolyn_OHara by Carolyn O’Hara

Getting people to work together isn’t easy, and unfortunately many leaders skip over the basics of team building in a rush to start achieving goals. But your actions in the first few weeks and months can have a major impact on whether your team ultimately delivers results. What steps should you take to set your team up for success? How do you form group norms, establish clear goals, and create an environment where everyone feels comfortable and motivated to contribute? Continue reading

The New Leadership

Gianpiero Petriglieri, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, trained as a psychiatrist before becoming an award-winning teacher and researcher whose work bridges the domains of leadership, adult development and experiential learning. He is also a frequent Harvard Business Review and Wall Street Journal blogger, and a fast speaking – and thinking – interviewee. He talked with Thinkers50 co-founder, Stuart Crainer

 

What is particularly striking about your resume is the move from psychiatry into management academia business schools. It seems an unusual leap.
Lots of people ask me that, why spend ten years training, do all this work and then change career? But personally I don’t feel I have changed direction that much.

I have always had a passion for understanding and assisting the unfolding of human lives in social contexts. At the broadest level, all my work — whether it is research, writing, teaching, coaching, consulting, and in the past, my practice as a psychotherapist — has gravitated around two endeavors. The first is to examine how people’s history and aspirations, and the dynamics of groups and social systems they are in, affect the way they think, feel and act in personal and professional roles. I am interested in how those forces, consciously and unconsciously, shape human being as well as human becoming. The second is to help people take their experience seriously without however taking it too literally, so they can make new meaning out of their experience, and develop more options for dealing with it. Continue reading

Three approaches to employee development that sound like great ideas, but really aren’t

by Melissa Janis

 

 With employees feeling overwhelmed by ever-increasing task demands, it’s harder than ever to make employee development a priority with its longer term, often “squishy” topics. Fortunately, there are leaders who understand the value of focusing on employee development and look to leverage it to boost productivity, engagement and retention for today as well as to build for the future. Continue reading