by Gianpiero Petriglieri
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t meet it, the struggle with emotions at work.
The misunderstood colleague, filled with frustration, attempting not to show it; the executive wondering how to confront her team’s lack of enthusiasm; the student hesitating to confess his affection to a classmate. Continue reading
By Amy Power
Company “culture” is a major buzzword for big business — and with good reason. When an executive is leading a large enterprise with financial and human resources, it’s much easier to leverage a massive budget to create company culture. Google touts lavish perks including on-site physicians and nurses to save time, massage chairs, nap pods, free meals and a stable of electric cars for those in need of a ride. Facebook offers a bike-repair shop, barbershop, video arcade, free candy shop, bakery and free computer-accessory vending machines. Continue reading
by Andy Molinsky
You want your employees to become more effective and emotionally intelligent communicators, savvier negotiators, more compassionate and effective deliverers of bad news, better coaches, and more sophisticated cross-cultural communicators. So you offer them interpersonal skills training. It’s a packaged solution that can pay great dividends for your business. Right?
Well, not so fast. Skills training is a huge industry, but also one with an equally huge failure rate. Companies spend billions of dollars annually helping their employees develop all sorts of interpersonal skills with questionable return on their investment. And the big question is, why? Why does training seem like such an obvious solution to a real problem when it doesn’t prove fruitful much of the time? Continue reading
by Walter Frick
Most companies will tell you they want to hire and retain “A players”, and why not? It’s hard to object to building a company around the best possible talent. But what is it about superstar talent that actually improves performance? A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines this question by looking at academic departments, where productivity can be measured in terms of papers published and citations from other researchers. Superstars were defined as academics who ranked above the 90th percentile based on citation-weighted publications. The paper points to three different ways that superstars can improve an organization, and measures the magnitude of each in the context of academic evolutionary biology departments. The first, and most obvious, is the direct increase in output that a superstar can have. Hire someone who can get a lot of great work done quickly and your organization will by definition be producing more great work. But, perhaps surprisingly, this represents only a small fraction of the change that superstars have on output. The authors write:
On average, department-level output increases by 54% after the arrival of a star. A significant fraction of the star effect is indirect: after removing the direct contribution of the star, department level output still increases by 48%. Continue reading
by Joanna Barsh and Johanne Lavoie
When we think of leadership, we often focus on the what: external characteristics, practices, behavior, and actions that exemplary leaders demonstrate as they take on complex and unprecedented challenges. While this line of thinking is a great place to start, we won’t reach our potential as leaders by looking only at what is visible. We need to see what’s underneath to understand how remarkable leaders lead—and that begins with mind-sets. Continue reading
