Bethanye McKinney Blount

Compensation is culture, period. It’s how you pay your people and it’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s the metric you can’t cheat. It’s naive to think that you’re just going to give people money and they’re not going to feel everything that’s attached to it. Pay is incredibly personal and emotionally charged. It directly affects how we live our lives and how we … [ Read more ]

Bryan Hancock, Bill Schaninger

We found through our research […] what drives perceived fairness in the performance-management process. One of the drivers of fairness is that you understand how what you’re working on fits in the bigger picture. […] The second driver of fairness is that there’s an ongoing component. “My manager has an ongoing conversation with me about how I’m doing, so I’m not surprised. I know what … [ Read more ]

Ken Shotts

There are strong arguments that diversity promotes effectiveness. But I think that has implications that people haven’t really thought through. What about situations where some people believe diversity produces ineffectiveness? That’s not a hypothetical — this has long been the argument against diversity in the military. But there’s a counter-argument rooted in social justice. Do I want to live in a world where people’s outcomes … [ Read more ]

The 6 Personalities of Change Rejection

Is it any wonder that so many of us are scared of change?

Before we completed our research into this phenomenon, I often wondered how rational and intelligent people could make such sloppy and irrational arguments against obvious improvements.

Today, I have a much better idea why people resist the inevitable. If you’re unsure why those around you are having such a difficult time embracing a new … [ Read more ]

Phanish Puranam

Every organization, regardless of its scale, faces the same universal problems: how to divide goals into tasks (division of labor) and how to put the results back together again (integration of effort). While these problems are universal, there are many different approaches to solving them, and a set of such solutions is an organization’s design.

Changing the Game for Women

Increasing the number of women at every level of an organization is possible if its leaders are ready to use practical solutions.

Hit the Mark: Make Complex Ideas Understandable

6 ways to communicate challenging concepts to an audience.

Sales Teams Aren’t Great at Forecasting. Here’s How to Fix That.

Though AI and other advanced technologies have been applied to improve forecasting accuracy, sales leaders still get blindsided by forecasts that turn out to be embarrassingly overinflated. That’s because the root causes of most inaccuracies are not faulty algorithms but all-too-human behavior. Here are five of the most harmful such behaviors and some techniques that can go a long way toward redesigning systems in ways … [ Read more ]

James Everingham

You can have more decisions than decision-makers, but if you have more decision-makers than decisions, that’s when you run into problems.

James Everingham

When you think of transparency, you usually default to the communication aspect: telling everyone what’s happening or admitting when you’ve made a mistake. But when folks say that things aren’t transparent, what they’re probably getting at is that decision-making isn’t transparent. It’s the feeling that decisions sometimes roll on down from the lofty perch of the leadership team, seemingly out of nowhere. Instead, pull back … [ Read more ]

John K. Coyle

All of us — individuals, teams, and organizations — have weaknesses. These are not skill gaps; those can be corrected with learning. Weaknesses are inherent deficiencies of talent or capability that do not change even after aggressive efforts to improve them. Pride and our ingrained work ethic may cause us to deny our weaknesses, but acceptance is the first step toward designing for strength.

[…] … [ Read more ]

Taya Cohen

Moral character is a broad dimension of personality that captures a person’s tendency to think, feel, and behave in ethical ways. It subsumes a number of more specific traits. For example, guilt proneness is an important moral character trait. People who have high levels of guilt proneness have a strong conscience — they feel guilty when they make mistakes or let others down. Moreover, they … [ Read more ]

Nancy Koehn

Widespread transformation always unleashes waves of collective fear, discontent, and doubt—emotions that often translate into vocal, and potentially more destructive, opposition. …If left unacknowledged, adversaries have the power to derail even the worthiest attempts at reform, and thus it is a leader’s responsibility to identify and, when necessary, neutralize his or her most powerful critics. But how is the person at the center of the … [ Read more ]

Terra Carmichael

I’m a big believer in teaching leaders to fish. That’s why we’ve rolled out a weekly(ish) email for leaders … that summarizes all the things they need to be thinking about in terms of managing and messaging to their team. We break it down into a few sections: things to know, things to do, things to share. It sounds simple, but let’s be real, leaders … [ Read more ]

How To Be Objective About Budgets

Addressing anchoring bias can lead to more accurate budget forecasts, better budget conversations, and more dynamic resource reallocation.

The Secrets of the ‘High-Potential’ Personality

Ian MacRae and Adrian Furnham have identified six traits that are consistently linked to workplace success, which they have now combined into the High Potential Trait Inventory (HPTI).

Ryan Patrick Hanley

We should fear … “men of system,” as [Adam Smith] calls them, who insist they have all the answers and are ready to run roughshod over the self-interests of the other individuals in a company — or in society.

People Don’t Actually Know Themselves Very Well

Chances are, your coworkers are better at rating some parts of your personality than you are.

Sandrine Devillard, Vivian Hunt, and Lareina Yee

Drawing on research in behavioral psychology and what McKinsey calls the “organizational health” of a company, we showed that women tend to encourage a more participatory decision-making process, such as improving the “working environment” component of organizational health. Men, meanwhile, tend to take corrective action more frequently when objectives are not achieved to bolster the “coordination and control” component of organizational health. Not all women … [ Read more ]

Scott Belsky

Bureaucracy was born out of the human desire for complete assurance before taking action.