Here’s How to Wield Empathy and Data to Build an Inclusive Team

When Ciara Trinidad left her post as Lever’s Head of Diversity and Inclusion, the numbers made her understandably proud: The startup’s team of 125 people was 59% women, 39% men, and 2% gender nonconforming. Even the sales team — historically a male-dominated group — had a 50/50 gender split. “The product team was at about 40% white; the majority was a mix of every other … [ Read more ]

Untangling Your Organization’s Decision Making

Any organization can improve the speed and quality of its decisions by paying more attention to what it’s deciding.

Pedro J. Pizarro

Human beings are incredibly perceptive. And they seem to be more perceptive when they look at people above them than when they look down.

Adam Bryant

I believe it’s time to give the narrative about whether men and women lead differently a rest. Yes, we need to keep talking and writing about why there are so few women in the top ranks. But this trope about different styles of leadership among men and women seems past its expiration date.

And while we’re at it, could everyone agree to drop the predictable questions … [ Read more ]

Bill Green

You sacrifice and you’re a victim, or you sacrifice because it’s the right thing to do and you have pride in it. Huge difference. Simple thing. Huge difference.

Michel Feaster

The best cultural lists are the behaviors you want to cultivate. The problem with values like respect and courage is that everybody interprets them differently. They’re too ambiguous and open to interpretation. Instead of uniting us, they can create friction.

Tae Hea Nahm

No matter what people say about culture, it’s all tied to who gets promoted, who gets raises and who gets fired. You can have your stated culture, but the real culture is defined by compensation, promotions and terminations. Basically, people seeing who succeeds and fails in the company defines culture. The people who succeed become role models for what’s valued in the organization, and that … [ Read more ]

Mike Krieger

Check in with new managers, too, and make it known that there’s an off ramp if they need it. Even people who thought they wanted the role may ultimately find that it’s making them miserable. Create check-ins along the way, say every six months. “Are you still happy? Do you want to take on more? Do you want to go back to being an individual … [ Read more ]

The Effective Decision

Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on what is important. They try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding. They try to find the constants in a situation, to think through what is strategic and generic rather than to “solve problems.” They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision making; rather, they … [ Read more ]

Lindsay McGregor

When you find yourself saying things like “I wish my people took more ownership,” “I wish we operated more like a startup,” or “I wish we were more nimble,” remember that most organizations have created so much emphasis on tactical performance that their people cannot adapt. Maintaining great performance over the long term will require organizations to also emphasize adaptive performance.

Strategic Change Is All in the Timing

Large organizations have many different heartbeats, and change managers need to listen to them all.

Executives Fail to Execute Strategy Because They’re Too Internally Focused

Experts have opined for decades on the reasons behind the spectacular failure rates of strategy execution. In 2016, it was estimated that 67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution. There are many explanations for this abysmal failure rate, but a 10-year longitudinal study on executive leadership conducted by my firm showed one clear reason. A full 61% of executives told us they were … [ Read more ]

Allison Kluger

Women rarely do something unless they feel 100% certain they can, and men only have to feel like they’re 60% certain. But if a woman and a man go and take the same exam, women will do just as well or better. As women, it’s easy to opt out of things that make us nervous, but we should develop a mind-set of, “I’m going to … [ Read more ]

David Rock, Beth Jones

Stop telling people to give feedback as a practice, and instead, encourage their employees to learn to ask for feedback. When a person asks for feedback, he or she is much less anxious about receiving it, and the giver feels less anxious too. If employees are encouraged and trained to ask for feedback regularly, they will get it when they need it, and they will … [ Read more ]

6 Things Every Mentor Should Do

Given how important mentoring is, there’s surprisingly limited guidance about how to become a good mentor. We offer here an informal set of guidelines for good mentorship — a playbook, if you will, for a game that is very much a team sport. While we draw many of our examples from academic medicine, the lessons are pertinent across disciplines.

Bethanye Blount

The clearest indicator of the values driving a company — your own or one you’re considering joining — is already in motion from the start, in one of the last places you’re probably looking: compensation.

Research: Objective Performance Metrics Are Not Enough to Overcome Gender Bias

In various contexts, such as entrepreneurship and hiring, people often exhibit a preference for men over women when information about an individual’s quality (for example, their expected performance) is unavailable or unclear. Even when performance information is available, lab-based research has shown that women still tend to be disadvantaged, compared with men of equal quality. This double standard means women must outperform men to be … [ Read more ]

The Perils of Democratic Decision Making

Enterprise Social Software (ESS)-enabled communities can contribute significantly to decision making, but how well they contribute depends on the type of decision being made and the role given to ESS. Deploying online communities to democratize decision making is very conducive to enhancing operational and tactical decisions in terms of identifying and including the “right” stakeholders and decision makers impacting work practices, as well as gaining … [ Read more ]

Mapping Employee Chitchat Can Reveal Information Blockages

By measuring the day-to-day interactions between employees, organizations can map how information gets shared and actually make work, and their businesses, better.

Eric J. McNulty

Principles, unlike rules, give people something unshakable to hold onto yet also the freedom to take independent decisions and actions to move toward a shared objective. Principles are directional, whereas rules are directive.