A Study Used Sensors to Show That Men and Women Are Treated Differently at Work

Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite, receive lower salaries, and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men. Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to differences in men and women’s behavior.

Which raises the question: Do women and men act all that differently? We realized that there’s little to no concrete … [ Read more ]

Building Trust Is a Blood Sport

Trust is seen by many managers as one of those soft issues best discussed in a sensitivity seminar. However, science clearly shows that a culture of trust stimulates productivity and innovation while also improving employee health and happiness. And after a decade of experiments, science also shows us how to build trust.

This article looks inside our heads to explain why trust is an effective means … [ Read more ]

Types of Intelligence and How to Find The One You Are Best In

For most people, being intelligent is perceived as having a lot of useful (and sometimes non-useful) knowledge and skills, and being able to apply such knowledge and skills.

That’s not wrong, mind you. In fact, it is one of the several accurate definitions of intelligence circulating today. Where it goes wrong in actual application is how people believe that being knowledgeable and skilled at general and … [ Read more ]

Nir Halevy, Ian Chipman

Typically, contracts contain both “control” and “coordination” clauses. Control clauses tell you what you can and can’t do at work, while coordination clauses help you align expectations. In other words, coordination clauses let workers know what employers want, while control clauses tell them how to do it and, quite often, what not to do. […] The key, is to remember that greater specificity can be … [ Read more ]

Is Performance Management Performing?

Organizations are spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours on performance management. Yet too few leaders are confident that their approaches are supporting the workforce of the future or improving the performance of the business itself.

It is time to revitalize performance management: To become more aware of the diversity of different segments of the workforce, to become open and more transparent, to foster real-time … [ Read more ]

David Clarke

Think of your workplace like a chessboard: Everybody has a role to play, and you can’t win a game with only knights. It’s healthy to have a mix of personality types. And one of those types is a team member who raises her hand, asks tough questions, and sparks productive debate.

Some people are naturally good at creating friction — they’re agitators, instigators, disruptors, and downright … [ Read more ]

The Myths of Unethical Behaviour

This article attempts to debunk the myths of unethical behavior created by business ethicists and to use the work of criminologists, who have been studying immoral behaviors for generations, and researchers in social psychology, to argue that unethical corporate behavior is most often a result of situational and contextual factors, job dependence and cognitive factors, which is perhaps an even more disturbing conclusion than the … [ Read more ]

Scott Crabtree

When you say thank you, you increase your own happiness. I know of one executive who puts 10 pennies in his left pocket every morning. Every time he thanks someone or expresses gratitude, he moves a penny to his right pocket. He won’t go home until his left pocket is empty. Whatever you need to do to remind yourself to say positive things at work, … [ Read more ]

Scott Crabtree

A huge difference between happy people and unhappy people is how they cope. Three top coping strategies recommended by doctors sound common enough but are too rarely practiced: 1) Talk to someone who cares about you (not just anyone, it won’t have the same effect); 2) meditate or try to be mindful for even just a few minutes; and 3) get physical exercise.

Scott Crabtree

Great goals go beyond SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant to your interests, and time-bound). They have specific milestones that help provide a sense of progress, which is crucial to happiness at work. If you start off with well-defined goals that will allow you to realize success and that have multiple steps toward an endpoint, you are much more likely to enjoy working toward them.

Scott Crabtree

There’s a common assumption that you will be happy when you are successful. But the reverse is actually true, and not just anecdotally. Hard neurological science supports the idea that happy people have more capacity to succeed. And beyond that, that happiness is not a genetic mandate, or a product of circumstance. It’s a choice.

How to Keep Perceived Bias from Holding Back High-Potential Employees

When talented people from diverse backgrounds fail to rise in a company, there are three powerful solutions: having more inclusive team leaders, more diversity among the top leadership, and better sponsorship practices.

There Are Two Types of Performance — but Most Organizations Only Focus on One

There are two types of performance that are important for success. Tactical performance is how effectively your organization sticks to its strategy. Adaptive performance is how effectively your organization diverges from its strategy. Every high performer needs both. A great salesperson will operate much more efficiently with a defined process for reaching out to prospects. They will represent the products more consistently. But they must … [ Read more ]

How to Lead an Effective Virtual Team

When it comes to brainstorming, project planning and setting goals, SHRM research suggests that virtual teams can be more effective than in-person teams. Virtual teams, however, are still considered inferior in some key areas. Traditional teams, for example, receive higher marks when it comes to developing trust, maintaining morale, monitoring performance and managing conflict. Furthermore, as the SHRM survey illustrated, virtual managers have a harder … [ Read more ]

It’s All Cass Sunstein’s Default

The law professor who brought behavioral science into public policy believes that with a little intervention, we can all have the freedom to choose wisely.

How Performance Affects Status in Task Groups

UCLA Anderson Professor Corinne Bendersky discusses perceptions of status in task groups and how that evolves over time.

Gary Hamel

In most organizations the costs of bureaucracy are largely hidden. Our accounting systems don’t measure the costs of inertia, insularity, disempowerment, and all the other forms of bureaucratic drag. Nowhere do we capture the costs of a management model that perpetuates a caste system of thinkers (managers) and doers (everyone else), that regards human beings as mere “resources,” that values conformance above all else, … [ Read more ]

Claire Hughes Johnson

If you don’t consistently teach more and more people how to make the decisions or find resolutions consistent with your company’s goals, you’re going to stall out. Trust saves a huge amount of time.

Claire Hughes Johnson

One of the biggest challenges any growing company faces is equipping employees with the information, agency and confidence to make decisions for the company on their own. As a founder or executive leader, you can’t always be there to make a call. You have to trust that others can do it in order to keep pushing the frontier of your business. To make this possible, … [ Read more ]

Claire Hughes Johnson

Your principles should be clear and explicit enough that the people who consult them will make the same decisions a founder of your company would. They should also be defined in a way that acknowledges potential tensions. When two principles seem to conflict, the context should tell you which principle should take precedence. In this way, your core tenets serve more as a guide to … [ Read more ]