3605 Posts Found

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Clarke | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

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 ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Overall | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

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.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

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.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Goals, Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity / Work Tips, Success / Failure

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.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

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.

Content: Article | Authors: Laura Sherbin, Ripa Rashid, Sylvia Ann Hewlett | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Women in Business

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 ]

Content: Article | Author: Lindsay McGregor | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

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 ]

Content: Article | Authors: Darleen DeRosa, Richard Lepsinger | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Teamwork

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.

Content: Article | Authors: Cass R. Sunstein, Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Economics, Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior

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

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Corinne Bendersky | Source: UCLA | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Bureaucracy, Management, Organizational Behavior

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.

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Training & Development, Trust

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Training & Development

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 ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase. For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

If organizations are ‘systems for getting work done,’ processes provide a fine-grained description of the means.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Garvin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Research explains why and how brevity often beats specificity in employee contracts.

Content: Article | Author: Ian Chipman | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Some people formally embrace the agile way of working but do not let go of their existing organizational structure and governance. That defeats the whole purpose and only creates more frustration.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Jacobs | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

As your startup grows, what your customers expect from you will change and the volume of their requests will change. You’ll shift from the reactive mode of supporting requests as they happen to the proactive mode of fixing issues before they ever become a problem.

I’ve spent the last seven years building the customer success function at HubSpot. I grew with the team, and played a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Redbord | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior