Ahead of the Curve: The Future of Performance Management

What happens after companies jettison traditional year-end evaluations?

Breaking Down the Gender Challenge

To make meaningful progress on gender diversity, companies must move beyond the averages and focus on the biggest pain points.

IQ plus EQ: How Technology Will Unlock the Emotional Intelligence of the Workforce of the Future

Companies have perfected collecting data on consumers to boost sales and customer loyalty. But to date, they have had little insight into how employees interact with each other and what makes them happy or successful at work. A new generation of emerging technologies promises to change that. Boosting EQ as well as IQ. Resulting in a much more engaged, more productive workplace.

Your Company’s Culture is Who You Hire, Fire, and Promote

Instead of letting your company become a corporate version of “The Hunger Games,” leadership should do the responsible thing: actively prioritize behavior that’s congruent with company values.

Mark Chussil

We narrow our decision-making frame when we believe we know what the future will look like. We implicitly assert that everything is locked in except for what we will do, and so we ask this simple, efficient question: “What should we do?”

Should asks people to spot and advocate the one right decision. It treats decision making as a debate. It drives toward closure. We need … [ Read more ]

Use Social Influences to Be a Better Manager

A new book shows how you can create a better team by recognizing people’s needs to stand out, fit in, and shape their identities.

Is Your Company’s Diversity Training Making You More Biased?

Although diversity and inclusion training is prevalent in corporate America, its impact is inconsistent. According to the evidence, sometimes the programs even have the opposite effect of what they intend. One 2016 study of 830 mandatory diversity training programs found that they often triggered a strong backlash against the ideas they promoted. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and … [ Read more ]

Stephanie Scotti

Here’s a little-known tip about asking someone a question. Always say their name first before asking the question. As in, “Lisa, could you describe your process as it is now?” This tactic avoids catching someone off-guard if the person wasn’t paying attention and didn’t hear the question. Everyone snaps to attention when they hear their name.

What Incoming Leaders Should Know About Employee Personalities

While personality differences between leaders are to be expected, a major shift can create difficulty in adjustment for everyone involved.

Gary Klein

What concerns me is the tendency to marginalize people who disagree with you at meetings. There’s too much intolerance for challenge. As a leader, you can say the right things — for instance, everybody should share their opinions. But people are too smart to do that, because it’s risky. So when people raise an idea that doesn’t make sense to you as a leader, rather than ask … [ Read more ]

The Four Building Blocks of Change

Four key actions influence employee mind-sets and behavior. Here’s why they matter.

Wouter Aghina, Aaron De Smet, Kirsten Weerda

The idea behind agile governance is to establish both stable and dynamic elements in making decisions, which typically come in three types. We call big decisions where the stakes are high Type I; frequent decisions that require cross-unit dialogue and collaboration, Type II; and decisions that should be parsed into smaller ones and delegated as far down as possible, often to people with clear accountability, … [ Read more ]

Four Tips to Gain Influence in Your Organization

You have more power than you think—here’s how to harness it.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

People are often cognitively lazy, not just cognitively biased. Our mental shortcuts and unconscious patterns of thought make everyone susceptible to the tactics of interpersonal influence: tactics that depend on the norm of reciprocity, accepting and obeying authority (or its symbols), the power of liking, the value created by scarcity, and the tendency to escalate levels of commitment, even in the face of negative outcomes. … [ Read more ]

Jeffrey Pfeffer

When executives tell me that flattery doesn’t work and that people can see through strategic efforts to garner their support, I cite extensive evidence showing that we are generally quite poor at discerning deception. When the deception is coming from a master deceiver and consummate politician like [Lyndon] Johnson, the odds of successful resistance are quite low.

Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On?

There are many models of emotional intelligence, each with its own set of abilities; they are often lumped together as “EQ” in the popular vernacular. We prefer “EI,” which we define as comprising four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Nested within each domain are twelve EI competencies, learned and learnable capabilities that allow outstanding performance at work or as a leader.

Glenn R. Carroll

Why are we drawn to authenticity? Part of it is an attempt to individuate ourselves and find something that’s different and more appealing to us than it is to the masses. We all do that. We find satisfaction and gratification in it. And I think that’s fine. There are theories that it has to do with the loss of identity in mass society — that … [ Read more ]

David Brooks

We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. In the major spheres, decision-making, when it happens at all, is downstream from curiosity and engagement. If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. Why are you interested in the things you are interested in? Why are some people zealously seized, manically attentive and … [ Read more ]

Your Scarcest Resource

Organizations waste too much time – see how Bain helps them manage it like money in this 10-minute video slide deck.