How to Give Your Team Feedback

Business books, magazines, and blogs are chock full of advice about how to give feedback to individuals, but how do you do the same for your entire team? What type of constructive criticism is appropriate in a group setting? How much is too much? And how should your colleagues help?

Cynthia McCauley’s Manual for Leadership Development

The leadership scholar explains why measurable, experience-based programs are key to helping executives develop their potential.

Ralph Welborn

There are the T-shirts (operations), the turtlenecks (marketing), and the suits (executive management). The language they use, their perspectives and how they prioritize is fundamentally different. So you’ve got to bridge that disconnect to get the alignment and executional consistency critical to agility.

Dan Ariely on ‘The Honest Truth About Dishonesty’

Everyone cheats a little from time to time. But most major betrayals within organizations — from accounting fraud to doping in sports — start with a first step that crosses the line, according to Dan Ariely, a leading behavioral economist at Duke and author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves. That step can start people on a … [ Read more ]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

The Communication Strategy Sure to Inspire Employees

Improve the way you communicate with your employees and create a motivating vision by tapping into your company’s past, present and future.

Henry Ford

No one is apathetic except those in pursuit of someone else’s objectives.

The True Cost of Hiring Yet Another Manager

Not long ago my colleagues and I studied the cost of adding a manager or executive, and we found a kind of multiplier effect. When you hire a manager, he or she typically generates enough work to keep somebody else busy as well. Senior executives — SVPs and EVPs — are even more costly. These high-priced folks typically require support from a caravan of assistants … [ Read more ]

Niels Billou, Mary Crossan, Gerard Seijts

As Guy Claxton, author of the book Live and Learn noted, one of the biggest barriers to learning is our resistance to let go of the 4C’s–the desire to be consistent, comfortable, competent and confident. We add a fifth to the list–the desire for control. Protecting and preserving these five C’s is a huge barrier to individual growth and development.

Thomas Malone on Building Smarter Teams

The head of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence explains how the social intelligence factor is critical for business success.

Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

What Power Is—and What It Isn’t

How to increase the total quantity of power in the organization so that the power given to some does not comes at the expense of the power of others.

Cultural Change That Sticks

When properly harnessed, an organization’s culture can be a true differentiator that no competitor can duplicate. However, as pressures on companies build, leaders often become frustrated with the comparatively slow pace of culture evolution. In the rush to implement new strategies and make performance improvements, the legacy culture—employees’ ingrained ways of doing things—can seem like the greatest barrier to change. Unfortunately, most well-intended efforts to … [ Read more ]

Jonathan Roberts

When I’m assessing a team, I use my “three ‘P’ ” test. The “P”s stand for people, process, and product. If everyone on the team isn’t clear about the product (whatever it is that you’re trying to create) and the process (how you’re going to get where you need to be, who drives what, who is the ultimate decision maker), then there are going to … [ Read more ]

Organisational Ambidexterity

Understanding an ambidextrous organisation is one thing, making it a reality is another. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez provides an execution roadmap.

Fostering Adaptability in Tomorrow’s Executives

In today’s turbulent business environment, leaders must be able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. A study coauthored by IESE’s Mireia Las Heras suggests that the most adaptable executives are those who have worked in a variety of different jobs during their careers and those who had access to senior managers early in their careers.

Editor’s Note: I would be very wary of drawing the … [ Read more ]

A Tool That Maps Out Cultural Differences

Most people tend to emphasize just one or two, at most three, dimensions of cultural difference when it comes to parsing and predicting foreigners’ behavior. But cultures differ along many more than three dimensions, so the more dimensions you consider, the less likely you are to trip up on a cultural paradox. The trouble, of course, is that it’s cognitively difficult for us to keep … [ Read more ]

Relationship Science: Harnessing Big Data for Power Networking

Call it a more sophisticated LinkedIn. It might just be the magic bullet for business development.

Editor’s Note: this is a somewhat topical article and the companies of importance will certainly change rapidly, but the underlying topic is of long-term interest. I was a bit disappointed that internal corporate network mapping and research wasn’t discussed more or tied to the larger idea.

Not All Professional Women Want to Lean In

While Sheryl Sandberg and others emphasize the challenges for working mothers, women early in their careers say they face very different dilemmas.

Editor’s Note: I agree with one commenter that the “solutions” offered seem disconnected from the primary point of the article (plus, seem of rather dubious validity).

Ron Crossland

When your intent is to move people to action, to help them understand and deepen their appreciation and gain more insight and more passion about their work, you have got to have […] facts, emotion, and symbols.