Gianpiero Petriglieri

When others assume you don’t care, they can easily reject your proposal or your presence with the pretense of style. But once they know you do care, and share a similar intent, even your critiques become an expression of that care.

Showing care requires naming a shared intent… It requires acknowledging that you are asking them to sacrifice old habits and norms they have valued, to … [ Read more ]

Crossing the mental Rubicon: Don’t let decisiveness backfire

We demand that leaders be decisive, but research in social psychology and behavioral economics suggests that decisiveness is not an unequivocal good. Studies on “mindset” reveal that, when contemplating an important decision, prematurely focusing on execution can exacerbate decision-making biases and lead to overconfidence and excessive risk-taking.

4 Listening Skills Leaders Need to Master

Leaders who listen well create company cultures where people feel heard, valued, and engaged. In addition, employees who experience high-quality listening report greater levels of job satisfaction and psychological safety. If you’re interested in sharpening your listening skills, try using these four techniques: (1) Listen until the end — don’t jump in or interrupt the speaker; (2) Listen to summarize the problem, not to solve … [ Read more ]

Judith Persichilli

Take your jobs and your responsibilities very seriously, but don’t take yourselves too seriously.

Ginni Rometty

Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, because you’re acknowledging what you or the organization know or don’t know… It takes a strong person to do that, to ask for help. When people won’t ask for help when they need it, I get very nervous. To me, that’s a great sign of weakness.

How to Think Clearly in Turbulent Times: Lessons from Charlie Munger

Munger’s success was built on a system for decision-making—not a classical investment philosophy, but rather a mental discipline underpinning one. We outline four ideas strategists can learn from Munger to think more clearly in turbulent times.

Five Essential Elements to Build the Capital You Need to Lead

The path to leadership can seem unclear in competitive organizations. In the book The Treasure You Seek, Archie L. Jones offers a roadmap to help aspiring leaders discover their strengths, communicate effectively, and build meaningful connections.

Frank D’Souza

Thinking about failure means going back to root causes. Most often, my failures stem from one of two places: a blind spot that I had or a comfort zone that I was in. I either didn’t see something, or I assumed something that wasn’t the right assumption. And those eventually lead to some form of failure.

It’s good to be constantly aware of your blind spots … [ Read more ]

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Breaking rules has many advantages. The first advantage of breaking the rules is that it catches people by surprise. […] The rules are made by those already in power. If you’re already in power, follow the rules. If you’re not, make your own.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

No one is hired to win a popularity contest—you’re hired to get things done. You’re hired to make things happen, so when you show up to lead a group of people, those people want many things from you. What they don’t necessarily want from you is your authentic self.

What they need from you is inspiration. They need energy, even if you’re not feeling energetic that … [ Read more ]

The big power of small goals

Employees who are disciplined about setting daily goals not only accomplish more but also feel better about their work. Here are three ways that managers can make daily goal-setting a habit.

Russ Laraway

Ask the question: Which quarterly goal does that workstream support? If you keep finding that the work that you’re doing isn’t reflected in the quarterly goals, it’s time to rethink how you’re approaching those OKRs, or get them right the next time.

How To Make Better Decisions

Understanding how and why people think the way they do will help you with everything from customer service to evaluating mergers and strategic initiatives. Takeaways from a life of study.

Russell Ackoff

We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

When moving from a BigCo to a startup, about half of what you know will be innovative and incredibly useful to your new company and the other half will only work at the later stage. Your job is to figure out as quickly as possible which half is which.

Ximena Vengoechea

It’s easy to assume that listening is merely about showing up and paying attention to the other person, but it’s also deeply tied to paying attention to ourselves. Being an effective listener is about building self-awareness around how you naturally show up in conversation.

Ximena Vengoechea

We often think of miscommunication as an issue with our own content or delivery — that if we could tweak the what or the how, our message would be more effective. But that perpetuates a dynamic where we view our counterparts as an audience, not as collaborators.

Annie Duke

When we look at success stories that were a long time in the making, there’s a temptation to say sticking to it is just good — full stop. But the problem is that the grit that allows us to power through will also get us to stick to things that aren’t worthwhile. Success comes from sticking to the stuff that’s working and quitting the rest. … [ Read more ]