Over the last two years, I read various Harvard Business Review
articles, which provide a vast amount of advices for modern companies and modern leadership.
Recently, I encounter that the law of diminishing returns kicked in, which means it's quite difficult to find new ideas, or to phrase it otherwise, I need to spend a disproportionate amount of time to find novel ideas. That's quite similar to what I experienced using Blinkist
. After all, the difficulty is anyway to apply the ideas rather than finding new ones.
In the last few weeks, I reviewed most articles. This led to the decision, to creating a comprehensive overview by citing the articles which provides the most interesting ideas.
I extracted the most influential 111 articles, which I grouped according to the following nine categories:
Leadership, health, motivation, culture, growth, change, behavior, productivity, and strategy.
All in all, the articles provide a great compass of what to do and how to do it the right way. The advises are independent of the position in an organization and not solely limited to managerial roles.
Obviously, I am aware of the confirmation bias and that I selected articles which are aligned with my world view. I am also aware, that demographic change, economic decline and political conflicts might change our behavior and how we work in the next decade.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that the advices described in these articles provide the right tools and for modern companies and modern leadership. Especially because a vast chunk of articles is written during the Corona pandemic, which also reflect the new way of how we work.
Leadership
- Be who you say you are.
- The first thing you must do is articulate your values so others know what to expect.
- Be a safe place to fail. [...] People inherently trust others they feel no need to hide from, especially in the shame of failure. When others make mistakes, even substantial ones, make sure that accountability includes keeping their self-respect intact.
- When people believe you care about the things they care about, you make them feel welcomed. And the more you learn about what’s important to others, especially people different than you, the less likely you are to misjudge them, securing greater levels of their trust.
- There is no currency in organizational life more valuable than trustworthiness. [...] In times of unprecedented uncertainty, it’s critical to earn and keep the trust of others every day. If you hope to enjoy a career of great influence and impact, start by cultivating a trustworthy reputation. Remember, somewhere in your organization, a colleague is sharing a story about their experience of you at their dinner table. What story do you hope they’re telling?
The Leader as Coach
by Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular
- Rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and what succeeded in the past is no longer a guide to what will succeed in the future. Twenty-first-century managers simply don’t (and can’t!) have all the right answers. [...] a model in which managers give support and guidance rather than instructions, and employees learn how to adapt to constantly changing environments in ways that unleash fresh energy, innovation, and commitment.
- Increasingly, coaching is becoming integral to the fabric of a learning culture—a skill that good managers at all levels need to develop and deploy.
- You also need to make coaching an organizational capacity that fits integrally within your company culture.
- If [employees] notice that their leaders are working to foster learning and cultivate the delicate art of leadership as conversation, they will do likewise.
- We live in a world of flux. Successful executives must increasingly supplement their industry and functional expertise with a general capacity for learning [...] Instead, with full institutional support, they need to reinvent themselves as coaches whose job it is to draw energy, creativity, and learning out of the people with whom they work.
- Successful hero-leaders can easily start believing that they’re untouchable and, ultimately, indispensable. It’s easy to be seduced by power, fame, glory, and money. It’s easy to become disconnected from reality and from colleagues, surrounded by sycophants and yay-sayers.
- A leader’s key role is to create energy and momentum — especially when circumstances are dire. It’s to help others see possibilities and potential, creating energy, inspiration, and hope.
- You cannot choose circumstances, but you can control your mindset. Your mindset determines whether you generate hope, inspiration, and energy around you — or bring everyone down. So, choose well.
- For the most part, we all agree on what is right: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion. On paper, every company has great values. But values are no good if they remain on paper. Being driven by values is doing right, not just knowing or saying what’s right. A leader’s role is to live by these values, explicitly promote them, and make sure they’re part of the fabric of the business.
- If you surround yourself with people you trust and whose values align with yours and the organization’s, you don’t have to figure out on your own what’s right in these situations. You will determine the right thing together, and then act on it the best you can.
- Being driven by values also means knowing when to leave when you’re not aligned with your environment, be it your colleagues, your boss, your board, or your company’s values and purpose. Have the wisdom to know the difference between what you can and cannot change, as the saying goes.
- Be yourself, your true self, your whole self, the best version of yourself. Be vulnerable. Be authentic. Being vulnerable and authentic does not mean offloading everything to your colleagues. For leaders, it means sharing emotions and struggles when appropriate and helpful to others.
- A well-cultivated self-observer allows us to watch our dueling selves without reacting impulsively. It also makes it possible to ask our inner lawyer to stand down whenever it rises up to argue our case to our inner and outer critics. Finally, the self-observer can acknowledge, without judgment, that we are both our best and our worst selves, and then make deliberate rather than reactive choices about how to respond in challenging situations.
- To improve your capacity to self-observe, begin with negative emotions such as impatience, frustration, and anger. When you feel them arising, it’s a strong signal that you’re sliding into the second self.
- [...] it’s important to ask yourself two key questions in challenging moments: “What else could be true here?” and “What is my responsibility in this?” By regularly questioning your conclusions, you’re offsetting your confirmation bias — the instinct to look for evidence that supports what you already believe. By always looking for your own responsibility, you’re resisting the instinct to blame others and play victim and focusing instead on what you have the greatest ability to influence — your own behavior.
- [...] Positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe.
- [...] true success is a win-win outcome, so when conflicts come up, he avoids triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, “How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?”
- Thinking through in advance how your audience will react to your messaging helps ensure your content will be heard, versus your audience hearing an attack on their identity or ego [...].
- If you create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.
- Acting on poorly understood priorities is not only ineffective, but it can backfire when leaders’ actions suggest that they don’t understand what their people are wrestling with.
- [...] ensure everyone in your organization recognizes why the well-being vs. performance trade-off is a false dichotomy, particularly in the long term. Help people see that well-being is enhanced by managers showing compassion and providing support, and that well-being in turn enhances all sorts of measurable, performance-related outcomes.
- [...] build psychological safety into these discussions for both leaders and employees. You need employees to be honest about their need for support and leadership to be honest about the performance demands the organization is facing.
- Leaders who strive for sustainably high performance — particularly in today’s environment — need to put in the time and the effort to ensure they’re enabling their employees to achieve it.
In Praise of the Incomplete Leader
by Deborah Ancona, Thomas W. Malone, Wanda J. Orlikowski, and Peter M. Senge
- In today’s world, the executive’s job is no longer to command and control but to cultivate and coordinate the actions of others at all levels of the organization. Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete [...] will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
- No one person could possibly stay on top of everything. But the myth of the complete leader (and the attendant fear of appearing incompetent) makes many executives try to do just that, exhausting themselves and damaging their organizations in the process. [...] The incomplete leader also knows that leadership exists throughout the organizational hierarchy [...]
- [...] a model of distributed leadership [...] views leadership as a set of four capabilities: sensemaking (understanding the context in which a company and its people operate), relating (building relationships within and across organizations), visioning (creating a compelling picture of the future), and inventing (developing new ways to achieve the vision).
- Sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing are interdependent. Without sensemaking, there’s no common view of reality from which to start. Without relating, people work in isolation or, worse, strive toward different aims. Without visioning, there’s no shared direction. And without inventing, a vision remains illusory.
- Once leaders diagnose their own capabilities, identifying their unique set of strengths and weaknesses, they must search for others who can provide the things they’re missing. [...] Leaders who choose only people who mirror themselves are likely to find their organizations tilting in one direction, missing one or more essential capabilities needed to survive in a changing, complex world. [...] It’s the leader’s responsibility to create an environment that lets people complement one another’s strengths and offset one another’s weaknesses.
- [...] it’s becoming increasingly clear that in order to inspire people to follow you, sharing personal stories with vulnerability, humor, and humility allows audiences?to see you as human?and thus be inspired by you.
- Telling personal stories helps lead to more trust in relationships. Research tracks three key drivers of trust: authenticity, logic, and empathy. We tend to trust people who we believe are acting as their real selves and demonstrating empathy. Increasing realness and humanity by sharing personal stories is one powerful way to build that trust.
- Stories of failure help us relate, normalize setbacks, and create intimacy.
- [...] when we think back on leaders who took time to build emotional resonance with us, our brains show increased positive emotion and social connection.
- Some managers, however, choose a different response when confronted by an underperforming employee: compassion and curiosity.?[...] they are somehow able to suspend judgment and may even be able to use the moment to do a bit of coaching.
- [...] when you respond in a frustrated, furious manner, the employee becomes less likely to take risks in the future because s/he worries about the negative consequences of making mistakes. In other words, you kill the culture of experimentation that is critical to learning and innovation.
- The ability to perspective-take is a valuable one. [...] it helps you see aspects of the situation you may not have noticed and leads to better results in interactions and negotiations. And because positions of power tend to lower our natural inclination for empathy, it is particularly important that managers have the self-awareness to make sure they practice seeing situations form their employee’s perspective.
- When trust, loyalty, and creativity are high, and stress is low, employees are happier and more productive and turnover is lower. Positive interactions even make employees healthier and require fewer sick days.
- [...] by choosing a compassionate response when they know they have made a mistake, they are not destroyed, they have learned a lesson, and they want to improve for you because you’ve been kind to them.
Why People Really Quit Their Jobs
by Lori Goler, Janelle Gale, Brynn Harrington, and Adam Grant
- If you want to keep your people — especially your stars — it’s time to pay more attention to how you design their work. Most companies design jobs and then slot people into them. Our best managers sometimes do the opposite: When they find talented people, they’re open to creating jobs around them.
- [...] three key ways that managers can customize experiences for their people: enable them to do work they enjoy, help them play to their strengths, and carve a path for career development that accommodates personal priorities.
- Smart managers create opportunities for people to use their strengths.
- In a connected world, a huge part of getting work done is seeking and sharing knowledge.
- People leave jobs, and it’s up to managers to design jobs that are too good to leave. Great bosses set up shields — they protect their employees from toxicity. They also open doors to meaningful tasks and learning opportunities — they enable their people to be energized by their projects, to perform at their best, and to move forward professionally without taking steps backward at home.
- First, get clear on what a vision is, and why it matters. Don’t confuse “vision”(an aspirational picture of future success) with “mission” (why an organization exists), “values” (the principles and moral beliefs by which the organization chooses to operate), or strategy (the decisions about where and how to compete that bring a vision to life).
- Watch for different kinds of opportunities to contribute. Contribute to the vision-work underway by other leaders. Translate an already-agreed enterprise vision down to the unit you are leading–or focus the work of your team on a local or regional vision.
- Because developing vision for an organization sets the stage for strategy and higher performance, it will always be seen as an essential capability for top leaders. [...] Like any leadership capability, visioning requires practice [...] Learning by doing is a gift for anyone on the organizational chart with the courage to dream and speak up.
- Being proactive can also lead you to adopt a mindset in which you’re okay with making mistakes, learning, and growing from them.
- An active approach towards learning: A company can continue to grow as long as the leaders are open to learning on the job [...]. It’s this mindset that helps companies evolve, expand, and reach newer markets and audiences. When you assume that you know everything there is to know about your business, you’ll end up building a culture that’s resistant to change and slower to grow.
- An active approach towards making mistakes: This refers to your ability to acknowledge mistakes when they occur and use them as valuable lessons about yourself and your business.
- Be agile: Agility is your ability to adopt a flexible mindset. Especially in times of uncertainty or crises, an agile mindset is critical to decision-making because it helps you adapt yourself quickly to a changing situation. Rather than fixating on existing strategies — which may have become redundant, or potentially harmful for your business — you’re able to exercise a creative mind to brainstorm new ways of approaching a situation.
Ego Is the Enemy of Good Leadership
by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter
- Ego makes us susceptible to manipulation; it narrows our field of vision; and it corrupts our behavior, often causing us to act against our values.
- Our ego is like a target we carry with us. And like any target, the bigger it is, the more vulnerable it is to being hit. In this way, an inflated ego makes it easier for others to take advantage of us. [...] it can make us susceptible to manipulation. It makes us predictable. When people know this, they can play to our ego.
- An inflated ego also corrupts our behavior. When we believe we’re the sole architects of our success, we tend to be ruder, more selfish, and more likely to interrupt others. This is especially true in the face of setbacks and criticism. In this way, an inflated ego prevents us from learning from our mistakes and creates a defensive wall that makes it difficult to appreciate the rich lessons we glean from failure.
- [...] an inflated ego narrows our vision. The ego always looks for information that confirms what it wants to believe. Basically, a big ego makes us have a strong confirmation bias. Because of this, we lose perspective and end up in a leadership bubble where we only see and hear what we want to. As a result, we lose touch with the people we lead, the culture we are a part of, and ultimately our clients and stakeholders.
- If we let our ego determine what we see, what we hear, and what we believe, we’ve let our past success damage our future success.
- Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Absentee leadership resembles the concept of rent-seeking in economics — taking value out of an organization without putting value in. As such, they represent a special case of laissez-faire leadership, but one that is distinguished by its destructiveness.
- The war for leadership talent is real, and organizations with the best leaders will win. Reviewing your organization’s management positions for absentee leaders and doing something about them can improve your talent management arsenal. It’s likely that your competitors are overlooking this issue or choosing not to do anything about it [...].
- For managers, it is important to realize that the costs of a problematic employee go beyond the direct effects of that employee’s actions — bad behaviors of one employee spill over into the behaviors of other employees through peer effects. By under-appreciating these spillover effects, a few malignant employees can infect an otherwise healthy corporate culture.
- [...] independent of any effects from managers, employee behavior is affected by the actions of peer co-workers.
- Understanding why co-workers make similar choices about whether to commit misconduct can guide managers in preventing misconduct. Given its nature, knowledge and social norms related to misconduct must be transmitted through informal channels such as social interactions. More generally, understanding why co-workers behave in similar ways has important implications for understanding how corporate culture arises and how managers can shape it.
- We’re not saying conflict is always bad. Its absence can lead to complacency and “groupthink.” When people are comfortable disagreeing, friction can inspire breakthrough ideas. Further, talking about our differences teaches us what our colleagues care about and how they prefer to work, improving relationships and communication on teams.
- That said, managing conflict is a skill, and one that many leaders are never taught. When it’s not handled well, conflict can wreak havoc on your team and even harm your managerial reputation.
- [...] four triggers cause the majority (91%) of conflict within organizations: communication differences (39%), opaque performance standards (14%), unreasonable time constraints (16%), and unclear expectations (22%).
- Remember, communication isn’t key — comprehension is!
- Recommunicate the vision. The biggest over-delegation risk for leaders is leaving the vision or culture of the company to others. Of course, most leaders don’t think they’ve done this. Instead, they believe they’ve delivered and communicated the vision innumerable times. And yet, their teams are confused and missteps occur with delivering the work on a consistent basis.
- [...] to combat this form of over-delegation, make sure you’re using every public communication opportunity you have to stress and reinforce the message. For instance, you could remind people about the overarching vision at the beginning of a project, during town halls and other forums, at senior leadership meetings, or periodically through email communications. Without this approach, there can be a cascading effect of morale issues, loss of creativity, and a lack of teamwork.
Health
- If you set happiness as your primary goal, you can end up feeling the opposite. This is because happiness (like all emotions) is a fleeting state, not a permanent one. An alternative solution is to make meaning your vocational goal.
- [...] nine in 10 people would be willing to swap a percentage of their lifetime earnings for more meaningful work.
- Align your values and actions?when choosing what to prioritize.
- [...] contributing to others’ well-being is strongly tied to experiencing meaning.
- Living with meaning and purpose may not make you happy [...]. But when you approach work situations mindfully, with an eye toward contributing to others while honoring your personal identity, you’ll find opportunities to practice the skills that help you find the intrinsic value in your work.
- In another sense of the term, this crafting was also a demonstration of treating work as craft — focusing on the skill needed to complete one’s work and dedicating oneself to perfecting those skills. This atmosphere of constant improvement in service of craft [...] in itself seems to fill professional pursuits with greater purpose.
- Identify a newer or younger employee you’d like to empower, and offer to help them navigate your firm. [...] Whatever your approach, efforts to enhance the positive relationships you have with others at work — often investing in serving them — can give work greater meaning.
- Purpose isn’t magic — it’s something we must consciously pursue and create. With the right approach, almost any job can be meaningful.
- The key is job crafting, or proactively taking steps to improve your happiness at work. There are three types of job crafting: cognitive crafting, task crafting, and relational crafting.
- Cognitive crafting is all about finding significance and meaning in your work by shifting your mindset.
- Task crafting can help ease boredom and deepen your engagement in your work. It involves looking for ways to make your job more interesting by changing the type of tasks you do, their scope, sequence, or number.
- Relational crafting is about creating an emotional connection with the people around you and maybe even strengthening your current relationships. Basically, you improve your job by altering who you interact with at work.
- The next time you experience self-doubt, try to interpret the feelings as a motivating force. Think of your nerves as reminders that there will always be room to grow. Instead of shying away from experiences that trigger your doubt, deliberately embrace them and remember it that it’s only through challenges that we can improve.
- Stop trying to be the smartest person in the room.
- “I needed to shift my thinking from wanting to seem like the smartest person in the room to wanting to leave the room being the smartest person. And it meant that I needed to ask questions constantly. I needed to not care whether it made me look like an idiot.”
- Instead of obsessing about how others will view you, try to remove your self-censorship. It will only get in the way of your learning.
- When reviewing opportunities to throw yourself into, ask yourself why you’re afraid of them. Are you hesitating to take something on because you are worried about failure? If the answer is yes, it’s probably a good sign that you should say “yes” because it will be a great growth opportunity. Just be careful to not overload yourself — prioritize experiences that will stretch you the furthest and help you get closer to your goals.
- Imposter syndrome typically shows up when we decide to take on new roles or new responsibilities, and it can result in feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, and guilt.
- Imposter syndrome is just temporary memory loss, where you have forgotten all the amazing things about you [...] We can mitigate imposter syndrome by reflecting on and reminding ourselves of our strengths on a regular basis.
- A better way to manage your anxious feelings is to get organized. Break down your goals into smaller, more manageable chunks and plan to tackle them one at a time. While completing a vast number of tasks can feel overwhelming, being consistent will get you far.
- Remember that even the most accomplished people have room for improvement. Making mistakes is inevitable. If you learn from those mistakes, it’s okay to fail every now and then.
- Part of the journey to overcoming imposter syndrome is learning from each experience you face.
- Do you ever find yourself endlessly mentally replaying situations in which you wish you’d performed differently? You wish you hadn’t said that dumb thing. You wish you’d volunteered for that project that’s now winning accolades. You wish you’d spoken up. You wish you hadn’t dropped the ball with that potential client.?Overthinking in this way is called rumination.
- Identify your most common triggers.
- One way to start to get this distance is by labeling what’s running through your head as thoughts and feelings, a tactic described in this article on emotional agility.
- If you’re ruminating about a mistake you’ve made, adopt a strategy that will lessen the likelihood of it happening again.
- Check your thinking for errors. Sometimes rumination is triggered by cognitive errors. The catch-22 is that you’re not likely to be very good at detecting distorted thinking when you’re ruminating, since it clouds thinking. The solution is to develop a good understanding of your typical thinking errors, over time, in calm moments so that you’re still able to recognize them when you’re feeling heightened emotions.
- Other common cognitive errors include setting too-high self-expectations, misinterpreting others’ expectations of you [...]
- Rumination is a widespread problem. Before you can break out of it, you need to become more aware of when you’re doing it and have resistance strategies ready to go. This takes time and effort. But it’s important — for your mental health and productivity — to try to nip it in the bud. So, before you go deep into your next “would have, should have, could have” spiral, give one or more of these ideas a go.
- Exercise self-compassion. Being kind to and willing to forgive yourself has shown to alleviate the negative effects of shame. Imagine that you are giving advice to someone else who is in the situation that you are in [...] You should be willing to give yourself the same advice.
- Focus on your accomplishments. [...] research demonstrates that focusing on the gap between what you have accomplished and what you want to accomplish leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. That energy can be motivating to act but when you’re not able to act, focusing on your accomplishments instead gives you a sense of pride in what you have done. Banish the guilt by feeling good about what you have already done.
- Practice acceptance. One of the outcomes of many mindfulness techniques is an acceptance of your current situation. This is also useful when you are trying to overcome feelings of guilt.
- [...] we feel regret in terms of things we haven’t done (missed opportunities) more intensely than regret of things we did do (or decisions we made). Taking the past year as an example, as you process what you haven’t done, or what you have missed, you’re regretting.
- [...] regret is also connected to our self-concept, or the difference between our ideal self and actual self. [...] In short, we’re feeling regretful because we didn’t reach our full potential or accomplish something we thought we would in that time period (and that time is lost).
- Regret feels like this anchor holding us back in the past.
- From a psychological point of view, the purpose of regret is to understand where we had control (and where we didn’t) and to learn from our experience. Granted, this comes with some level of pain about the past, about things you couldn’t achieve, but looking at the past with gratitude rather than the lost opportunity costs can make all the difference between getting stuck in the pain and growing from the learning.
- Beating yourself up about things that you can’t control is unproductive regret. It’s more useful to take a closer look at your feelings and think about what you can (and cannot do) in the future.
- And one thing was clear, whether we can reason away our regret or not, we have to remember to hold ourselves accountable for only those things that are in our control. Think of your regrets as lessons you have the opportunity to learn from instead of “could haves” and “should haves” — those will only suck you into a rabbit hole of negativity.
- [...] there is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion: The more people are exhausted, the lonelier they feel.
- [...] the link between social support at work, lower rates of burnout, and greater work satisfaction and productivity.
- Promote a workplace culture of inclusion and empathy.
- [Workplaces] characterized by caring, supportive, respectful, honest, and forgiving relationships lead to higher organizational performance overall. You want to encourage community and value warm, friendly, and understanding relationships between people. Empathy, in particular, may be a protective factor against burnout and work exhaustion [...]
- Encourage employees throughout the organization to build developmental networks. These networks are small groups of colleagues you routinely turn to for task advice or emotional support.
- Celebrate collective successes. The happiness arising from a happy hour is short-lived. But celebrating collective successes helps create a sense of belonging and attachment in organizations.
- [...] it is so important for leaders to create an environment where taking time off is not only allowed but championed.
- Research shows that companies with high-recognition cultures benefit from less turnover and better performance, probably in part because the environments feel less stressful, or the expressions of gratitude enable people to better cope with the demands they face.
- Stress is inevitable in the workplace and in life. But it doesn’t have to be pervasive. Organizations can and should play a more active role in preventing burnout.
- To address the stress of your workload, assess how well you’re doing in these key areas: planning your workload, prioritizing your work, delegating tasks, saying no, and letting go of perfectionism.
- Perceived lack of control. Feeling like you lack autonomy, access to resources, and a say in decisions that impact your professional life can take a toll on your well-being.
- If you’ve found that once you’ve done all you can, others can’t improve or don’t want improved relationships, then you may want to consider a job change.
- Think about whether you believe that you receive fair and equitable treatment.
- Values mismatch. If you highly value something that your company does not, your motivation to work hard and persevere can significantly drop.
- We all know that chronic overwork is bad for our mental and physical health and can seriously jeopardize the quality of our work.
- [...] the insecure overachiever’s sense of commitment can lead to extreme conformity and the normalization of unhealthy behaviors.
- Paradoxically, the professionals I studied still believe that they have autonomy and that they are overworking by choice. They do not blame their organizations, which after all have invested in work-life balance initiatives and wellness programs.
- [...] by the time insecure overachievers become leaders of their organizations, they unconsciously replicate the systems of social control and overwork that helped to create them.
- If you are a leader, you have a responsibility not just to your firm but to the people who work within it. Help your colleagues to achieve their full potential, but do not allow yourself to exacerbate and exploit their insecurities.
- Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. [...] many in high-pressure jobs [...] become enmeshed not with another person, but with his career.
- A particular confluence of high achievement, intense competitiveness, and culture of overwork has caught many in a perfect storm of career enmeshment and burnout. Over the years, we’ve found that these issues interact in such complex ways with people’s identity, personality, and emotions that it often requires full-on psychological therapy to address them successfully.
- A particular confluence of high achievement, intense competitiveness, and culture of overwork has caught many in a perfect storm of career enmeshment and burnout. Over the years, we’ve found that these issues interact in such complex ways with people’s identity, personality, and emotions that it often requires full-on psychological therapy to address them successfully.
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy
- The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story.
- To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated [...]. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.
- While breaks are countercultural in most organizations and counterintuitive for many high achievers, their value is multifaceted.
- Confronted with relentless demands and unexpected challenges, people tend to slip into negative emotions [...]. Such states of mind drain people’s energy and cause friction in their relationships. Fight-or-flight emotions also make it impossible to think clearly, logically, and reflectively.
- A powerful ritual that fuels positive emotions is expressing appreciation to others, a practice that seems to be as beneficial to the giver as to the receiver.
- Finally, people can cultivate positive emotions by learning to change the stories they tell themselves about the events in their lives. Often, people in conflict cast themselves in the role of victim, blaming others or external circumstances for their problems. Becoming aware of the difference between the facts in a given situation and the way we interpret those facts can be powerful in itself.
- The most effective way people can change a story is to view it through any of three new lenses [...]. With the reverse lens, for example, people ask themselves, “What would the other person in this conflict say and in what ways might that be true?” With the long lens they ask, “How will I most likely view this situation in six months?” With the wide lens they ask themselves, “Regardless of the outcome of this issue, how can I grow and learn from it?”
- [...] people need to clarify priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their daily behaviors.
- Don’t fall into a victim mentality, believing there are no choices or that you don’t have control. Instead, bring greater vigilance to assessing your priorities, making tough trade-offs, and incorporating self-care where you can.
- What are the 1–2 things that are mission critical today? What is something I can do to recharge my battery (get to bed early one night this week, listen to my favorite music while working, or catch a nap on a plane)? Who or what will I have to say “no” to during this time?
- Communicate with your colleagues and loved ones. Other people can be a real energy drain — or gain — during work crunches and set-backs.
- To be truly self-compassionate, especially during an acute period of work stress, accept the situation by acknowledging it with awareness and compassion, observe and label your emotions (don’t suppress or deny them), preserve your sense of choice and agency, communicate with your colleagues and loved ones, and ask for help when you need it.
Building Resilience
by Martin E.P. Seligman
- We discovered that people who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable. (“It’s going away quickly; it’s just this one situation, and I can do something about it.”) That suggested how we might immunize people against learned helplessness, against depression and anxiety, and against giving up after failure: by teaching them to think like optimists.
- [...] positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment—the building blocks of resilience and growth.
- The mandatory module, on post-traumatic growth, is highly relevant for business executives facing failure. [...] it begins with the ancient wisdom that personal transformation comes from a renewed appreciation of being alive, enhanced personal strength, acting on new possibilities, improved relationships, or spiritual deepening.
- Understanding the response to trauma (read “failure”), which includes shattered beliefs about the self, others, and the future.
- Finally, we deal with how to minimize catastrophic thinking by considering worst-case, best-case, and most likely outcomes.
- Enhancing mental toughness, highlighting and honing strengths, and fostering strong relationships are core competencies for any successful manager.
- More than five decades of research point to the fact that resilience is built by attitudes, behaviors and social supports that can be adopted and cultivated by anyone. Factors that lead to resilience include optimism; the ability to stay balanced and manage strong or difficult emotions; a sense of safety and a strong social support system. The good news is that because there is a concrete set of behaviors and skills associated with resilience, you can learn to be more resilient.
- Exercise mindfulness. [...] mindfulness predicts judgment accuracy and insight-related problem solving, and [...] mindfulness enhances cognitive flexibility.
- [...] avoid context switching. Create dedicated times in the day to do specific work-related activities and not others [...].
- [...] cognitively take a step back from our experience and label our thoughts and emotions, we are effectively pivoting attention from the narrative network in our brains to the more observational parts of our brains. Being mentally agile, and decentering stress when it occurs, enables the core resilience skill [...] the ability to pause, step back, reflect, shift perspectives, create options and choose wisely [...].
- One of the most overlooked aspects of the resilience skill set is the ability to cultivate compassion — both self-compassion and compassion for others.
- Managing stress over the long-term requires cultivating your own resilience skills before seeking external solutions so that you can turn changes, stresses, and challenges into opportunities. These skills include adaptability, a healthy relationship to control, continual learning, having a sense of purpose, and knowing how to leverage support and appropriate resources.
- When we ask “What can I learn from this?” instead of “Why me?” we can shape the challenge to our advantage.
- Analysis alone isn’t enough. [...] analysis without action leads to rumination and anxiety. By identifying actions you can take you’ll be able experiment with solutions and new behaviors and discover productive ways to handle challenges and stress.
- With stronger internal resilience, we can then be proactive and intentional about how we use technology and other external tools to improve the quality of our lives and our work and find solutions to the business, social, and global pressures we face.
Motivation
The 3 Things Employees Really Want: Career, Community, Cause
by Lori Goler, Janelle Gale, Brynn Harrington, and Adam Grant
- [...] we identified three big buckets of motivators: career, community, and cause.
- Career is about work: having a job that provides autonomy, allows you to use your strengths, and promotes your learning and development. It’s at the heart of intrinsic motivation.
- Community is about people: feeling respected, cared about, and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.
- Cause is about purpose: feeling that you make a meaningful impact, identifying with the organization’s mission, and believing that it does some good in the world. It’s a source of pride.
- [...] the key concept that motivation is less about employees doing great work and more about employees feeling great about their work.
- The better employees feel about their work, the more motivated they remain over time. When we step away from the traditional carrot or stick to motivate employees, we can engage in a new and meaningful dialogue about the work instead.
- Share context and provide relevance. There is no stronger motivation for employees than an understanding that their work matters and is relevant to someone or something other than a financial statement. To motivate your employees, start by sharing context about the work you’re asking them to do. What are we doing as an organization and as a team? Why are we doing it? Who benefits from our work and how? What does success look like for our team and for each employee? What role does each employee play in delivering on that promise? Employees are motivated when their work has relevance.
- Anticipate roadblocks to enable progress. When you ask anything significant of team members, they will undoubtedly encounter roadblocks and challenges along the path to success. Recognize that challenges can materially impact motivation. Be proactive in identifying and addressing them. What might make an employee’s work difficult or cumbersome? What can you do to ease the burden? What roadblocks might surface? How can you knock them down? How can you remain engaged just enough to see trouble coming and pave the way for success? Employees are motivated when they can make progress without unnecessary interruption and undue burdens.
- What workers really need, to feel engaged in and satisfied by their jobs, is an inner sense of purpose.
- [...] people feel loyal to companies that support their own career and life ambitions — in other words, what’s meaningful to them.
- Regular check-ins that use five areas of inquiry are another way to help employees explore and call out their inner purpose. Leaders can ask: What are you good at doing? [...] What do you enjoy? [...] What feels most useful? [...] What creates a sense of forward momentum? [...]How do you relate to others? [...].
The Little Things That Make Employees Feel Appreciated
by Kerry Roberts Gibson, Kate O'Leary, and Joseph R. Weintraub
- Touch base early and often. [...] interactions are actually valuable points of connection for your employees (and for you). They prevent your staff from feeling invisible. [Routines] that allow your employees to share stories with you about what they’re doing or working on, you can make them feel “known” by you — and stay in the loop on what’s happening within your organization.
- Address growth opportunities. Employees want to know what the future holds for their careers. When managers take time to explicitly discuss growth potential or provide opportunities and “stretch” assignments, employees interpret it as evidence that they’re valued.
- [...] it’s crucial to understand that as humans we want to feel motivated and to find meaning in the things that we do. It’s part of our biology. In fact, there’s a part of our brains called the seeking system that creates the natural impulses to learn new skills and take on challenging but meaningful tasks. When we follow these urges, we receive a jolt of dopamine — a neurotransmitter linked to motivation and pleasure — which make us want to engage in these activities even more. And, when our seeking systems are activated, we feel more motivated, purposeful, and zestful. We feel more alive.
- Exploring, experimenting, learning — this is the way we’re supposed to live and work. The problem is, too many workers aren’t able to partake in these activities because the way our organizations are run is preventing them from doing so.
- Despite these difficulties, it is possible for leaders to activate their employees’ seeking systems without a large overhaul to organization-wide policies and culture. [...] There are three small but consequential nudges that trigger employees’ seeking systems: encourage them to play to their strengths, creating opportunities to experiment, and helping them personalize the purpose of the work.
- [...] it doesn’t take charm, or motivational speeches to tap into that energy — all it takes is a concerted effort to infuse self-expression, experimentation, and personalized purpose into all that we do.
- [...] the key is for managers to first accurately identify the reason for an employee’s lack of motivation and then apply a targeted strategy.
- [...] reasons fall into four categories — a quartet we call the motivation traps. Namely, they are 1) values mismatch, 2) lack of self-efficacy, 3) disruptive emotions, and 4) attribution errors.
- Find out what the employee cares about and connect it to the task. [...] Engage in probing conversation and perspective-taking to identify what your employee cares about and how that value links with the task.
- Build the employee’s sense of confidence and competence. [...] point out times in the past when they’ve surmounted similar challenges. [...] Build their sense of self-efficacy with progressively more difficult challenges, or by breaking down the current task into manageable chunks.
- Tell them you want to understand why they are upset and engage in?active listening.
- [...] effective self-motivation is one of the main things that distinguishes high-achieving professionals from everyone else.
- Abstract ambitions—such as “doing your best”—are usually much less effective than something concrete [...]. As a first general rule, then, any objectives you set for yourself or agree to should be specific.
- Goals should also, whenever possible, trigger intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation. An activity is intrinsically motivated when it’s seen as its own end; it’s extrinsically motivated when it’s seen as serving a separate, ulterior purpose—earning you a reward or allowing you to avoid punishment. My research shows that intrinsic motives predict achievement and success better than extrinsic ones do.
- The trick is to focus on the elements of the work that you do find enjoyable.
- Another common trap is to choose incentives that undermine the goal you’ve reached.
- Finally, loss aversion—people’s preference for avoiding losses rather than acquiring equivalent gains—can also be used to design a strong external motivator.
- Self-motivation is one of the hardest skills to learn, but it’s critical to your success.
Culture
- Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.
- [...] the cost of disengagement. While a cut-throat environment and a culture of fear can ensure engagement (and sometimes even excitement) for some time, research suggests that the inevitable stress it creates will likely lead to disengagement over the long term. Engagement in work — which is associated with feeling valued, secure, supported, and respected — is generally negatively associated with a high-stress, cut-throat culture.
- Lack of loyalty [...]. Research shows that workplace stress leads to an increase of almost 50% in voluntary turnover. [...] the turnover costs associated with recruiting, training, lowered productivity, lost expertise, and so forth, are significant.
- Wellbeing comes from one place, and one place only — a positive?culture.
- [...] qualities of a positive workplace culture boils down to six essential characteristics:?Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends. Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling. Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes. Inspiring one another at work. Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work. Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust, and integrity.
- [...] trusting that the leader has your best interests at heart improves employee performance. Employees feel safe rather than fearful and [...] a culture of safety i.e. in which leaders are inclusive, humble, and encourage their staff to speak up or ask for help, leads to better learning and performance outcomes. Rather than creating a culture of fear of negative consequences, feeling safe in the workplace helps encourage the spirit of experimentation so critical for innovation.
- In sum, a positive workplace is more successful over time because it increases positive emotions and well-being. This, in turn, improves people’s relationships with each other and amplifies their abilities and their creativity. It buffers against negative experiences such as stress, thus improving employees’ ability to bounce back from challenges and difficulties while bolstering their health. And, it attracts employees, making them more loyal to the leader and to the organization as well as bringing out their best strengths. When organizations develop positive, virtuous cultures they achieve significantly higher levels of organizational effectiveness — including financial performance, customer satisfaction, productivity, and employee engagement.
- [...] cultures that inspired more play, purpose, and potential, and less emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, produced better customer outcomes.
- So here is one [definition]: Culture is the set of processes in an organization that affects the total motivation of its people. In a high-performing culture, those processes maximize total motivation.
- The next most sensitive element is the identity of an organization, which includes its mission and behavioral code.
- A great culture is not easy to build — it’s why high performing cultures are such a powerful competitive advantage. Yet organizations that build great cultures are able to meet the demands of the fast-paced, customer-centric, digital world we live in. More and more organizations are beginning to realize that culture can’t be left to chance. Leaders have to treat culture building as an engineering discipline, not a magical one.
- [...] there are three elements to a culture: behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of values. A great culture is what you get when all three of these are aligned, and line up with the organization’s espoused values. When gaps start to appear, that’s when you start to see problems — and see great employees leave.
- When expected behaviors are clear, we can focus our time on practicing those behaviors rather than spending our time on trying to identify them. Accountability becomes easier to measure and success easier to attain.
- Every process that is created, every system installed, every technology that is used, every structure that is designed, every job title that is given will reinforce or dilute the culture. There are five key systems that are important to the overall cultural system [Hiring, Strategy and goal setting, Assessing, Developing, Rewarding].
- Culture takes time to define. [...] Yet, if the time is spent (1) really understanding the behaviors expected throughout the organization; (2) identifying the systems and processes that will continue to help those behaviors be expressed and sustained; and (3) shaping practices that help employees and the organization become better [...].
- The link between values and performance isn’t always immediately obvious. But consider that culture and values are how an enterprise honors its mission and it becomes clear that values are a crucial component of strategic intent.
- In today’s disruptive marketplace, every organization needs to attract, develop, and retain talent with diverse skills and perspectives. The difference between success and failure will not be in the formulation of job descriptions and compensation packages, but in the ability to articulate a higher purpose. That begins with a clear sense of shared mission and values.
Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization
by Robert E. Quinn and Anjan V. Thakor
- That’s a hard truth to recognize. If, like many executives, you’re applying conventional economic logic, you view your employees as self-interested agents and design your organizational practices and culture accordingly, and that hasn’t paid off as you’d hoped.
- So you now face a choice: You can double down on that approach, on the assumption that you just need more or stricter controls to achieve the desired impact. Or you can align the organization with an authentic higher purpose that intersects with your business interests and helps guide your decisions. If you succeed in doing the latter, your people will try new things, move into deep learning, take risks, and make surprising contributions.
- When organizations embrace purpose, it’s often because a crisis forces leaders to challenge their assumptions about motivation and performance and to experiment with new approaches.
- An organization often discovers its purpose when things are going badly.
- Turn the authentic message into a constant message.
- The job becomes an incubator for learning and development, and along the way the employee gains confidence and becomes more committed to the organization and the higher purpose that drives it.
- Every organization has a pool of change agents that usually goes untapped. We refer to this pool as the network of positive energizers. Spread randomly throughout the organization are mature, purpose-driven people with an optimistic orientation, people like Corey Mundle at Hampton Inn. They naturally inspire others. They’re open and willing to take initiative. Once enlisted, they can assist with every step of the cultural change. These people are easy to identify, and others trust them.
- People who find meaning in their work don’t hoard their energy and dedication. They give them freely, defying conventional economic assumptions about self-interest. They grow rather than stagnate. They do more—and they do it better.
- Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.
- [...] building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.
- In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out; and spend less energy defending their personal value so they have more energy available to create external value. How people feel — and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.
Why People Get Away with Being Rude at Work
by Shannon G. Taylor, Donald H. Kluemper, W. Matthew Bowler, and Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben
- Bad behavior at work can have very real consequences. People who experience workplace rudeness, for example, report lower engagement, suffer more mental and physical health problems, and are more likely to burn out and quit their jobs. And nearly all of us are affected by rudeness and other types of workplace misbehavior, like interrupting and exclusion:
- [...] we were able to demonstrate that victims are blamed for their mistreatment even when they’ve done nothing wrong.
- Victims of rudeness were perceived as performing considerably worse on the job than employees who hadn’t been mistreated, regardless of the employees’ actual performance. As performance ratings often have a substantial impact on compensation and promotion decisions, our results show that victims of workplace mistreatment can be adversely impacted in several other important ways, adding insult to injury.
- [...] how can leaders combat bias when evaluating employees? We recommend leaders receive training similar to that undergone by judges and arbitrators, who are taught to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. [...] But because unrelated contextual and personal factors can influence the outcome — even among highly skilled judicial decision makers — training should also increase leaders’ awareness of the forces that may be influencing their decisions.
- Given the central role leaders play as decision makers in the workplace, it’s critical that they assess employee behavior fairly and accurately.
- One reason people don’t speak up is the significant risk of doing so. Challenging the status quo threatens people’s status and relationships with supervisors and coworkers, research shows. Speaking up can also result in negative performance evaluation, undesirable job assignments, or even termination. Most people are aware of these potential costs; as a result, most stay quiet about bias, injustice, and mistreatment.
- We’re especially likely to follow others’ actions when there is ambiguity about the appropriate way to behave.
- [...] another source of the type of courage and confidence [is] needed to speak up in organizations: authenticity.
- That silence is pervasive in organizations due to the widely shared belief that speaking up about sensitive issues is futile or even dangerous. Consequently, organizations need to convey to employees that they will be protected and valued if they share suggestions, opinions, and concerns — and that those who harmed them will face serious consequences. By doing so, leaders can encourage those who are being mistreated to find their voice.
- But what’s touted as niceness is often nothing more than the veneer of civility, a cute nod to psychological safety, a hologram that falsely signals inclusion, collaboration, and high performance. In many of these cultures, leaders have simply spread a thin layer of politeness over a thick layer of fear. There is the appearance of harmony and alignment but in reality there’s often dysfunction simmering beneath the surface that results in a lack of honest communication, intellectual bravery, innovation, and accountability.
- Choked innovation. By its very nature, innovation disrupts the status quo. And yet it’s the lifeblood of growth. Innovation is also a social process that requires divergent thinking and courageous conversations.
- “I’d rather work in an authoritarian toxic culture than a nice toxic culture because in the authoritarian toxic culture, they would at least tell me that I’m wrong when I challenge the status quo. I can provoke the system, force a reaction, and maybe that will lead to something. In a nice toxic culture, they humor you and then nothing ever happens.”
- Low-velocity decision making. In a nice culture, there’s pressure to go along to get along. A low tolerance for candor makes the necessary discussion and analysis for decision making shallow and slow. You either get an echo chamber in which the homogenization of thought gives you a flawed decision, or you conduct what seem to be endless rounds of discussion in pursuit of consensus. Eventually, this can lead to chronic indecisiveness.
- But culture change can’t be achieved through top-down mandate. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here.” Someone with authority can demand compliance, but they can’t dictate optimism, trust, conviction, or creativity.
- In terms of organizational culture change, simply explaining the need for change won’t cut it. Creating a sense of urgency is helpful, but can be short-lived. To harness people’s full, lasting commitment, they must feel a deep desire, and even responsibility, to change.
- The dominant culture and structure of today’s organizations are perfectly designed to produce their current behaviors and outcomes, regardless of whether those outcomes are the ones you want. If your hope is for individuals to act differently, it helps to change their surrounding conditions to be more supportive of the new behaviors, particularly when they are antithetical to the dominant culture.
- And remember that culture change only happens when people take action. So start there. While articulating a mission and changing company structures are important, it’s often a more successful approach to tackle those sorts of issues after you’ve been able to show people the change you want to see.
- [...] five factors, exacerbated by the pandemic, have combined to yield the changes that we’re living through in today’s labor market. We call these factors the Five Rs: retirement, relocation, reconsideration, reshuffling, and reluctance. Workers are retiring in greater numbers but aren’t relocating in large numbers; they’re reconsidering their work-life balance and care roles; they’re making localized switches among industries, or reshuffling, rather than exiting the labor market entirely; and, because of pandemic-related fears, they’re demonstrating a reluctance to return to in-person jobs.
- [...] companies that have the vision and resources to offer flexibility to their employees are the most likely to maintain a stable and competitive workforce. And the companies best able to attract and retain talent will be those offering benefits that address the changing needs of workers. Similarly, companies that demonstrate a commitment to improving their employees long-term career prospects by offering training and tuition reimbursements will garner greater loyalty and gain in stature with prospective employees. The Great Resignation was no anomaly; the forces underlying it are here to stay.
Growth
- Empathy, communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, compassion. These are all skills you need to thrive in the workplace and become a great leader.
- [...] the habit of reflection can separate extraordinary professionals from mediocre ones.
- The practice itself is all about learning, looking back on the day (without bias or regret) to contemplate your behavior and its consequences. It requires sitting with yourself, taking an honest moment to think about what transpired, what worked, what didn’t, what can be done, and what can’t. Reflection requires courage. It’s thoughtful and deliberate. Being at the “top of your game” only comes when you extract from your past how to engage the future.
- To get its full benefits, you must make reflection a habit.
- Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning. When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive far greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation. In contrast, people at primarily fixed-mindset companies report more of only one thing: cheating and deception among employees, presumably to gain an advantage in the talent race.
- It’s critical to reward not just effort but learning and progress, and to emphasize the processes that yield these things, such as seeking help from others, trying new strategies, and capitalizing on setbacks to move forward effectively.
- Organizations that embody a growth mindset encourage appropriate risk-taking, knowing that some risks won’t work out. They reward employees for important and useful lessons learned, even if a project does not meet its original goals. They support collaboration across organizational boundaries rather than competition among employees or units. They are committed to the growth of every member, not just in words but in deeds, such as broadly available development and advancement opportunities. And they continually reinforce growth mindset values with concrete policies.
- To remain in a growth zone, we must identify and work with these triggers. Many managers and executives have benefited from learning to recognize when their fixed-mindset “persona” shows up and what it says to make them feel threatened or defensive. Most importantly, over time they have learned to talk back to it, persuading it to collaborate with them as they pursue challenging goals.
5 Mistakes Companies Make About Growth Mindsets
by Heidi Grant, Mary Slaughter, and Andrea Derler
- When people really do have too much on their plate, attacking their mindset is counter-productive. Because the problem isn’t their attitude — it’s that they can’t bend the laws of space and time.
- The first step is getting clear on how we define these things. Again, we define a growth mindset as both the belief that skills and abilities can be improved, and that developing your skills and abilities is the purpose of the work you do. A culture that fosters a growth mindset, then, is a culture in which all employees are seen as possessing potential, are encouraged to develop, and are acknowledged and rewarded for improvement.
- When your employees (and maybe even you, as their manager) aren’t allowed to grow, they begin to feel that they don’t matter.
- The learning curve flattens, a plateau is reached; a precipice of disengagement and declining performance is on the near horizon. I’d estimate that four years is about the maximum learning curve for most people in most positions;
- The human brain is designed to learn, not just during our childhood school years but throughout our life spans. When we are learning, we experience higher levels of brain activity and many feel-good brain chemicals are produced. Managers would do well to remember that.
- Because every organization is a collection of people on different learning curves. You build an A team by optimizing these individual curves with a mix of people: 15% of them at the low end of the curve, just starting to learn new skills; 70% in the sweet spot of engagement; and 15% at the high end of mastery. As you manage employees all along the learning curve, requiring them to jump to a new curve when they reach the top, you will have a company full of people who are engaged.?You and every person on your team is a learning machine. You want the challenge of not knowing how to do something, learning how to do it, mastering it, and then learning something new. Instead of letting the engines of your employees sit idle, crank them: Learn, leap, and repeat.
- As we grow and learn in our jobs and in our careers, we’re constantly faced with situations where we need to adapt our behavior. It’s simply a reality of the world we work in today. And without the skill and courage to take the leap, we can miss out on important opportunities for advancement. How can we as professionals stop building our lives around avoiding these unpleasant, but professionally beneficial, tasks?
- In order to step outside your comfort zone, you have to do it, even if it’s uncomfortable. Put mechanisms in place that will force you to dive in, and you might discover that what you initially feared isn’t as bad as you thought.
- As we grow and learn in our jobs and in our careers, we’re constantly faced with situations where we need to adapt our behavior.
- In order to step outside your comfort zone, you have to do it, even if it’s uncomfortable. Put mechanisms in place that will force you to dive in, and you might discover that what you initially feared isn’t as bad as you thought.
- What you know is less relevant than what you may learn, and knowing the answer to questions is less critical than having the ability to ask the right questions in the first place.
- The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture.
- Reward continuous learning. It is impossible to trigger deliberate changes in your team’s or organization’s culture unless you actually put in place formal reward systems to entice them — and even then there is no guarantee you will achieve change unless the rewards are effective.
- By definition, performance is highest when we are not learning. Equally, it is hard for employees to find the necessary time and space to learn when they are asked to maximize results, efficiency, and productivity. [...] Note that rewarding curiosity is not just about praising and promoting those who display an effort to learn and develop; it’s also about creating a climate that nurtures critical thinking, where challenging authority and speaking up are encouraged, even if it means creating discord. This is particularly important if you want your team to produce something innovative.
- Give meaningful and constructive feedback. [...] it is easy to forget the value of negative feedback. However, it is hard to improve on anything when you are unaware of your limitations [...] Although one of the best ways to improve employees’ performance is to tell them what they are doing wrong, managers often avoid difficult conversations, so they end up providing more positive than negative feedback. This is particularly problematic when it comes to curiosity and learning, since the best way to trigger curiosity is to highlight a knowledge gap [...] negative feedback must be provided in a constructive and delicate way — it is a true art [...].
- In sum, if you want to nurture curiosity and learning in your employees, there’s no need to rely on your organization’s formal learning and development programs. Reinforcing positive learning behaviors, giving constructive and critical feedback to align employees’ efforts with the right learning goals, showcasing your own curiosity, and hiring people with high learnability and a hungry mind are all likely to create a stronger learning culture within your team and your organization.
- Our capacity for learning is becoming the currency we trade on in our careers. Where we once went to work to learn to do a job, learning now is the job. Adaptive and proactive learners are highly prized assets for organizations, and when we invest in our learning, we create long-term dividends for our career development.
- Deprioritizing our development is a risky career strategy because it reduces our resilience and ability to respond to the changes happening around us.
- The people you spend time with are a significant source of knowledge. Creating a diverse learning community will offer you new perspectives and reduce the risk that you’ll end up in an echo chamber.
- Seek out people who have an opposite experience from you in some way. [...] People who have made different choices and have different areas of expertise than you are a good place to discover a new source of challenge.
- We can’t predict how our careers will develop or what the world of work will look like in the future. Investing in our ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn helps us increase our readiness for the opportunities that change presents and our resilience to the inevitable challenges we’ll experience along the way.
- The challenge is that you’re competing against every individual in your industry who wants to be a high performer. If you grow more capabilities more quickly than they do, you’ll perform better today, earn opportunities to perform better in the future, and a virtuous cycle will take hold.
- Think of growth as a cycle — successfully perform, get feedback, and perform again even better. Experiences power that growth cycle, so you’ll want to understand which experiences matter most and gain as many of them as quickly as possible.
- A personal experience map shows which experiences you want to acquire in the next two to five years to grow your career. It’s a practical planning document that describes how you will produce the highest-performing you.
- Growing yourself faster isn’t easy but it’s made far simpler when you’re clear about your origin, your destination, and the fastest, experience-driven route between the two.
- Top performers are always learning and adjusting, and routinely seek feedback from their boss, peers, and subordinates.
- Your company may be grappling with a disruption from a new technology such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, or cloud-based computing. Become the expert person in your department on an emerging issue. Conduct research and literature reviews, attend conferences, or write on the topic. Developing expertise in a nascent area of growing importance can lead to promotions and other career opportunities.
- We are now in the era of do-it-yourself career development. Companies less frequently offer formal training — a trend that has been around for years.
- Unfortunately, organizations today are unknowingly leaving employees with skill gaps and blind spots that can derail careers and organizational effectiveness.
- Solve for your own blind spots. Top performers are always learning and adjusting, and routinely seek feedback from their boss, peers, and subordinates.
- Become an expert in an area of increasing importance to your company.
- In order to develop an area of expertise, we first have to set achievable goals about what we want to learn. Then we have to develop strategies to help us reach those goals.
- When it comes to learning, one of the biggest issues is that people don’t engage in metacognition enough. They don’t stop to ask themselves if they really get a skill or concept.
- [...] learning benefits from reflection. This type of reflection requires a moment of calm. [...] it usually takes a bit of cognitive quiet, a moment of silent introspection, for us to engage in any sort of focused deliberation.
- By deliberately organizing your learning goals, thinking about your thinking, and reflecting on your learning at opportune times, you can become a better study [...].
