In the world of social impact and public health, there is a long-standing belief that the best way to get people to care about a problem is to show them its massive scale. Activists, non-profits, and government agencies often lead their campaigns with staggering statistics: ‘1 in 10 people will develop Alzheimer’s’ or ‘4.2 million […]
Read More… from The Big Problem Paradox: When Prevalence Reduces Urgency
For decades, the prevailing trend in corporate architecture has been a ‘war on walls’, characterised by the removal of cubicles and private offices in favour of open, ‘unbounded’ workspaces. The primary motivation for this shift is the belief that removing physical barriers will foster greater collaboration, increase face-to-face (F2F) interaction, and boost the ‘collective intelligence’ […]
Read More… from The Transparency Paradox: How Open Plan Offices Shut Down Interaction
The “glass cliff” is a well-known metaphor that describes how women are set up for failure by being put in leadership roles when organizations are in crisis. A research team of three feminist scholars push back on the metaphor, arguing that it perpetuates gender inequalities by placing the responsibility for negative outcomes on the individual […]
Read More… from For Women Leaders, Refusal Is at the Heart of Transformative Leadership
Lying, or any form of deception, is a negative and destructive behavior that is proscribed in organizations—at least theoretically. ReReal-lifeypically complicates theory, and a study from the University of Chicago Prof. Emma Levine reveals that whether deception is, unwarranted and destructive is heavily dependent on the context. Levine conducted a series of inductive and empirical […]
One resilient conclusion from leadership commentators and observers is the connection between extraversion and leadership—that is, extraverted individuals are more likely to become leaders than introverted individuals. Leadership research, however, continuously calls into question this conclusion. Consistently over time, the results are mixed: some research will show a link between extraversion and leadership, and other […]
Read More… from Why Extraverts Don’t Necessarily Make Good Leaders
Many people “make sense” of the world through their peers—that is, they seek to better understand events in the world around them by talking with and learning how their peers are responding to the events in question. This occurs when a new corporate strategy is announced by top management that is ambiguous—that is, not clearly […]
Read More… from Opinions of Other Managers Guide Middle Management Response to Strategy
After we have finished a compelling book or a film, the narrative of the story will linger in our minds. This lingering is involuntary: we do not choose or decide to think about the story. Emotional experiences and social interactions, research has shown, have the same lingering impact after their occurrence. A study by a […]
Read More… from Making Messages Linger with Thought-Provoking Stories
How does one listen well? The answer—as revealed in an exhaustive review of the listening research published between 2000 and 2021—is often built on the speaker’s perception. For example, some common signs of a good listener include: acknowledging the speaker through non-verbal reactions (nodding the head) or verbal reactions (“hmm,” “yes”); continuing to watch the […]
Read More… from The Listening Paradox: Why Listening Is Often Difficult
Effective communication among members of a team or organization is key to the success of a group. Fast and direct face-to-face communication would appear to be the ideal method of communication. A study based on police emergency calls, however, reveals the complexities of communication—and why choosing the best modes of communication may not be as […]
Few people in their careers have avoided the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings. For Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School and Tijs Besieux of the consultancy Leadership Footprint, unproductive meetings are a symptom of a broader problem: unproductive conversations. In many ways, the success of organizations hinge on the quality of the conversations within them. […]
Read More… from Leading Conversations: Productive and Unproductive Voice
