For three Scandinavian researchers, the traditional approach to leadership almost renders the term a misnomer: the study of ‘leadership’ is actually the study of ‘leaders’ — the study of the personality traits, behaviours, and performance of (often) heroic individuals who align and inspire their ‘followers.’ Leadership, in this traditional approach, is not only embedded in […]
Read More… from Forget the Hero: Leadership as Day-to-Day Processes, Practices and Interactions
Transforming academic research from pure knowledge into real-world business or organizational practices is challenging for a wide variety of reasons. Time is an issue. Business unit or organizational leaders have little time to leaf through academic journals or article databases looking for research they can apply to their companies. Even if they did, the parameters […]
The word ‘scenarios’ has many different meanings in a variety of fields and disciplines. In strategic planning, scenarios refer to a small set of carefully structured and tailored narratives about the future context a company or an industry might inhabit. These narratives are developed through interviews and workshops with a broad range of stakeholders related to the focal […]
Read More… from The Power of Scenarios to Open New Perspectives
Is sarcasm in the workplace as destructive as usually assumed? While sarcasm — in which people express one thing by saying the exact opposite — is rampant in organizations, most leadership and communication books urge people to avoid sarcastic remarks, which are considered a negative form of communication. However, a team of researchers argue that […]
Learning from errors is central to human development. Learning in a business context occurs best when there is a mind-set of acceptance of human error, and furthermore the experimental trials that lead to successful innovation, new processes and better performance necessarily entail errors on the way. Due to the potential costs and negative, sometimes disastrous, […]
Read More… from Better Error Management Can Foster Innovation and Learning
While large corporations may have the bandwidth to organize mandatory, sustained in-house training programs, smaller companies must depend on outside organizations and the government to provide training. The challenge with such programs is that employees will only actively participate if they are self-motivated to do so. How can companies create or enable such self-motivation? According […]
Read More… from Psychology-based Training Incentives Motivates Workers
With the dominant, almost overwhelming impact that social media has on just about any function of a business, it’s easy to forget that social media is barely a decade old. The vast majority of today’s leaders built most of their careers before anyone had even conceived of Facebook or Twitter. As a result, leaders must […]
Read More… from Six Skills for the Social Media-Literate Leader
Expatriate assignments are great opportunities for employees and managers assigned overseas to not only increase their personal knowledge, but also share knowledge across units. In a study on the knowledge benefits from expatriate experiences, Sebastian Reiche, a professor at IESE Business School, showed that there are two types of such knowledge benefits. The first is […]
Read More… from Learning from Expatriate Experience After the Return Home
Why do so many people make New Year’s resolutions? Because the New Year is the most obvious and universal of temporal landmarks — the dates or periods in time that mark a meaningful transition or change. Anything from a birthday or an anniversary to the first day on a new job or even in a […]
Read More… from How Landmarks in Time Help Employees Set Aspirational Goals
Leaders drive the process of organizational learning and adaptation by providing time and space, granting the freedom to explore and fail, and by encouraging those around them to look at things in new ways. This research examines the characteristics of a core set of leadership relationships, providing insights to help leaders reflect on their own […]
