Author Archives: Larry Janis

Talking a Walk Could Be a Step Toward Better Negotiation

 

 

 

 

by Dave Gilson

 

Many people think of negotiation as a fight, but it’s really about collaboration, Margaret Neale explains to me as we begin our walk. “What negotiation is to me is joint problem-solving: let’s find a solution to a problem that we’re facing.”

Right now, the problem Neale and I face is how to get across the Stanford campus without getting soaked by an unseasonable shower. Where’s one of those famous covered walkways when you really need it?

Neale, a professor emerita of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, is an expert on negotiation and, to paraphrase the title of her book on the subject, how to get more of what you want. She’s found that the traditional approach to negotiation — two adversarial parties staring each other down over a table — doesn’t work all that well. “If you’re fighting, you’re not creating value. You’re trying to dominate,” she says. “Reframing it from battle to collaborative problem-solving opens up the opportunities for negotiation in such an amazing way.”

If you’re fighting, you’re not creating value. You’re trying to dominate.
Margaret Neale

I’ve joined Neale on this stroll to hear about her latest article, which explores an easy way to break out of the boardroom-battle model. Recently published in PLOS ONE, it details an experiment in which around 160 volunteers were split into same-gender pairs and given a 30-minute exercise where they had to hammer out the details of a fictional job offer. Half of the recruiter-candidate pairs talked while sitting across from each other in a room; the other half haggled while taking a walk outside. (more…)

The art of leading in the AI age

 

 

 

 

 

by Pia Lauritzen

 

 

 

Advances in generative AI are provoking a flood of opinions about the technology’s effect on our working lives. When AI is said to improve everything from productivity to brand loyalty, it is tempting to assume that it can improve leadership, too. Maybe it could free up time for leaders to work on their relationships. Or help them become better at dealing with emotions and give real-time feedback during difficult conversations. So, is AI going to make for better leaders?

The short answer is that leadership is not a product of technology, so the technology itself can’t improve leadership. But technology can shape leaders, as we’ve seen throughout history. Indeed, there are three distinct periods when it comes to discussing technology and leadership, and each one has required a different kind of leader. In the first era, the premodern era—think preindustrialization—tools compensated for our weaknesses, and leaders needed to be subject matter experts who could master these tools for survival. In the modern industrial era, technology complemented our limited nature and helped improve our lives; leaders needed to be administrators who could use the technology to help us be more productive. The third era is the post–World War II digital era—whose offerings include AI—in which we have technology that is designed to overcome our limitations; and our leaders need to be what I call organizational midwives, guiding us through a working life that is defined more by what technology does for us than by what we do ourselves.

It was Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, who identified the distinction between premodern and modern technology in his seminal 1954 lecture, “The Question Concerning Technology.” He made it clear that although different generations of technology have different ways of influencing human beings and behaviors, our fundamental purpose for using technology remains the same: to deal with the fact that we are limited creatures, thrown into this world without knowing why and for how long.

That’s probably not what a CEO, who is focused on delivering results, is thinking about every day; but in a very real sense, a good business leader is helping her teams cope with limitations using the technology on hand. Heidegger didn’t say anything about leadership in his lecture, but he did speak of a connection between the artificial and art that is useful in understanding how the role of leadership has evolved. In ancient Greece, “at the outset of the destining of the West,” Heidegger said, it was not technology or “the artificial” alone that bore the name techné. Art, understood as “the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful,” was also called techné. Like that of art, the role of leadership is not to make our lives easier but to remind us of the beauty of using ourselves and our limited time and resources in a meaningful way. To put our experience, knowledge, and skills to use, we need something (technology) to compensate, complement, and overcome our limited nature, and we need someone (a leader) to help us achieve goals that none of us would be able to achieve on our own. (more…)

How to be more creative, according to psychology

 

 

By Emily Reynolds

 

Engaging in creative activities has significant benefits. Creative forms of therapy can have a positive impact on those with depression, dementia, and bipolar disorder, for example. Outside of therapeutic settings, too, creativity has numerous upsides: it has been associated with greater innovation, for instance, and may even increase mental clarity.

Creativity, then, can make our lives better in a multitude of ways, as well as being an end in itself. But how do we increase our levels of creativity?

From keeping dream diaries to using particular emotional regulation strategies, here’s the research on how to boost creativity, digested.

Consciously push yourself to be creative
We often view creativity as something we have to let ourselves express naturally rather than something that can be forced. But one study found that receiving an instruction to be creative can, perhaps counter to this assumption, actually boost our creativity.

The team asked a number of jazz pianists to improvise a piano track as they would normally. They were then instructed to play three more times, and before one of these performances were told to “improvise even more creatively than your past performance(s)”. For participants who were relatively inexperienced, this instruction seemed to work: independent judges described their improvisations as “more proficient, aesthetically appealing, and creative” than their previous attempts.

The team suggests that the command to be more creative led these pianists to put conscious effort into trying new ways of playing. However, participants with more experience didn’t get the same benefit from this instruction, perhaps because they were already such expert improvisers that their technique couldn’t improve with greater conscious control.

So if you’re looking to boost creativity, especially if you’re an amateur, making a conscious effort may help. (more…)

A Flexi-Work World Needs New Performance Appraisals

 

 

 

by Chengyi Lin

 

Adopting the right metrics could help align objectives and encourage more companies to embrace flexible work arrangements. 

Although the days of full remote work may be over, many employees have expressed a desire for flexible work arrangements. But with Covid-19 no longer a global health emergency, more organisations could demand that people return to the office – setting the scene for an inevitable tug-of-war.

Some organisations including Google, Meta and EY have continued to allow teleworking in some capacity, but others have followed the lead of Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk and insisted on calling employees back to the office full-time. Some of the downsides of flexi-work that often come up are onboarding difficulties, the logistical challenges of asynchronous work, the erosion of team cohesion, culture and collaboration, and the risk that employees may become demotivated.

There have always been inherent tensions and misalignments between employer and employee goals. Many of them are now amplified by flexi-work. Managers may prefer an in-person work environment for reasons of control and ease of coordination. Employees tend to prioritise convenience and efficiency, as well as meaningful collaboration. Organisations value performance, culture and talent development.

An unlikely solution lies in tweaking the performance appraisal system. Doing so could help align priorities, build common ground and create an organisational culture in which flexible work arrangements help people and businesses thrive.

Managing the tensions

Performance appraisals have long been a critical aspect of business performance and talent management. Besides marrying individual and organisational goals, they help move the organisation forward collectively during periods of change. (more…)

How to motivate employees when their priorities have changed

 

 

 

 

 

by Kristi Hedges

 

 

Get into a conversation with a company leader these days, and you’ll likely hear some version of “no one wants to work hard anymore.” Those companies who are hiring still seek hungry, ambitious hard-chargers who will do what it takes to succeed. But new hires come in negotiating like seasoned executives, leaving managers flummoxed. Even with recent rounds of layoffs, employee expectations are staying high, as job ads emphasizing flexibility and other benefits attest. There’s also a truism that transcends economic situations: Companies want to hire and retain the best people, which gives the best people leverage. I see my C-suite clients grasping for more control to get back to “normal” by pushing for longer hours in the office, tightening metrics, and hoping that economic headwinds will return their power.

I tell them not to count on it.

Human nature hasn’t fundamentally changed. People want to be engaged at work and apply themselves to big things. But just like a camera lens zooming out, we now see there’s more to the story. Feeling passionate about our working life — liking what we do and how we do it — is as important as ever, but what creates that passion has broadened and deepened. We no longer see a singular pursuit of a corporate goal in a bustling office as the only way to a purposeful career. Leaders need to catch up or they’ll be operating frustratingly empty hybrid offices with quiet-quitters and short-timers. (more…)