by Emmett Fitzpatrick
Acknowledge that your employees are likely fatigued
This one sounds easy, right? Well, yes, it is!
We need to acknowledge – for ourselves – that your employees are likely fatigued, and not be shy about sharing that with your employees. Continue reading
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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.”
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. Continue reading
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.
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
by Chengyi Lin
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. Continue reading
