Hybrid Teams / Leadership / Motivation and Engagement / Performance

Three Ways Behavioral Science Will Shape the Future of Leadership Development

Summary A combination of global pandemic and a new generation of employees are driving a realignment of the employee-employer dynamic. As people re-examine their work priorities, enlightened CEOs and senior leaders increasingly recognize that managers who understand and effectively influence human behavior deliver better results. Behavioral science is moving front and center as executives rethink leader development. With this focus they are asking which of the many behavioral science insights and tools will…

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22 March 2022

DNA strand assembling from different elements

Hybrid Teams / Leadership / Virtual Teams

Decoding the DNA of Hybrid Teams

The sudden and rapid shift to hybrid workplaces brings a unique opportunity for exploring new ways of working. What makes the emergence of hybrid models different from past seismic changes in the business landscape, such as the industrial and information revolutions, is that the hybrid workplace is primarily about embracing new behaviors enabled by technology rather than new technologies redefining businesses and behavior. If you’re a leader navigating this new world, your first…

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22 August 2021

Communications / Leadership

Brain Science is Turning Feedback Inside-Out

In his article, Employee Surveys Are Still One of the Best Ways to Measure Engagement, Scott Judd, the head of People Analytics at Facebook, observes that "…surveys are starting to look like diesel trucks, collecting dust in the age of electric cars." Employee feedback surveys first emerged in the 1920s, along with scientific management and the drive to improve industrial productivity. In 1932, Rensis Likert began a revolution in survey research with his…

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9 May 2021

Leadership / Virtual Teams

Embracing Uncomfortable Conversations: Leaning Out to Create Authentic Connections

Noël found herself mentally fatigued, burned out, and disengaged from her work. How did she end up here when she felt so energized by this new role just a short while ago? Even before the Pandemic, Noël started feeling discouraged and isolated from her colleagues. When she transferred to the engineering department two years ago, she was excited for the opportunity to align her passion with her daily craft – Noël loved developing…

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21 March 2021

Leadership / Virtual Teams

Trust. The Missing Metric.

When Peter Drucker said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." he was, in essence, advocating a cure for mediocrity through better metrics. Unfortunately, he didn't specify what should be measured. Devan was excited about her promotion from leading a single team in the CS organization to Head of Customer Success at a remote-first enterprise software company. Her former CS team consistently outperformed the other teams in the group across customer…

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8 November 2020

Diversity / Inclusiveness / Leadership / Performance

How to Build a Team that (Actually) Embraces Inclusiveness

In my work with teams, I found that most people describe themselves as "almost always" or "always" inclusive. Yet, too often, I've seen those same people demonstrate subtle acts of exclusion and discriminatory mindsets that keep their co-workers off the dance floor. A few years ago, a young woman from South East Asia presented some promising new product research results in a department review. After the meeting, an executive intended to compliment her…

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30 August 2020

Coaching / Leadership / Motivation and Engagement / Performance

The ROI of Trust

Trust is like oxygen. It is an essential element that drives engagement and fuels performance. It fosters inclusiveness and binds a group of diverse people together to pursue a common purpose. Too often, leaders take it for granted – until it becomes dangerously low. Then, faced with symptoms like low engagement or rising turnover, they embrace a patchwork of remedies to treat the symptoms rather than the root cause. For leaders who dare…

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14 June 2020

Leadership / Virtual Teams

The Remedy for Remote Performance Anxiety

If you're one of the tens of thousands of managers now leading a fully remote team, many of your people likely felt a sense of excitement with the freedom of going virtual. As the weeks go by, that initial excitement often gives way to anxiety as the pressure of meeting deadlines and goals without being face-to-face sinks in. That isn’t unusual as many people are more comfortable resolving issues or making tough decisions…

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29 March 2020

Leadership

The Alchemy of Leadership. Three Essential Ingredients for Success.

Here in the Wasatch mountains, 2020 arrived with fresh snowfall and the promise of more powder to come in the first few days of the new year. For those who traveled here for the Christmas and New Year holiday in hopes of an idyllic winter vacation with heaps of snow and cozy evenings around the fireplace, their wish came true. For me, the holidays have been a delightful mix of spending time with…

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5 January 2020

Leadership

Seeing the Potential for Extraordinary

Why is it that some people see the potential for extraordinary in others when everyone else sees only the ordinary? Thanksgiving is a few days away and snow is in the forecast which means lots of visitors to the ski slopes and lodges here in Park City. So before things get too busy I figured I'd pull a chair up close to the fireplace at my favorite mountain lodge, indulge in a mug…

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24 November 2019

Leadership

Crafting Your Leadership Legacy

I can still recall the feeling of satisfaction and anticipation that came with my promotion to Senior Product Manager and my first people leadership role. Reading the company announcement that named my new team, and our mission to define the next generation of products to fuel the company’s growth, I was determined that we were going to be the best, exceeding every expectation in the relentless pursuit of our goals. I was already…

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22 September 2019

Coaching / Leadership

Stop the Silent Startup Killers

In the medical world, “silent killers” are conditions with no obvious symptoms that progress to an advanced stage before someone discovers them. In organizations and on teams, a lack of psychological safety, unconscious bias, and low trust are “silent killers” that slowly drain away energy, engagement, and the human spirit — often going undetected until the damage becomes irreparable. Ignoring these silent killers is toxic for teams and life-threatening for startups. Leaders who…

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9 September 2019

Coaching / Leadership

Stop Wasting Money on Leader Training

In a hyper-competitive, global environment organizational leaders know that they must develop their managers and teams or risk being out-innovated and outperformed in record time. Yet, despite the billions of dollars spent every year on leader training, there is a continual flow of evidence from consultancies and academia that training fails to deliver against expectations. Recent articles from Gallup -  “Why Manager Development Programs Aren’t Working” ,  McKinsey, and HBR all emphasize the…

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5 August 2019

Leadership

21st Century Teams: The Road Ahead

Despite an increase in nationalistic and protectionist rhetoric around the world, the growth and speed of global business continues. Driven by the need for more people than ever to work virtually across multiple teams and cultures, organizations must develop and support a new generation of tech-savvy people through a networked, collaborative approach to leadership and teamwork. The impact on organizational culture, structure, and operations is profound, and many companies continue to struggle with…

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1 January 2019

Communications / Leadership

The Cost of Leader Silence

The role of employee voice in organizations – whether in the form of work-related complaints, participating in decision making, contributing new ideas, or providing feedback – has been a topic of discussion and debate for over 200 years. The industrial revolution fueled the drive towards a greater employee voice via organized labor. The information era precipitated the rise of Organizational Behavior as a discipline, and a greater focus on encouraging employees at all…

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11 November 2018

Coaching / Leadership / Performance

Peer Coaching and Sales Team Performance

How do you continuously improve your sales team’s performance? The traditional answer was to put in place a tough, heroic sales leader who embraced an aggressive sales culture, high-pressure pay-for-performance, intensive training, and constant culling of weak performers – practices that emerged after WWII and were refined in the 1980’s corporate world. In today’s sales environment, those approaches can seem about as useful as the abdominizers and Walkman’s you might find at a…

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12 August 2018

Motivation and Engagement

4 Steps to Motivating Millennial Teams

For organizations in search of talent, people born between 1977 and 1994 matter because a) there are a lot of them; and b) by 2020, their generation will make up 50% of the global workforce. This generation’s career aspirations, attitudes about work, and comfort with technology will define the work culture of the 21st century. The term “millennials”, given to this generation by social scientists and the media, is a Western label. Leaders…

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18 February 2018

Team Research / Virtual Teams

Too Many Cooks In Your Virtual Team’s Kitchen?

As organizations become more team-centric, and as globalization drives interaction across regions and time zones, the use of virtual teams has grown rapidly (SHRM, 2012). For organizations, the advantages of being able to leverage talent and resources across geographies and time zones can be a source of competitive advantage. For the individuals chosen to lead these virtual teams, the challenges associated with leadership are amplified by the nature of being virtual rather than…

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4 February 2018

Leadership

Team Leadership Lessons from the Navy SEALs

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu observed that the challenge of leading a small army versus a large army is largely a matter of “dividing up their numbers” and “signs and signals”. In modern terms, this means instilling the structures, communications, and processes that are necessary for scaling an effective small force into a larger one. As fast-growing, team-based startups replicate their small, highly-effective teams into a larger, high-performance organization—or, when larger…

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6 September 2017

Leadership

The Discipline of a Team Turnaround

If you aspire to lead, then at some point in your career you will likely find yourself responsible for turning around a troubled team. The trouble may come from within the team, external forces, or both. For me, it was both. My first GM role was leading the turnaround of a loss-making business unit, within a shrinking division, of a once-great company. This company had missed the next big wave in its industry…

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20 August 2017

Leadership / Team Research

Team Leadership Lessons from Athletes

Leadership is fundamental to performance in both business and sports. As a result, in the world of sports, most of the leadership research over the past 25 years has been focused on the appointed coach or team captain, versus athletes who demonstrate leadership qualities and actions on the playing field ("athlete-leaders"). The distinction is important because athlete-leaders improve team cohesion, athlete satisfaction, team confidence, and motivational dynamics within the team. Cotterhill and Fransen…

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9 August 2017

Woodblock painting by Shotei/Takahashi Hiroaki (January 2, 1871 - February 11, 1945)

Leadership

Leading a Cross-Cultural Team

Cross-cultural teams have become the norm in virtually every multi-national company and many smaller companies doing business globally. Building a highly-effective cross-cultural team can be one of the most challenging, and rewarding, opportunities for a team leader. Early in my career, a Japanese ...

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6 August 2017

Leadership

My First Team Leader Role: How I Got it (Almost) All Wrong

Despite the number of years since my first team leader experience, there are a few memories that come back as though they happened yesterday. I recall the feeling of satisfaction that came with my promotion from Product Manager to Senior Product Manager. I remember my sense of excitement when the company announced my new role and team, and our mission to lead the development of the next generation of products to fuel the…

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30 July 2017