| By Dorie Clark, hbr.org | Almost every leader wants to make more time for strategic thinking. In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the leadership behavior most important to their organization’s success. And yet in another study, a full 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking. Of […]
Why It’s So Hard to Speak Up Against a Toxic Culture
| By Francesca Gino, hbr.org | Frustrated by the behavior of some men in their workplace, a group of women working at Nike anonymously surveyed other women colleagues a few months ago about their perceptions of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. The results painted a clear picture of a workplace where women often felt marginalized, disrespected, […]
5 Common Complaints About Meetings and What to Do About Them
| By Paul Axtell, hbr.org | We all complain about meetings. We have too many. They’re a waste of time. Nothing gets done. These complaints often have merit, but they are so broad that they’re difficult to argue with and harder to address. There are specific complaints that can be tackled, however. When I ask people in the workshops I […]
The Power of Leaders Who Focus on Solving Problems
| By Hal Gregersen, Deborah Ancona, hbr.org | In front of a packed room of MIT students and alumni, Vivienne Ming is holding forth in a style all her own. “Embrace cyborgs,” she calls out, as she clicks to a slide that raises eyebrows even in this tech-smitten crowd. “Really. Fifteen to 25 years from now, cognitive neuroprosthetics […]
The Power of Listening in Helping People Change
| By Guy Itzchakov, Avraham N. and Kluger, hbr.org | Giving performance feedback is one of the most common ways managers help their subordinates learn and improve. Yet, research revealed that feedback could actually hurt performance: More than 20 years ago, one of us (Kluger) analyzed 607 experiments on feedback effectiveness and found that feedback caused performance to decline in […]
How to Get People to Accept a Tough Decision
| By David Maxfield, hbr.rg | Imagine this: You’re a general manager for a manufacturing company and orders are up. You know you should be celebrating, but instead, you feel gut punched. Your plants are facing severe capacity and material constraints and you know you can’t fill these orders. Now you have to decide which ones to […]
How to Run a Meeting Without Talking Too Much
| By Art Markman, hbr.org | Have you ever left a meeting feeling that you dominated the whole thing — and not in a good way? You talked a lot, and in the end, you felt that nobody else had enough time to speak. This is a bad dynamic for several reasons. People don’t want to attend […]
Your Strategic Plans Probably Aren’t Strategic, or Even Plans
| By Graham Kenny, hbr.org | It happens all the time: A group of managers get together at a resort for two days to hammer out a “strategic plan.” Done and dusted, they all head home. But have they produced a plan with a strategy? At the start of my public seminars on strategic planning I ask attendees, who rank from […]