Friday Features: 05-April-2019
Friday Features - a weekly selection of useful insights from business schools, consulting firms and publications to help you Unleash Your Leadership
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BY Ed O'Brien via Harvard Business REVIEW
The information age certainly has the potential to improve our understanding. But new evidence suggests that access to information may work better in theory than in practice. People think they will rationally assess all available information before forming conclusions, but then, with so much information at their disposal, they actually form conclusions nearly right away. Minds are made up long before we make it through the evidence
BY Edmund L. Andrews via Stanford Business Insights
You can fill a room with studies on leadership that hail the importance of being a likable, honest, caring, and modest boss.
In the work world, however, that’s not what people want most. When people have a chance to choose whom to work with, and their own success depends in part on those people, a new study finds that cold competence becomes more important and likability less so.
When money is on the line, in other words, most people would rather work for a very competent jerk than a nice but less competent boss.
BY Julia Hobsbawm via Strategy+Business
Networks in corporate culture traditionally have been rather specialist-interest. But now, employee network groups are becoming social health incubators that move beyond networks with an emphasis on social interactions and shared characteristics of identity, gender, and sexual orientation toward a more strategic use of what I would call human networks effects — the kind that solve tangible problems across an entire organization.
BY Kevin Murphy & NeYsa Colizzi via BAIN Insights
Threats focus an organization’s attention on the need for change with an urgency that can give cover to deep transformations. [...] But what if your company is doing just fine, great even, but you still need to change? [...] In today’s environment the need for change is ever increasing, but that doesn’t mean it’s always negative. [...] How do you motivate a desire to change, though, when all that your employees see is blue skies?.
BY Art Markman via FastCompany
When we think about leaders’ behaviors, it’s easier to notice the big things they do in public: A managers shares some news with her team in a meeting. A CEO makes a controversial hiring (or firing) decision that earns press coverage. A head of state tweets something incendiary. Whether we’re aware of it or not, it’s episodes like these–and what people we trust tend to say about them–that affect our beliefs about whether a given leader is good or bad, not to mention our ideas about leadership generally.
But other acts of leadership are much harder to see, generate little to no discussion, and yet are just as influential. “Quiet” forms of leadership, in other words, matter more than you might imagine. Here’s what that looks like and why it’s so important..
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue of Friday Features as much as we did putting it together. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do write in.
Narayan Kamath
