The Best of This Week

With Remote Collaboration, Sometimes Conflict Is a Good Thing Remote work environments lack the spontaneous exchange of ideas that can naturally occur in an in-office setting. To spur innovation in this challenging context, leaders have to be skillful in connecting with employees at all levels of the organization while encouraging rigorous debate....

2d

Driving Remote Innovation Through Conflict and Collaboration

To stimulate and refine ideas for innovation, organizations have traditionally relied on the energy of face-to-face, copresent teams collaborating both formally and informally in meetings, cubicles, and corridors, and at watercoolers. The dynamic energy created by copresence is considered critical for embedding innovation into an organization’s workplace...

3d

The Price Leaders Pay for Cutting Ethical Corners

Image courtesy of Brian Stauffer/theispot.com Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for leaders to ask their employees to cross ethical lines. Consider the following examples from a pilot study we recently conducted: A sales representative at a retail company was asked to grant credit approval to unqualified customers who were friends of her supervisor;...

4d

Why Good Leaders Fail

It is often hard to understand why a leader with a track record of success would — poof — suddenly and unexpectedly fail to meet expectations. This seemingly abrupt and unpredictable form of leadership failure — which we refer to as leader derailment — can be a vexing performance outcome for organizations to both understand and manage. Even before...

6d

The Best of This Week

What Explainable AI Means for Talent Development Explainable AI, which author Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic considers “the quality of a system to provide decisions or suggestions that can be understood by their users and developer,” can play an important role in fair, accurate talent assessment. Used alongside ethical human judgment, this form of AI can...

2w

Are You Ready to Lead Work Without Jobs?

The way we have traditionally organized work and workers is becoming increasingly obsolete. We are moving toward a new work operating system that will deconstruct work into tasks and projects that may be assigned not only to employees but also to machines and contingent workers in talent marketplaces. In addition, workers will increasingly be identified...

2w

The Practices That Set Learning Organizations Apart

Image courtesy of Michael Glenwood Gibbs/theispot.com The Research As a first step in their research, the authors conducted focus groups with professional bodies, government offices and policy bodies, educators, and employers. They collected interview data from 21 organizations in six countries across a variety of industry sectors, such...

2w

Innovative Work Cultures Know the Difference Between ‘Leader’ and ‘Manager’

“A leader without followers is just someone out for a walk.” Various versions of this saying, often attributed to author John C. Maxwell, are frequently used to encourage people in power to focus on inspiring others. But if you listen within many companies today, you may get the sense that a lot of them have forgotten — or never learned — the lesson...

2w

When You Reject People, Tell Them Why

Humans are meaning-making machines, continually searching for patterns and creating stories to make sense of them. This intense desire to understand the world goes hand in hand with the rise of artificial intelligence in organizations. We expect AI to advance our quest for meaning — not just to predict that X leads to Y in the workplace but to shed...

2w

The Best of This Week

5 Ways to Support Better Remote Onboarding Early-career talent needs onboarding and development opportunities, even in a fully remote work environment. Based on their study of 500 internships and graduate programs worldwide, the authors suggest five ways that organizations can effectively support new contributors — virtually. How to Make Your Next...

3w