Manage AI Bias Instead of Trying to Eliminate It

Businesses and governments must face an uncomfortable truth: Artificial intelligence is hopelessly and inherently biased. Asking how to prevent such bias is in many ways the wrong question, because AI is a means of learning and generalizing from a set of examples — and all too often, the examples are pulled straight from historical data. Because biases...

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Rethinking Hierarchy

Chris Gash/theispot.com For all the hype and promise swirling around the idea of eliminating management to create agile, flat organizations, bosses and corporate hierarchies have remained extremely resilient. As we argued in the pages of MIT Sloan Management Review in 2014, under the right conditions, having such hierarchies in place is the best...

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How to Build a High-Trust Workplace

These days, it’s hard to read the news without encountering a story about quiet quitting — the notion that swaths of employees have become so disengaged that they’re doing the minimum required to keep their jobs. To address this issue, many organizations are investing in better office spaces, hybrid work support, enhanced employee wellness, and more...

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How to Help High Achievers Overcome Imposter Syndrome

Recently, we met a woman who told us the story of how she grew up on a Native American reservation and had to drop out of high school to care for her younger siblings. In her early 20s, she went back to school, where she excelled. Eventually, she went to dental school and earned four postsecondary degrees. “Coming from my very challenging childhood,...

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Action and Inaction on Data, Analytics, and AI

The title of this column series is “AI in Action,” and there has indeed been a lot of action over the past year. Judging from the 11th annual NewVantage Partners survey of senior data and analytics executives, some trends are moving in the right direction. For example, more companies are creating senior roles to focus on data and analytics. The chief...

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Workplace Toxicity Is Not Just a Mental Health Issue

The dramatic reckoning between health and social safety nets that has erupted over the past few years has by now taken a severe toll on almost everyone in the workplace. Many tired employees have identified their jobs as a draining force and are questioning the proportion of their lives that work consumes. Some employees have exited their roles under...

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Why Innovation Depends on Intellectual Honesty

Jon Krause/theispot.com The Research The authors surveyed teams in more than 60 technology startups and established companies in a variety of industries to understand the interaction between psychological safety and intellectual honesty, and the extent to which they are essential to fostering innovation. To measure psychological safety, they...

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This New Year, Resolve Against Workaholism

Employees often go the extra mile by staying late or helping a coworker with an assignment. These actions — known as citizenship behaviors — are especially beneficial to the companies where these employees work. In fact, research shows that employee citizenship behavior enhances both team and company performance. For years, scholars have recognized...

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What’s Holding Back Manager Effectiveness, and How to Fix It

Organizations are facing an unusual set of challenges brought on by the combination of a tight labor market and the widespread expectation of a recession. Companies need to cut costs, enable teams to deliver results more effectively, and keep employees engaged and satisfied, or they risk the very real possibility of losing them. The latest job figures...

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Flexibility Is Key to Integrating Meaning and Work

Our shared experience of the COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity to question a lot of things. We revisited long-held assumptions, picked up new habits, and let go of past ways of being. Over the past two years, my team and I have led a series of workshops and seminars where we asked people to talk about what they have learned about themselves....

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