Explainers Archives - Page 6 of 11

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 101: How to Make a Difference

Creating a supportive workplace for all employees is both a critical and sensitive topic. We’ve identified a few best practices that engage participants and deliver real results.

Explainers

How to Encourage a Culture of Courage

Courage isn’t an inherent quality—it can be trained. Here’s how to make it a habit on your team.

Explainers

What Happens When Your Role Transforms into the Chief Transformation Officer

When companies realize they need to become more innovative, they often anoint one person to lead the charge. Here’s how to spread transformation through the organization.

Explainers

Your First Hire: Finding (and Keeping) the Right Role

When adding the first members to your team, how do you identify the right roles for your needs—and once they join, how do they continue to grow?

Explainers

How Do You Encourage Employees to Go the Extra Mile?

Have you ever escorted a guest through your office rather than letting them find their way themselves? Or maybe you’ve spoken up to avert a potential disaster, or “gone the extra mile” on a project even when you knew you wouldn’t get a bonus. If so, congratulations—you’ve engaged in an Organizational Citizenship Behavior.

Explainers

What Makes for an Emotionally Reliable Leader?

As a leader, it feels like you’re constantly under pressure. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s all too easy to respond to problems emotionally, which can make people feel like you’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and they never know just who they’re going to get.

Explainers

What Does “Bring Your Whole Self to Work” Really Mean?

Many of us are limited by our work personas and wish we could be more authentic with our colleagues. Increasingly, we hear people advocate for bringing “our whole self” to work, but what are the limits of that advice and when is authenticity actually damaging to a team?

Explainers

What You Need to Know about Your Team’s Psychological Safety at Work

The most important factor in any high-performing team is psychological safety: that is, the feeling that it’s safe to take risks in front of the group. But how do you foster it?

Explainers

Why Culture/Market Fit Is More Important than Product/Market Fit

Product/market fit was a term coined by Marc Andreesen and defined as, “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Culture/market fit is similar, yet even more foundational. Find yourself a healthy market, yes. Then develop a culture that can deliver product/market fit.

Explainers

What to Do When Teammates Don’t Share the Same Motivation

Individuals don’t have to share the same motivation to achieve a shared outcome, but they do need to trust that others are looking out for their interests.

Explainers

How to Make Risk Feel Less Risky—And Why It’s Essential for Success

We’re gonna go out on a limb here and say that you didn’t get to where you are without taking a risk. Maybe it was moving to a new city in pursuit of a job opportunity. Maybe it was volunteering to lead a project that had never been tried before. Or maybe it was saying “no” to a lucrative offer because it compromised your long-term goals.

Explainers

When Followers Don’t Follow

Even the most progressive leaders will find themselves on particularly hard days asking themselves, “Why doesn’t my team do what I need them to do?”

Explainers

Personality Tests Don’t Work, Here’s Why and The Alternatives

Personality tests, we think, help us understand ourselves better. But in reality, they are often a self-gratifying exercise that gets us no closer to understanding ourselves or others.

Explainers

The Futures of Work: Fixed Vs Fluid

Regardless of what the airport bookstore shelves tell you, there is no single future of work. There are multiple organizational futures stretching out in front of every company, and the road best taken is dependent on the environment around you.

Explainers

How to Reduce Decision Fatigue

Every day, we are faced with decisions that can range from seemingly minute to hugely impactful. Making decisions as a group is complicated even further by the addition of different perspectives, personalities, and opinions, so it’s easy for decision making fatigue to set in.

Explainers

How to Avoid “Creative Entitlement”

Having only a small group of people within your organization that identify as “creative” can lead not only to cliques but it can also lead to rule avoidance and unethical behavior.

Explainers

The Pros and Cons of “Radical Candor”

While radical candor can benefit an organization, it has to be used in the right context: specifically, you must have an established level of trust and respect within a team first. If team members don’t have empathy for their coworkers, it’s too easy to deliver harsh criticism and excuse it by claiming it’s just “radical candor.”

Explainers

Five Ways to Scale Change within an Organization

Technology can scale exponentially, people and relationships can’t. As you grow your organization, scaling your culture in a healthy way becomes ever more important.

Explainers

Why Onboarding May Be More Important Than Hiring

Here’s a controversial opinion: right now, for most companies, onboarding is more important to obsess over than hiring. To be sure, both are generally important things (we’re not saying that hiring is unimportant). But right now, how you onboard talent is even more important than how you find talent.

Explainers

What Every Institutional Innovation Program Gets Wrong

In the last few years, many large organizations have reached the conclusion that the talent required to optimize their existing revenue sources is distinct from the talent required to invent the future. Today, the most savvy organizations will realize the need for a third team: those with the ability to take the refined ore of a new idea and shape it into a commercially viable and sustainable business.