Collaboration is taking over the workplace. According to data collected by the authors over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more. There is much to applaud about these developments—but when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause.

At many companies, people spend around 80% of their time in meetings or answering colleagues’ requests, leaving little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. What’s more, research the authors have done across more than 300 organizations shows that the apportionment of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. The avalanche of demands for input or advice, access to resources, or sometimes just presence in a meeting causes performance to suffer. Employees take assignments home,...

Teams are a critical part of today’s workforce – but they’re often unsuccessful. Some of the reasons for failure include problems with coordination, motivation, and competition – as well as waiting too long to address these issues.

How do you know if your team is working at the highest level? This 23-item assessment is designed to help members of a team become more aware of how it functions. By assessing a series of factors known to influence a team’s success – such as team purpose, commitment, talent, norms, goals, morale, and rewards – you can examine how well how your team is functioning and see what levers might be most effective for improving productivity and satisfaction.

Even before working from home became widespread, digital technology was transforming how and where work gets done and how many people are needed to do it.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, companies can rebuild a workforce that is better equipped for an economy in which routine and repeatable tasks are increasingly machine-enabled.

Drawing on research by Bain & Company involving more than 300 large firms worldwide in every facet of the global economy, the authors identify six practices for companies to follow as they regroup and reorganize for the inevitable recovery.

Economics & Society (70) Entrepreneurship (18) Finance & Accounting (17) Innovation (49) International business (26) Leadership & Managing people (100) Managing organizations (109) Managing yourself (91) Operations (19) Sales & Marketing (48)

If you’re not a numbers person, finance is a daunting subject. But understanding concepts like EBITDA and net present value are important no matter where you sit on the org chart. Here are some strategies for boosting your financial acumen. Get acquainted with your company’s income statement. Reproduce the numbers in a spreadsheet then group them into categories of profit and loss. Your goal is to understand how much your company spends and where it makes money. Play with the numbers. Experiment with the figures on the balance sheet by going through a series of “what if” scenarios. What if prices were lower? What if revenue was higher? This exercise helps you internalize how financial models work. Find a financial mentor. Foster a relationship with a senior financial or operations manager who can teach you and answer your questions. This person can also serve as a sounding board for financial decisions you need to make.

Now that workplaces are turning to a hybrid model, many of us are going to have to face change and uncertainty like we never have before. Research in organizational psychology suggests that three traits will help you navigate this new era:

August 17, 2021

Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning, has long studied how people find fulfillment. As the ongoing pandemic causes many of us to rethink how and why we do our jobs, she offers advice on how to find more enjoyment and engagement, avoid burnout, reset ambitions, and, if necessary, change paths. One key is to define – or redefine – your purpose as it relates to work, and Smith explains how to do that wherever you are in your career.

Now more than ever, leaders are struggling with anxieties, fears, and all sorts of difficult emotions. What’s the best way to handle these internal struggles at work? The authors analyzed journal entries from thirty global leaders in May and June of 2020 and identified three distinct leadership styles: Heroes, who focused on the positive; Technocrats, who focused on results; and Sharers, who openly shared both positive and negative experiences. Despite a common assumption that the Hero and Technocrat leadership styles are best, the authors found that Sharers were in fact most effective when it came to building cohesive, high-performing teams that were resilient in the face of the myriad challenges posed by the pandemic. Based on both their own study and extensive secondary research, the authors go on to offer several strategies to help leaders get more comfortable sharing negative emotions in a helpful, appropriate manner.

The pressure that can overcome star performers is a function of three things: the importance of a situation’s outcome, the uncertainty of the outcome, and the volume of tasks, decisions, and distractions surrounding the outcome. Coaches can help them handle the pressure of a high-stakes event by reducing the overwhelming baggage they can attach to failure by getting them to see what’s important to them that won’t change regardless of the outcome, and by aiding them in realizing which tasks and distractions they can put aside.

The Chief Data Officer is arguably one of the most important roles at a company. It’s also a position that has become notoriously hard to stay in. The average tenure of CDOs is just two to two-and-a-half years. There are a few reasons for this. The role is relatively new, so companies are still trying to decide what they want from the person in this position. Many companies expect the impossible from their CDO. Finally, CDOs often have trouble selling their actual accomplishments to a business audience — they just don’t speak the language. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. One successful CDO imparted two pieces of advice: 1) Start with a clear connection to business strategy with tangible examples of how data analytics can drive business outcomes (topline, bottom line, cash, stewardship), and 2) lead with 1-2 forward thinking business partners to demonstrate what is possible. Those partners become the change agents across the organization.

When the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sunk, only 705 of its 2,200 passengers and crew, floating in 16 lifeboats, were saved. Imagine how many more might have lived if crew members had thought of the iceberg as not just the cause of the disaster but a lifesaving solution.

The iceberg rose high above the water and stretched nearly 400 feet in length. The lifeboats, or the Titanic itself, might have been able to pull close enough to the iceberg for people to scramble on.

Regardless of whether this could actually have worked, it’s an intriguing idea—yet surprisingly difficult to envision. That’s because a cognitive bias called “functional fixedness” limits people to seeing objects only in the way in which they’re traditionally used. In a nautical context, an iceberg is a hazard to be avoided; it’s very hard to see it any other way.

When it comes to innovation, businesses are constantly hampered by functional fixedness and other cognitive...

Sarah-in-Seattle and Sarah-in-Stockholm are both white, middle-class, married, professional women with babies and toddlers at home. But their experiences as working mothers returning to work after giving birth could not have been more different. That’s because Sarah-in-Stockholm benefits from a host of family-friendly policies that the Swedish government supports, including lengthy paid parental leave, free healthcare, and subsidized childcare.  Without any of those supports, Sarah-in-Seattle has struggled to balance her job and child-rearing. Employers can surely help overcome this problem by offering better benefits. But that won’t fix the problem for everyone. Instead, they should start advocating for legislation that better accommodates the needs of working families.

It can be hard to know how to make your resume stand out. Start by accepting that it’s going to take some time and effort. Don’t try to sit down and knock it out in an hour – you’re carefully crafting a marketing document. Open strong with a summary of your expertise. Use an accomplishments section after the opener to link your experience to the job requirements. You don’t want to waste space upfront on irrelevant job experience. It’s okay to be selective about what employment, achievements, and skills you include; after all, you should tailor your resume for each position. Give concrete examples of your expertise, quantifying your accomplishments with numbers where you can. Seek input from a mentor or friend who can review it and give you feedback. Lastly, create a personable LinkedIn profile to complement your resume.

Trust is the enabler of global business — without it, most market transactions would be impossible. It is also a hallmark of high-performing organizations. Employees in high-trust companies are more productive, are more satisfied with their jobs, put in greater discretionary effort, are less likely to search for new jobs, and even are healthier than those working in low-trust companies. Businesses that build trust among their customers are rewarded with greater loyalty and higher sales. And negotiators who build trust with each other are more likely to find value-creating deals.

Managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees. Research indicates that managers first should identify the reason for an employee’s lack of motivation before applying a targeted strategy. These reasons fall into four categories called motivation traps. Namely, these are values mismatch, lack of self-efficacy, disruptive emotions, and attribution errors. Each of these four traps has distinct causes and comes with specific strategies to release an employee from its clutches. Identifying exactly which trap has ensnared your employee and applying the right targeted intervention can get things moving again.

Not only is the majority of training in today’s companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training is flawed. Want to see eyes glaze over quicker than you can finish this sentence? Mandate that busy employees attend a training session on “business writing skills”, or “conflict resolution”, or some other such course with little alignment to their needs. Like lean manufacturing and the lean startup before it, lean learning supports the adaptability that gives organizations a competitive advantage in today’s market. It’s about learning the core of what you need to learn, applying it to real-world situations immediately, receiving immediate feedback and refining your understanding, and then repeating the cycle. In order to begin practicing lean learning, organizations need to move from measuring credits earned to measuring business outcomes created. Lean learning ensures that employees not only learn the right thing, at the right time, and for...

Formal education is linked to higher earning and lower unemployment. Beyond that, learning is fun! Engaging in a new topic can be a joy and a confidence booster. But continuous and persistent learning isn’t just a choice – it has to become a habit, no easy task in these busy times. To make learning a lifelong habit, know that developing a learning habit requires you to articulate the outcomes you’d like to achieve. Based on those choices, set realistic goals. With goals in hand, develop a learning community and ditch the distractions. Finally, where appropriate, use technology to supplement learning. Developing specific learning habits – consciously established and conscientiously cultivated – can be a route to both continued professional relevance and deep personal happiness.

It’s normal to occasionally experience anxiety — when we’re faced with a high-stakes meeting, a stressed-out boss, or a conflict with a colleague. When we’re anxious, we tend to trap ourselves in false or limited ways of thinking. These thought patterns create a debilitating negative spiral that can take over our lives by convincing us of impending doom and further exacerbating our sense of helplessness.

But there are strategies you can take to overcome these thinking traps. First, consciously change your activities to divert your attention away from your stressor. Next, give it a name, so you better understand the type of anxiety you’re dealing with. Then, separate your uncertainties from the facts, and consider what stories you’re telling yourself about the situations — and if there are other angles to consider. Finally, step outside your own head by thinking about what you would tell someone else if they were faced with the same scenario.

It’s not enough for NGOs to simply put assistance, products, and provisions into the hands of beneficiaries. They must also ensure that donated resources suit beneficiaries’ needs and capabilities, so that the resources can and will be used. But the severe budget constraints under which most NGOs operate can make this a daunting challenge. Finding out what diverse recipients want and what works for them — not to mention putting this information into practice via customised offerings — can be prohibitively expensive. One way to achieve impact at scale in the face of these difficulties is to remove info-gathering from the process entirely and provide unfinished products that recipients can complete according to their own tastes and abilities. In essence, this means moving from an off-the-shelf mode of delivery to a partial-DIY paradigm. This article goes further to argue that this strategy is an option worth considering, even when money is no object. As long as...

As you craft your company’s hybrid work plans and policies, be aware of the inequities hybrid work can create or make worse. Designing with five practical dimensions of inclusion in mind is critical for creating an equitable organization. First, create a positive recruitment and onboarding experience by providing new hires with the right technology and support and implement a buddy system to replace the informal learning that typically takes place in the office. Second, bridge physical distance by making smart use of digital tools to keep people connected. Third, increase psychological safety to enable people to speak up when they experience interpersonal conflict. Fourth, break up in-groups by identifying “weak ties.” Finally, monitor who gets promoted and why to identify patterns that favor one group over others.