September 13, 2021

There’s another podcast we love: Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel. The show explores how to make work happier, healthier, and more human.

At the end of Season 4, host Morra Aarons-Mele interviewed Hempel about how work and mental health are changing for the better, as companies and leaders rethink work norms.

In this special bonus episode, Hempel interviews Morra about her own journey with work and mental health, and how her experiences with depression and anxiety influence her leadership.

Check out the new season of Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel wherever you get your podcasts.

Are you interested in solving other people’s problems? In order to build a product that has a strong market demand, you need to have a deep understanding of the problems your customers are trying to solve and offer them a viable solution. This requires customer empathy, which an important trait for any budding entrepreneur. Do you enjoy selling? If you want to be an entrepreneur, you will be doing some version of it all the time. You’ll need to have a thorough understanding of your market, a clear vision for your company, and strong communication skills to convince people of your point of view. How resilient are you? On your journey to launch a business, you will encounter all sorts of obstacles and challenges. Sometimes you may fail or be told “no,” but that’s a part of it. You need to believe in yourself and your idea enough to get back up and try again.

Honest conversations are a crucial tool in helping leaders and their organizations successfully act on their ethical ambitions. If you aspire to lead ethically and with high purpose, first turn inwards. Take the time to have an honest conversation with yourself to help figure out what matters to you, and where your ethics lie. Next, align your senior team. Third, be prepared to be derailed. Unfortunately, at some point, pressure to meet shareholder expectations will derail your aspiration to lead with a higher purpose and values. And finally, don’t wait for the whistle to blow.

U.S. employers had to help address the deficiencies in the U.S. health care system that emerged during the pandemic. Instead of retreating after the pandemic subsides, they should go on the offensive and play a more active role in shaping a better health care system. This article lays out the priorities in which they should invest.

Everyone faces stress at work, but some people are able to handle the onslaught of long hours, high pressure, and work crises in a way that wards off burnout. You can get better at handling stress by making several mental shifts:

The inflated ego that comes with success – the bigger salary, the nicer office, the easy laughs – often makes us feel as if we’ve found the eternal answer to being a leader. But the reality is, we haven’t. An inflated ego makes us susceptible to manipulation; it narrows our field of vision; and it corrupts our behavior, often causing us to act against our values. Breaking free of an overly-protective or inflated ego and avoiding the leadership bubble is an important and challenging job that requires selflessness, reflection, and courage.

To become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, many companies have turned to unconscious bias (UB) training. By raising awareness of the mental shortcuts that lead to snap judgments—often based on race and gender—about people’s talents or character, it strives to make hiring and promotion fairer and improve interactions with customers and among colleagues. But most UB training is ineffective, research shows. The problem is, increasing awareness is not enough—and can even backfire—because sending the message that bias is involuntary and widespread may make it seem unavoidable.

UB training that gets results, in contrast, teaches attendees to manage their biases, practice new behaviors, and track their progress. It gives them information that contradicts stereotypes and allows them to connect with colleagues whose experiences are different from theirs. And it’s not a onetime session; it entails a longer journey and structural organizational changes.

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While LinkedIn shows promise for early career professionals to, few are using it well — especially when it comes to outreach because approaching people you’ve never met might feel intimidating. If you’ve been reaching out to people on LinkedIn and not hearing back, there are strategies you can use to increase your chances. Whether you’re seeking advice on a career path or job change, you want someone to review your resume, or you’re approaching a potential mentor, how you frame your message to show intent is what makes all the difference.

We generally assume that working too much is bad for our health. But what exactly is unhealthy about this is unclear. Is it working long hours that increases our risk of developing health issues? Or is it something else, like Michael’s compulsive work mentality, that is harmful for health? A study unravels the difference between behavior (working long hours) and mentality (a compulsion to work, or what we call workaholism). A survey and health screening of 763 employees found that work hours was not related to health issues, while workaholism was. Whether or not they worked long hours, people who obsessed over work reported more health complaints and had increased risk for metabolic syndrome; they also reported a higher need for recovery, more sleep problems, more cynicism, more emotional exhaustion, and more depressive feelings than employees who merely worked long hours but did not have workaholic tendencies. Unlike people who merely work long hours, workaholics...

If you want to be your best and perform at a high level, fear of people’s opinions may be holding you back.

Our fear of other people’s opinions, or FOPO, has become an irrational and unproductive obsession in the modern world, and its negative effects reach far beyond performance. If you start paying less and less attention to what makes you you—your talents, beliefs, and values—and start conforming to what others may or may not think, you’ll harm your potential.

If you really want to conquer FOPO, you’ll need to cultivate more self-awareness. Most of us go through life with a general sense of who we are, and, in a lot of circumstances, that’s enough. We get by. But if you want to be your best while being less fearful of people’s opinions, you need to develop a stronger and deeper sense of who you are.

You can start by developing a personal philosophy—a word or phrase that expresses your basic beliefs and...

More and more companies are relying on pricing algorithms to maximize profits. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables real-time price adjustments based on supply and demand, competitors’ activities, delivery schedules, and so forth. But constant price shifts have a downside: They may trigger unfavorable perceptions of a firm’s offerings and its brand.

It’s vital, therefore, to understand and manage the signals being sent by the algorithms. The authors offer real-world examples of companies that have succeeded in this endeavor and others that have not. And they recommend four steps to avoid harm: Determine an appropriate use case for algorithmic pricing and explain its benefits to customers; designate an owner to supervise and be accountable for the system; set and monitor guardrails, both to protect against wild surges and to learn how price changes affect all aspects of the organization; and override the algorithms when...

The next time you are filling a leadership role, ask yourself three questions. First, does the candidate have the skills to be a high-performing contributor or the skills to be an effective leader? The performance level of individual contributors is measured largely through their ability, likability, and drive. Leadership, by contrast, demands a broader range of character traits, including high levels of integrity. Second, can you really trust this candidate’s individual performance measures? The number one indicator of performance in most companies is a single subjective rating by a direct manager. This makes measures of performance vulnerable to bias. Finally, are you looking forward or backward? The secret to selecting great leaders is to predict the future, not to reward the past. That’s why you should promote high-potential people, not just top performers.

Emotional ambivalence is the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions about something. It’s what we think of as being “torn.” As organizations develop ways of working that better consider the collective needs of our society, it’s critical for leaders to adapt and evolve expectations, structures, and reward systems in ways that support employees’ increasingly complex emotional lives. Drawing on the collective insights from their previous and ongoing research, the authors offer six critical leadership lessons for building cultures and structures that encourage emotional ambivalence and harnessing its benefits as we establish a “new normal” in the second half of 2021.

Millions of American women left the workforce during the pandemic, mostly to provide care for families when schools and other support systems closed. As the economy rebounds, companies will need to lure this talent back—and return-to-work programs provide a vehicle for doing so. These programs—aimed at mid-career professionals who’ve taken time off from employment—have been around for 20 years, and the author has been writing about (and consulting with companies on) them for nearly that long. In this article she gives an overview of the evolution of these programs, describes the various types, and suggests best practices to make them most effective.

There’s no question that working with a diverse group can be more challenging than contributing to a more homogenous one. There are more opportunities for misunderstanding and conflict, especially in times when personal, professional, and societal tensions are running high. However, these hurdles are easily overcome with intentional leadership and teamwork. Start by establishing team norms that set the stage for psychological safety before stressful events occur. Work to find deeper connections through which you share and learn. Talk through challenges rather than ignoring them. And, finally, work to spread the culture through your organization.

There have been surprisingly few studies that set out to quantify what makes for a successful corporate transformation. Using a meta-analysis that crunched data on financial performance as well as corporate reputation, the authors examined 128 global companies that had undergone transformation between 2016 and 2020 and found that: 1) Transformation is even harder than expected (only 22% of companies in their sample were successful), and 2) Successful companies shared a common focus on initiatives that prioritized employees, including DE&I programs and support for women managers’ careers, in addition to competitive pay and access to health care.

Companies around the world are experimenting with a four-day workweek, and participants are reporting feeling less burned out, more productive, and happier. Early in his career, author Joe Sanok was able to negotiate a four-day workweek himself. In this article, he suggests some tips around how you can do the same:

The opened 2021 with a cover story headlined “Why Retailers Everywhere Should Look to China.” It’s not hard to see why. China is both a large and a fast-growing retail market—worth about $5 trillion in 2020—and highly digitized. And the pandemic has made digital every retailer’s strategic priority. The authors draw from their research on Chinese retailers to explain five lessons that Western companies can learn from China as they develop their own digital market offerings:

The strategic impulse to identify a higher-purpose mission that galvanizes the organization—is a common thread among the Transformation 20, a new study by Innosight of the world’s most transformative companies. The T-20 study identified the global companies that have achieved the highest-impact business transformations over the past decade as measured by new growth, respositioning the core business, and financial performance. Each of these companies developed new-growth businesses outside its traditional core which have become a significant share of the overall business. However, it’s the decision to infuse a higher purpose into the culture, one that guides strategic decisions and gives clarity to everyday tasks, that has propelled these companies to success.

The last major global shock—the 2008 recession—led to what economists call a “jobless recovery” as companies found they could get by with fewer employees. But post-pandemic, the author writes, managers should focus on changing employees’ roles instead. He has five key pieces of advice: Enable employees to meaningfully connect with customers in the moments that count; help them make more such connections by shifting the boundaries of their work; find ways to allow customers to lend a hand; ensure that employees can see the impact of their work on the lives of their customers; and invest some of the new value created in increased compensation and improved scheduling—which will in turn create more value.