Researcher and author Marcus Buckingham says we’ve overly complicated what it means to lead. Leading people means checking in with an employee every week for 52 weeks out of the year. Asking about their successes and failures–big and small. Asking what they loved last week and what they hated. And then what they are focused on this week and how you can help. “Short-term past, short-term future. Because love lives in the detail,” he says. If you think to yourself, “Well, I’d love t...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0311C Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Stu...| Harvard Business Review
When leaders have misconceptions of what empathy entails, they don’t know how to practice it—or they practice it badly. Many don’t bother to intentionally lead with empathy at all, and the stakes are high for those who don’t: low morale, poor retention, and burnout among employees, and failure to connect, inability to gather information, or being perceived as inaccessible for leaders. Empathy is a requisite to mobilize, connect with, and engage others. To better lead with this non-neg...| Harvard Business Review
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and col...| Harvard Business Review
Executing complex initiatives like acquisitions or an IT overhaul requires a breadth of knowledge that can be provided only by teams that are large, diverse, virtual, and composed of highly educated specialists. The irony is, those same characteristics have an alarming tendency to decrease collaboration on a team. What’s a company to do? Gratton, a London Business School professor, and Erickson, president of the Concours Institute, studied 55 large teams and identified those with strong col...| Harvard Business Review
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 al...| Harvard Business Review
