Does an organization benefit when its employees are highly connected to workers in other firms and industries? Or does the benefit simply flow to the employees themselves, as they perhaps are building better future job prospects through these connections. Shelley Li, Frank Nagle, and Aner Zhou set out to examine this question. They built an enormous dataset comprised of approximately 9 million employees with 2 billion individual employee relationships at more than 7,000 publicly held companies in the United States. The scholars discovered that companies whose workforces are more connected te ..read more

I'm looking forward to hearing David Brooks speak at my daughter's graduation from Vanderbilt University next month.   Brooks, a writer for the New York Times, has written a new book titled, " How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.  I'm reading the book now, and it has some terrific insights on how we can connect, empathize, and communicate with others more effectively.  Brooks appeared recently on Matt Abraham's podcast from Stanford.  Brooks introduces a very interesting concept.  He describes the value of being a "loud l ..read more

Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and Alan Murray recently interviewed Otis Elevator CEO Judy Marks at Deloitte University. Marks offered some great insights to the assembled group of leaders from a variety of companies.  In the interview, Marks offered a great comment about the types of voices that a leader needs to hear now and again.  She specifically mentioned three voices: You need a group of very trusted people who are going to tell you truth because things get filtered and they really do. So you need to call one of them a loyal irritant as long as it doesn’t really bother them. You ..read more

Source: https://www.organimi.com/ The Wall Street Journal's Chip Cutter has written about the transformation underway at Bayer, led by its new CEO, Bill Anderson. The article is titled, "One CEO’s Radical Fix for Corporate Troubles: Purge the Bosses." The 160-year-old company has struggled mightily in recent years, particularly after a problematic acquisition of Monsanto. Anderson's transformation plan calls for the establishment of 5,000 to 6,000 self-directed teams, as well as the elimination of many middle management roles.  He has taken aim at the pile of rules and reg ..read more

Source: The MSLs' Liaison Newsletter Some individuals have a strong action orientation.  Others have what is described as a state orientation. What's the difference?  According to James Diefendorff and his colleagues,  "Individuals with a strong action orientation are able to devote their cognitive resources to the task at hand, thus enabling them to expediently move from a present goal state to some desired future goal state. These individuals flexibly allocate their attention for the purpose of task execution and goal attainment. Persons who are more action orien ..read more

Lila Maclellan has written an important story for Fortune titled "The recent debacles at Boeing and Meta highlight the dangers of shrugging off employee concerns."  Boeing, of course, has been saddled with product quality and safety troubles for several years, including two fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX, about which I wrote a case study.   Meta has had repeated instances of internet safety and privacy issues, for which senior leaders dismissed or downplayed employee concerns.   In this article, Maclellan cites Ann Skeet, senior director at the Markkula Center f ..read more

(Shutterstock.com/retrorocket) Does money serve as a more effective motivator for certain types of work, but not others? That is the fundamental question explored by scholars in a recent working paper. Pamela Osborn Popp, Ben Newell, Daniel Bartels, and Todd Gureckis have written a paper titled, "Can Cognitive Discovery Be Incentivized With Money?" They conducted six experiments. In the first five experiments, they asked research subjects to examine a set of items. The participants had to determine how the items might be categorized sensibly into groups and then assign them appropri ..read more

Why do we miss key opportunities at times in our careers?  Sometimes, it may have to do with the type of opportunity we encounter.  Suppose we have to decide whether to pursue a course of action which could have a positive outcome, but it has a very low probability of a successful result.  Harvard's Emily Prinsloo and her co-authors have published an interesting new paper exploring what they call "opportunity neglect."   Through a series of studies, they show that individuals  systematically fail to take advantage of low-probability opportunities, even when the ..read more

Source:  https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk Do we learn more from in-person collaborators than remote teammates?  That question has been top of mind for many people over the past few years.   Much of the dialogue about this question has not been evidence-based though.  It's been highly anecdotal.   Recently, however, I read about some fascinating research on the topic.  Frank van der Wouden and Hyejin Youn analyzed more than 17 million academic publications over decades to address the question of whether local collaboration generates more learn ..read more

Source: www.cleartouch.com Leaders love to talk about customer obsession.  They often highlight it as a value they cherish.  They encourage others to put the customer first.   Yet, all too often, they don't walk the talk.   Far too many organizations are quite insular in their thinking.  People focus an overwhelming amount of their time and attention on internal processes and procedures.   Executives become buried in staff meetings, and they become isolated from customers, markets, front-line employees, and external partners.    ..read more