What am I supposed to do with all this money? That’s not a lottery winner asking. It’s what University of British Columbia psychology professor Elizabeth Dunn asked herself when she scored her first job. She scanned the research that revealed money often fails to buy happiness, yet she wondered if there was a way to spend money that could increase happiness. She teamed up with fellow psychology Ph.D. and HBS professor Michael Norton to look into it.
Read MoreThe (mis)pursuit of happiness
When Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos became head of a residential college for first-year students, she was shocked by the level of stress, depression, loneliness, and anxiety the students were experiencing. That, and her own self-described “below average” happiness level inspired her to create a course packed with evidence from the happiness research landscape that debunks what we’ve been conditioned to believe will give us the good life, exposes the faulty wiring in our brains that conspires to lead us astray, reveals what does make us happy, and teaches habits we can form to get there.
Read MoreTalk gooder
Classes begin at Harvard Business School this week, and a course that’s sure to fill up fast this year is Associate Professor Alison Wood Brooks’ new offering How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. It’s based on gobs of data revealing the importance of how we talk — not the proper use of language or presentation skills — how we converse each other in our daily lives. Students will learn conversation skills based on research insights through lots of practice, feedback, reflection, and wisdom from occasional guest “practitioners” such as matchmakers and comedians.
Read MoreHow do you know?
“I just knew.” It’s that feeling you instantly got when you met “the one” or clicked with a friend. Or when you instinctively knew that dog or cat that stood out from the rest of the litter was the one coming home with you, or that house or town you stepped into and just felt at home in. We’ve all experienced this kind of knowing.
Read MoreHello in there, hello
Long before the hammer of social distancing shattered our ways of connecting, causing us to quickly pivot to figure out ways to be together, and worry about the emotional effects of isolation, sirens were sounding about loneliness as a global public health problem. Former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic in 2017.
Read MoreAll meetinged out*
Too many meetings — meetings without a purpose, redundant meetings, or meetings called instead of a simple email or quick conversation. Even when they’re necessary, too many people are there, many show up late and tap away on computers or are glued to phone screens, loud voices dominate, discussions go long and veer off-topic, and mind-numbing PowerPoint decks zap energy. Nothing useful gets done. And bad meetings can take up even more time at the “meeting after the meeting,” where people let off steam with each other about how bad the meeting was. I often hear “I have to come in early, stay late, or work the weekends to get my work done because I’m in meetings all day.”
Read MoreCulture lessons from Chase Memorial Nursing Home
Culture woes. They’re a constant: my team isn’t gelling. We’re missing deadlines. Mistakes keep repeating. We’re siloed. We show up late to meetings even though we committed to being on time. Or, even at home: chores we agreed to go ignored, or some sort of disrespect has crept in.
How do we create the culture we’re aiming for?
Read MoreSleep is the new black
Sleep is the new black and some of us are just waking up to it. (I couldn’t help myself.) After a client told me I had to read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, and Bill Gates gave it the nod in his GatesNotes last month, it moved to the top of my bedtime reading stack.
Read MoreHabit forming
As the new year approached last month, my inbox was filled with books, articles, TED talks, and podcasts aimed at weeding out bad habits and growing good ones. We are what we do, and we do countless, repetitive things daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly — consciously and unconsciously. These habits get us on the road (or not) to our intentions, so giving them an annual tune-up keeps us in good working order. A couple of resources that have been on my radar for awhile are worth sharing.
Read MoreCan you hear me now?
As they do every December, both Oxford Languages (Oxford English Dictionary) and Merriam-Webster announced their word of the year for 2019…
I knew what my word of the year for 2019 was going to be in January. It was my word of the year in 2018. It’s an odds-on favorite for 2020. It’s pervasive in our work, our lives, relationships, our current events. Or, should I say its absence is pervasive.
Read MoreA sense of style
Often dismissed as nothing more than a dinner party game, sometimes misused to label, pigeonhole, or stereotype people, and occasionally the backdrop for Dilbertian team-building moments, personality typing is both widely used and controversial. I’ve found personality assessments to be an anchor tool in the emotional intelligence toolbox.
Read MoreDoctor’s orders
I was causing a ruckus with a controversial proposal in a leadership team meeting a few years ago. Tensions were high. Faces were red. Veins were bulging. It was beginning to break into a full-on yelI. I caught the general counsel’s eyes — he’d been staying out of it — and said, dryly, “This is going well, don’t you think?” After an awkward pause, everyone laughed. I’m not going to tell you the rest of the meeting went my way. I will say it helped turn down the heat measurably.
Read MoreBack to Built to Last
WeWork’s IPO debacle and CEO ouster, Juul’s comeuppance, and many other recent fallen giants and C-suite changes spurred David Gelles’ acerbic piece in the NYT. He reminds us, among other things, that the now commonplace “utopian mission statements” from “Christ-like” founders that temporarily intoxicate the market eventually come down to the numbers when investors sober up.
Gelle’s fun-poking at these companies’ “yoga babble” made me want to revisit the seminal research that discovered the critical role of vision, mission, and values in organizations that stand the test of time.
Read MoreComposureself
It can be just a little nudge, almost imperceptible. Or it can be a full-on heart pound that makes you wonder if you’re gonna need a trip to the emergency room. You’ve been triggered. Maybe it’s a snarky comment in a meeting, a critique from your partner about how you might’ve scrambled those eggs better, the tipping point of a crushing workload, or your manager just found a mistake in your analysis. If it’s a little thing, it might distract you from what you’re doing for a bit. If it’s a big thing, it can bring an out-sized sometimes regrettable reaction, or cause you to shut down. And it doesn’t feel so good.
Read MoreDabbler Obsessive Hacker Master
When Mastery: Taking it Home by George Leonard hit the pages of Esquire’s May 1,1987 “Ultimate Fitness” feature, along with John Poppy’s The Keys to Mastery, it went the viral equivalent of its time — lots of letters to the editor, requests for copies and reprints, and CEOs disseminating it widely within their organizations. “A navy carrier pilot . . . wrote that he had been having trouble landing the F-14 Tomcat on an aircraft carrier . . . ‘Insights from Mr. Leonard’s outline of the master’s journey gave me the extra 10 percent of mental discipline that I needed to make the trek down this portion of my path a relatively easy one.’”
Read MoreHow am I doing?
“I don’t really know how I’m doing” is a familiar refrain. Even when an organization has a 360-feedback process and regular performance check-ins, people are still not sure how they’re doing or why they may not be progressing as quickly as they’d like. As a bookend to this, managers struggle with how to put words to the feedback they’re trying to give. They want it to be clear and actionable, yet they find their conversations often don’t deliver.
Read MoreWhat really matters, part two
We’re drowning in this stuff. Ten steps to this, four ways to that. I like that Gallup has for decades teamed up with other organizations, economists, psychologists, and scientists, to understand the elements of a life well-lived — how we experience our lives and the things that are important to us — and they’ve kept it data-based and fad-free. While global well-being research informs broader societal decisions for employees, communities, and countries, it’s helpful for us to be reminded of what really matters, as we often operate on autopilot in our busy and distracted lives.
Read MoreWhat really matters, part one
Culture is the “it” of our current work moment. And for good reason, as Peter Drucker coined, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The way things get done in an organization — the systems, behaviors, and practices — guided by a set of values, define its culture. (And sometimes the values that are actually lived are not the ones on the website.) How we work together drives our personal engagement and performance, which in turn determines how well the organization does.
Read MoreWhere have I been?
It has happened several times in the last few months — young leaders I’ve encountered calling out Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People as inspiring, guiding, and causing them to change how they are navigating the world. The book even served as the basis for one company’s core values. Of course I’d known about it for decades, though I’d not read it — it seemed dated and sales-y — a sort of “to seem rather than to be” thing.
Read MoreOnce upon a time… in your mind
The only thing we know for sure about the stories we tell is that they’re not true. Not completely, anyway. Our make-believe can range from getting the details surrounding an emotional event wrong to being unshakably sure of the stories we tell about ourselves that are often turn out to be mind-made.
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