- Microsoft studied the impact of remote work on collaboration among its information workers: “The shift to remote work caused the formal business groups and informal communities within Microsoft to become less interconnected and more siloed. Furthermore, firm-wide remote work caused separate groups to become more intraconnected by adding more connections within themselves. The shift to remote work also caused the organizational structure to become less dynamic.” How does that compare with your own experience? Hit Return and let me know.
- Companies are more likely to promote top salespeople to sales management. And as we discuss in my leadership development programs, what makes you good at the former is not necessarily makes you effective at the later. A research paper.
- “Organizing data is a hard problem, but organizing people is an even harder one. And until we solve it, I don’t think we will live in the harmonious data world that we all desire.” Bryan Offutt offers some principles.
- Your ability and effectiveness in hiring well as a manager. Hunter Walk thinks you should up your game. He offers practical tips.
- A team’s collective intelligence can transcend the individual intelligence of its members. Naturally, it requires interaction. Collectively intelligent groups are those in which the least socially sensitive group member has a rather high score on social sensitivity. In other words, one insensitive member can ruin it all. A research paper.
People who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “what is the secret of success” when they should be asking, “what prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. — Karl Weick
- Speaking of social sensitivity, Subbu Allamaraju argues that we should “dispel the perception that you can’t be nice if you want to be effective. Being nice is essential to being effective.”
- “Many groups begin meetings with a “check-in,” a round of brief comments by each member on a range of topics, such as how they’re feeling, a recent experience, or what they hope to accomplish. Checking in can serve a number of useful purposes.” And Ed Batista thinks that it’s not only about the speaker.
- High turnover, the shift to hybrid work, and continued uncertainty about the future mean that your workforce might be feeling unmoored. Liz Fosslien thinks it’s time to re-onboard everyone.
- It’s in the news and Ted Gioia is not impressed: “Meta is for Losers. Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company on a new idea—but this is a wager he will almost certainly regret.”
- Also in the news is the death of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who is best known for the concept of flow. He also wrote a book called Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and he made a list of “paradoxical traits” of creative people.
