Culture
It’s a New Era for Mental Health at Work (via HBR)
- Culture change — top-down and bottom-up; invest in line-level leaders to help them help others; it can’t just be HR
- Sustainable ways of working — emphasize flexibility; promoting autonomy, establishing boundaries, and creating norms around communications, responsiveness, and urgency
- Deeper connections — go further than “how are you;” empathy and authenticity are key
How Business Leaders Can Reduce Polarization (via HBR)
- Get your own house in order (don’t be a hypocrite)
- Know how your organization feels about the issue
- Be consistent
- Create common ground
- Foster healthy engagement
- Engage the hidden majority (exhausted with politics)
- Communicate a clear purpose
- Ensure respectful interactions
- Develop like-minded coalitions
- Invest in new solutions
- Promote fact-based discourse
- Catalyze inclusive communities
- Build international bridges
Interviewing
8 Tips for Conducting an Excellent Remote Interview (via HBR)
- Focus on emotional intelligence
- Lean in to the intimacy of the screen
- Get real about the challenges of the pandemic
- Notice reactions to distractions
- Banish back-to-backs
- Broaden your pool (and add some outliers to the mix)
- Set your candidates up for success
- Don’t forget that you’re interviewing, too
Leadership
Good Leaders Know You Can’t Fight Reality (via HBR)
- Accept results. “Leaders can hem and haw, rant and rave, but until they can properly accept what has happened, they aren’t likely to move forward or lead anyone else forward.”
- Accept circumstances. “…the importance of giving up control of what you never had control over to begin with, and making room for your emotional reaction without acting on every thought or negative feeling.”
- Accepting your failings and those of others. “When a leader can accept their own failings, they are freed up to pursue growth and explore new ways of leading to improve their effectiveness. We must also accept others as they are, and make choices based on the real person, not who we wish they’d become.”
Organizational Design
The Skill of Org Design (via Software Lead Weekly)
Although it’s on the long side, this is a fantastic article about organization design and where people have made it work and where it’s failed. The four skills he outlines: (1) You have to be good with people; (2) you have to think in systems; (3) you have to understand modes of control (economic incentives, obligations, and culture), and (4) you have to be able to implement changes and get them to stick.
Process
Does Your Team Really Need Another Digital Tool? (via HBR)
- Think of your ecosystem as a single product (or app), rather than a phone full of different apps.
- Use A/B testing to see if the tool is a good fit.
- Consider building for average tech literacy.
Technology
The Future Is Faster Than You Think (via Emily Moses)
One of our company’s board members suggested this to my supervisor (who also read it). The link above is to an 18-page summary I wrote, so check it out if you want more details. Overall the book left me tentatively optimistic. The technology is there. The need is there. The momentum for improvement is there. We just need to act in our collective self interest instead of our personal, short-sighted interest. The game’s not over yet, and it’s also ours to lose (and most signs point to that the majority of us will lose). I hope I’m wrong.