CAREER

Culture decks are a company’s constitution A culture deck is a foundational document, the constitution of a company. They can be the result of a bottom-up input process, like in the case of Zappos’ Culture Book which compiles employees’ testimonials. (To avoid confusion of terms: A culture deck is basically the […]

“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.” — Mickey Mantle The most important role of a leader is to face reality. Understanding what lies ahead is critical to making the right decisions. Accepting reality requires to remain open to new information — especially the one that challenges what we know for sure. Avoidance doesn’t make issues go away — sugarcoating the truth only makes them worse. Surprisingly, denying reality is the main reason CEOs get fired. A team can only solve the problems they talk about. Denial Is dangerous “The health of an organization is measured by the lag time between when you feel it and discuss it.” — Joseph Grenny Freud referred to denial as “the state of knowing but not knowing.” I see this all the time when coaching teams — people know what’s wrong at their organization but they act as if they didn’t. Fear and lack of support have turned everyone silent — rather than speaking up; they operate in denial. Defense mechanisms help us survive losses or dramatic news. We deny something terrible happened because we can’t accept it to be true. If data is showing […]

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe You know that stare? Well, you actually only realize it in hindsight. When you find yourself gazing out the window, or at the small corner of the wall, or up at the ceiling. You’re so fixated on that one space, as if it were reeling you in, looking to talk to you or maybe even advise you. Once your consciousness comes back, you realize that you were lost in a moment. An imaginative glimmer in time. Something has preoccupied you. Perhaps good, perhaps bad. But it’s preventing you from action. Whatever past idea, struggle, thought, inspiration, missed chance, fear, anxiety or stress that has you captured, know that you may have to modify your process. In order to modify your process, you must begin with changing your habit. As the saying goes, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Take writing, for example. Every writer knows what writer’s block is all about. We feel completely stuck, unable to even commit the action to hitting the […]

Women are not raised to be brave. We are taught to play it safe, avoid risk and failure, and strive for perfection. From childhood, we’re told to be good little girls, to behave like a lady, to defer to the boys, to secure approval by pleasing the grownups, and to not be bossy, outspoken, pushy, self-aggrandizing, or disruptive. Men are taught to take risk after risk, play hard, and if they fail, to dust themselves off and plunge ahead. Behaviors such as fighting, yelling, shoving, interrupting, or competing fiercely are permitted and even approved of. This kind of gender stereotyping is nowhere more pervasive than in the business world. Professional achievement and all the traits associated with it get placed in the male column. If a man focuses on his career and taking a calculated approach to amassing power, he is living up to society’s stereotypical expectations of men. If a woman behaves in the exact same manner, she has violated stereotypical expectations of women. This bias is at the core of why women are held back by men and why women hold themselves back. It is a massive understatement to say that women and men are not having the […]

Isn’t it funny how work relationships are sometimes compared to a marriage, like “married to work” or he’s my “work husband”? Sort’ve makes sense, though: you spend a lot of time with your coworkers, and engage in emotional activities like celebrating big wins and debating the best approach to a problem. (We like to call this “sparring.”) It turns out, marriage advice applies to a lot of workplace relationships. Two smart authors with backgrounds in anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, found that appreciation is a key part of healthy relationships in the household and the office. In their book, “5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace,” Dr. Paul White and Dr. Gary Chapman share five “languages” to show appreciation in the workplace: quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and a modified version of physical touch. Showing appreciation for your employees yields high dividends. Employees who feel appreciated are more productive, more engaged, and less likely to leave the company. Unfortunately, leaders, particularly in tech, are not known for their high emotional intelligence (EQ). There’s the myth of the lone genius, the “brilliant-but-unbearable” founder, and the assumption that technical skills trump people skills. But it’s just that: a myth. […]

There are habits you can develop that impact nearly every aspect of your personal and professional success. Running is a great example, because people who run regularly see powerful benefits, like having more energy, thinking more clearly and getting sick less often. I am a runner and a huge proponent of running, but I realize that for many people, regular running will never become part of their lives. It’s a habit that requires a lot of effort, sweat and sometimes even pain. Fortunately there is another habit that impacts nearly every aspect of your success, as well. This habit requires about as much effort as remembering to look both ways before you cross the road and definitely doesn’t require sweating. In fact, it doesn’t even require you to add anything to your schedule. It’s the habit of being mindful. Mindfulness is often described as sitting still, breathing deeply and paying attention to your breath. Although that certainly can be a mindfulness practice, being mindful is simpler and can offer a wider array of benefits. Being mindful is a shift from “being our thinking”—being that blabbering voice in our heads—to being aware of our thinking. This subtle inner shift allows us […]

“You’ll believe a man can fly.” So proclaimed billboards and posters across the nation in 1978, in anticipation of the December release of Richard Donner’s Superman — The Movie. It wasn’t an idle promise. Although the Man of Steel had been depicted in numerous TV shows and cartoons over the years, Donner’s film vowed something special: It would convince us that what we were seeing was actually happening. And the visual effects did, indeed, prove to be remarkable: Aided by a clever front projection technique developed by inventor Zoran Perisic, as well as star Christopher Reeve’s ability to move the way an actual airplane might, Superman set new standards for what could be accomplished onscreen. It was all building, of course, on the earth-shaking work done by George Lucas’s Star Wars just the year before. Special effects had always been around, to be sure; anyone who’d seen a Georges Méliès film from the 1890s knew that they were as old as cinema itself. But together, the space adventure of 1977 and the superhero fantasy of 1978, with an assist perhaps from a certain monster shark movie of 1975, helped establish the supremacy of a new, emerging genre: the visual effects […]