Personality Type in the Workplace Blog

Maybe you have to inform your star performer that she won’t be getting a well-deserved raise. Or perhaps you have to tell your team that projects are cancelled and people are being laid off. How do break news like that? What do you say?

One thing is for sure: you cannot not communicate. Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away and leaving things to the rumor mill won’t win respect for your leadership skills. Here’s how to make a bad news experience more positive, both for you and for the employees you’re addressing.

Like him or tolerate him, your boss plays a big part in your life. He is single-handedly responsible for your day-to-day happiness at work, and he could also influence your job opportunities throughout the rest of your career. Obviously, there’s a far greater chance that your boss will open rather than close doors for you if you make the effort to get along.

That’s harder to practice than it is to preach.

There is an increasing body of evidence showing that diversity matters, especially when it comes from the top. Leadership teams of varying gender, ethnic and racial makeup perform better financially, experience less employee turnover, and have better customer orientation than their less diverse counterparts. They are also better at recruiting top talent, which leads to a cycle of increasing returns.

Collaboration is no longer a nice-to-have, it's an organizational structure that defines our work environments. Whether we're talking about cross-functional teams, silos breaking down, virtual meeting rooms, huddles, stand-ups, or the myriad technologies that boost teamwork, collaboration has never been more essential to operations. The team - not the individual - is the secret to business success. 

There are two types of employees: those who thrive in a team environment, and those who would rather work alone. Though these two groups can work together cohesively when they need to, they typically accomplish much more when allowed to do things their own way.

To improve future performance, teams must learn from their mistakes. Despite being an irrefutable truth, few teams do this well. This is not due to a lack of willingness on their part - most organizations devote countless hours to after-action reviews, project postmortems and similar analysis to help the team reflect on what it did wrong and avoid similar mistakes in the future. More often than not, these actions fail to drive any real change in future outcomes.

One of the most challenging work transitions comes when you face the prospect of leading a new team for the first time. Getting people to work together is not easy, and many team leaders rush over the basics in order to start achieving goals. But the first weeks and months are critical for starting a team off on the right foot. What actions should you take to set the team up for success? How will you get the team working well together, manage conflict, and create an environment where everyone feels safe, valued and motivated to contribute?

There's something rotten in the state of recruiting. When a candidate looks at a job ad, they would be forgiven for thinking that all employers are looking for people with a specific list of skills  - 10 years' experience within an S&P 500 company/advanced understanding of technology platforms/specific industry certifications/proven track record of managing large teams.

What is the secret of productive teams? For the longest time, Google believed that the best teams consisted of the smartest people who got on with each other. But an observation of 180 of its internal teams provided a surprising result: the "who" didn't actually matter. There was nothing showing that a mix of skills, backgrounds or specific personality types made any difference.