1: There are often tense moments at the beginning of a Crucial Conversation.

The stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions can get intense.

“Others are scanning your every facial tic or leg crossing for evidence of your intentions,”  Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, and their co-authors write in their classic book  Crucial Conversations

“Do you mean them harm? Are you out to get them?” they are … continue reading

1: Consider this.

Has there ever been a time when you received really tough feedback from someone, and you didn’t become defensive?

“Instead, you absorbed the feedback. You reflected on it. You allowed it to influence you,”  Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, and their co-authors write in their classic book  Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High.

What was it about that situation that helped you … continue reading

1: Why do some teams succeed and others fail?

The People Analytics team at Google had spent two years attempting to answer this question.

The initiative was code-named “Project Aristotle.”  The team gathered survey data, conducted hundreds of interviews, analyzed a mountain of data and statistics, ran regression models, and built software programs.

There were no clear patterns or trends on what makes teams perform at the highest … continue reading

1: What makes a great team great?

Is it simply a matter of intelligence? Do teams with the smartest people perform the best?

Is “group intelligence nothing more than the intelligence of the individuals making up the team?” Charles Duhigg asks in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

Actually, no.

In 2008, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT recruited 699 people and divided them into 152 … continue reading

1: Back in 1991, Amy Edmondson, a first-year Harvard PhD student, began visiting two Boston hospital wards.

She was studying organizational behavior and was “on the prowl for a dissertation topic,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

Her idea was that good teamwork would reduce medical mistakes. That “the units with the strongest sense of teamwork,” Charles notes, “would have the … continue reading

1: Google’s People Analytics group wanted to understand how to build the perfect team.

Google has consistently been ranked by Fortune magazine as one of America’s top workplaces.

This result was no accident. “Even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

The People Analytics … continue reading

1: When Diane Button was new to end-of-life care, so many questions flooded her mind.

“I wondered if I would ever get to a place where I would feel comfortable stepping into the home of a dying person with ease and grace,” she writes in her wonderful book What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living.

Fortunately, she had a mentor. “Hospice chaplain Clarence Liu was was … continue reading

1: Psychologist John Gottman can predict who will eventually get divorced a stunning 94 percent of the time.

In a pioneering 1992 study, John and his team interviewed fifty-two married couples.

They asked each couple “a variety of questions about how they met, why they decided to get married, and what changes their relationships had been through and observed them as they took part in a fifteen-minute discussion about a … continue reading

This week and next we are exploring Sahil Bloom’s concept of “Social Wealth” as outlined in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

Today we turn to a list of “Social Wealth Hacks I Wish I Knew at Twenty-Two” which Sahil put together with Arthur C. Brooks, social scientist, Harvard Business School professor, and number one New York Times bestselling … continue reading

1: What we feel impacts what we see.  And hear.

“People who are scared take in a scene differently,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

“Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech,” David notes.  “Anxiety narrows … continue reading