One of the many business myths I have been fighting for two decades is that results from (often unscientific) personality tests are valid for someone’s entire career. On average, personality changes about 25% over one’s lifetime. New evidence shows environmental factors can speed up those changes. An international team of researchers analyzed data on 7,109 …
Tag: psychology
Drop the Carrot and Stick: The Science of Motivation
In 1999, before I danced away the millennium on New Year’s Eve to Prince while ignoring fears about the Y2K Bug, a major study began changing the way researchers viewed worker motivation. Lead author Edward Deci was the first to propose in 1971 that workers might have internal motivations that had nothing to do with …
Social Power: Root Cause of Injustice on the Streets and in the Office
Although I already planned on linking my earlier posts on social power to bias in the workplace, events in the streets reinforce the need. I believe the belated global discussion around racism overlooks an underlying factor that must be addressed if we are ever going to gain the moral, social, and financial benefits of truly …
Social Power Affects Leaders, Suggesting Compassion
During dinner a while back with an excellent leader in a large company (when eating out was still allowed), I gave him a challenge. We were talking about social power’s unconscious impacts on people. Before stepping away to release some whiskey, I asked him to think about the common behaviors of bad managers he’d had. …
Mind the Elephant: How Automatic Judgements Impact Org Change
When you and I hear something we don’t want to believe, here’s what happens in our brains, according to my thesis research on persuasion[1]: The emotional centers of our brain are triggered, and we get an unpleasant physical response such as tightness in the chest. Our brain starts searching for reasons to dismiss the offending …