Science of People

You arrive at work. Everything’s quiet...too quiet. You notice your colleagues hunched at their desks, furiously typing away, terrified looks in their eyes. You wonder what’s going on. And then you see it. Down the hallway. Oh no, oh no. There it is....

Your boss is in a bad mood.

Have you experienced this situation? When we walk into work and there’s office tension, it’s hard not to notice it and worse, be affected by it. If the boss is in a bad mood, you know it’s going to be a long day.

The Atlantic

Several years ago, Gallup asked people in 142 countries to respond to a series of statements designed to measure employee engagement—involving matters like their job satisfaction, whether they felt their work was important, and whether they had opportunities in the workplace to learn and grow.

What the polling firm found was that engagement is the exception, not the rule: Worldwide, 13 percent of employees were engaged at work, while 63 percent were not engaged and 24 percent were "actively disengaged," meaning they were unhappy and unproductive. Engagement rates were highest in the United States and Canada, and lowest in East Asia.

Chief Executive

For a company to prosper, it must be willing to continually evolve. The more a company embraces change, the better its chances of success. Most business leaders understand this, but when the time comes for real change to be made, many fail to consider the effects of these adjustments on the company as a whole.

Harvard Business Review

There are many ways to split people into two groups. Young and old. Rich and poor. Us and them. The 98% who can do arithmetic and the 3% who cannot. Those who split people into two groups and those who don’t. Then there’s the people who make good competitive-strategy decisions, and those who don’t.

Chief Learning Officer

Organizations worldwide have to develop their leaders with less time and money, and it’s not easy. Worse, most leadership development programs turn out to be ineffective and expensive. These programs provide little focus on the social, interpersonal and strategic aspects of leadership, and what’s learned is often difficult to apply. But there’s an alternative. Action learning with a trained coach is a cost-effective approach that enables leaders to develop capabilities while working to solve urgent organizational or social problems.