Curious Minds at Work

How we think about toughness needs a reset. Too often, it’s been associated with brute forcing our way through things. Ignoring our feelings. Making an outward show of confidence and dominance. The problem is it just doesn't work. Performance coach and bestselling author, Steve Magness, offers another way. He’s done a deep dive on the latest research on toughness and performance. In his book, Do H...

You’re days into a work project, staring at a screen, feeling anxious about your tight deadline. Mid-afternoon your phone lights up with a call from a friend. You want to connect, but you feel like you don’t have a minute to spare. You let the call go into voicemail. On the surface, this decision may seem inconsequential. But what if you knew that a decision like this, centered on an opportunity f...

Digital exhaustion is real. We’re working across more apps than ever before, and since they’re always accessible, work-life boundaries have disappeared. Combine this with our personal tech, and we’ve got a recipe for burnout. Paul Leonardi is a Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After decades of business consulting, he’s had a front-row seat to emplo...

We spend a lot of our lives in groups. Whether it’s at work. With friends. Even with family. Yet we tend to focus on everyone as individuals. We rarely think about things from the group’s perspective. Colin Fisher is an expert in organizational behavior and an associate professor at University College London, and he wants to change that. His book, The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of...

What prevents some of us from acting on our creative ideas while others dive right in? That’s the question creativity researcher, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, set out to answer. It’s what she writes about in her book, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action. Zorana is a senior research scientist at Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Through her work, she’s...

Good things happen when people know they matter. Engagement and performance increase, which then motivates people to stay. In addition, they’re happier, which, makes work more enjoyable for everyone.   But creating this kind of workplace doesn’t happen by accident. It requires that leaders consistently apply a set of specific skills focused on these outcomes. That’s why I wanted to talk to Zach Me...

When’s the last time you ran an experiment? Not as a scientist. But as a person who wants to get unstuck or try something new. There are messages coming at us from all directions. A popular one encourages us to pursue big dreams often in service of a blanket version of success. For some, these messages are motivating. But for many others, they’re overwhelming. If, instead, we want to pursue our ow...

Something happens at work – good or bad – and it brings on strong emotions. Instead of taking a moment to calm down, we’ve got to quickly shift gears and head into another meeting. We know we’ve got to manage our feelings, but the question is, how do we do that? Ethan Kross is an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and writer who specializes in emotion regulation. He is a professor of psych...

A few years ago, we experienced a solar eclipse. Walking the streets of my neighborhood that day, looking through my solar eclipse glasses and sharing them with others, I felt a profound sense of awe. And I saw that awe, that wonder, reflected in the faces of the people around me. For one or two hours, we were part of something bigger than ourselves. And that experience took us out of ourselves. I...

If you think about it, your personality impacts how you approach your life. The choices you make, the risks you take, the relationships you have. Our personalities create a set of habits, automatic reactions that impact what we think, feel, and do. When we take on new roles, like becoming a manger or a parent, we may find that certain aspects of our personality no longer work for us. As a leader,...

In those moments when we want to disagree, why do we often stay silent? At those times when we want to opt out, why do we often just go along? A key reason is that it’s hard to defy. It’s hard to question the way something’s always been done. To challenge comments, behaviors, and systems. Yet it’s in those moments of defiance that we flex our values and craft an identity. That’s why I wanted to ta...

Making changes in our own lives is hard enough. It’s even more challenging when we need to lead our teams or organizations to do it. That’s why I invited Dan Heath back to the podcast. Dan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Made to Stick, Switch, and The Power of Moments. This time he’s here to talk about his latest book, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Dan shares powerful sto...

Most of us dislike networking. At its best, it’s exhausting. At its worst, it can feel inauthentic, even manipulative. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if, instead, we could focus on helping others in ways that, in the long run, benefit us, as well? Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s learned that when we...

At some point in every leader’s career, they’ll experience a moment of crisis. And in these moments of enormous pressure and uncertainty, a leader’s actions can mean the difference between an organization’s survival or its demise.   Dan Dworkis is an emergency room physician and professor of emergency medicine who’s built his career on moments like this. He not only understands how to approach the...

As you move up in leadership roles, you gain more power. Initially, you may take it in stride, thinking it’s something you earned and something you’d never let get in the way of being the manager you want to be. But as the pressure to perform grows, the gap in power between you and your team creates blind spots that can erode these relationships. Former Microsoft executive and Fortune 500 coach, S...

Managing up is crucial for your success. It’s about knowing your career goals and aligning them with your manager’s needs and priorities. Yet it’s a skill we’re rarely taught and one we rarely see done well.   For Melody Wilding, this gap in how to manage her career became clear when it caused her to lose her job. It’s what made her want to write her latest book, Managing Up: How to Get What You N...

On the surface, trust seems simple. You either trust someone or you don’t. That’s why I was so intrigued by Charles Feltman’s book, The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work. Charles is a leadership coach and trust expert. And where others view trust as binary, he sees it in four dimensions. He describes what each dimension looks like and explains how to assess the gap...

We’re all virtual communicators. Even if we don’t work remotely, we’re texting, using social media, and making phone calls. But the question is, are we good at it? Do we know the best practices that can set us apart? Andrew Brodsky can teach us. He’s a management professor and virtual communication expert. In this episode, we discuss his book, Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication....

Most advice on power is about why we need it or how we can get it. And it's typically focused on things outside us, like titles or promotions. While these external markers are important, they can leave us empty inside.  Advice that focuses solely on external power leaves out how to build and maintain the crucial internal power we need.  That’s why Chris Lipp decided to mine the research on persona...

Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist and the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He believes leaders are made, not born, and he’s spent decades proving it. In this interview, we talk about his findings and how they apply to today’s leaders. We also discuss his latest book, Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. In it, he shares three...

Conversations play a big role in our personal and professional lives. It’d be hard to build or maintain a relationship without them.   That’s why Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School Professor and conversation expert, has written the book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She’s found that if we improve our conversations, even a little, the results can be gam...

With few exceptions, we have digital footprints. And each time we scroll social media, run a Google search, or use a smartphone to navigate, we’re adding data to that footprint. While we gain a lot from our ability to do all these things, we also feed companies the data they need to target us. Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist and professor at Columbia Business School. Over the cours...

We go to the dentist, get our eyes checked, and get our cars inspected. These regularly scheduled health and safety audits let us know how we’re doing. But we rarely audit how we spend our time. Sure, most of us have a calendar. Yet few of us study how these calendar events impact our happiness. We rarely track the connection between what we spend our time doing and how well we’re flourishing. As...

If you’re a woman in the workplace, you know the deck is rarely stacked in your favor. For example, promotions are harder to come by. The gender wage gap is real. And power can feel elusive. Psychology professor and researcher, Alison Fragale, has studied the power problem for decades. What she’s figured out is that the solution lies with status. But, as she argues in her book, Likeable Badass: Ho...

There are many good reasons to look to others. For example, you might need expert advice or feedback to improve your performance. But there’s one reason not to, and, that is, to determine your self-worth. When you look to someone else to define you or tell you how to live your life, you lose a lot. And if you find it hard to believe you’d ever let someone else influence you in those ways, you’d be...