The Weekly Pulse is my content curation and my highlights from readings, books, podcasts, insights, and everything I discovered during the week.
So, let’s go with some discoveries from the week!
#1 – Change the Way You Persuade
#2 – The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why
#3 – How Resilience Works
#4 – It’s Okay to Be Good and Not Great
#5 – The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture
Change the Way You Persuade
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Gary A. Williams and Robert B. Miller
Summary: It’s happened to you before, right? You call a meeting to try to convince your boss and peers that your company needs to make an important move—for instance, funding a risky but promising venture. Your argument is impassioned, your logic unassailable, your data bulletproof. Two weeks later, though, you learn that your brilliant proposal has been tabled. What went wrong?
3 Highlights:
“… You need as much credibility as you can garner. If you haven’t established enough clout with a skeptic, you need to find a way to have it transferred to you prior to or during the meeting – for example, by gaining an endorsement from someone the skeptic trusts...“
“… Perhaps the most defining trait of skeptics is that they tend to have very strong personalities. They can be demanding, disruptive, disagreeable, rebellious, and even antisocial. They may have an aggressive, almost combative style and are usually described as take-charge people…“
“… In a meeting, thinkers will often take contradictory points of view. This can be extremely confusing, but remember that thinkers do not like to show their cards up front, so expect that you may not be able to discern how they feel about any of the options you present. In fact, thinkers often do not reveal their intentions until they render their final decisions...”
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The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Deborah Tannen
Summary: What mean to get heard? The head of a large division of a multinational corporation was running a meeting devoted to performance assessment. Each senior manager stood up, reviewed the individuals in his group, and evaluated them for promotion. Although there were women in every group, not one of them made the cut. One after another, each manager declared, in effect, that every woman in his group didn’t have the self-confidence needed to be promoted. The division head began to doubt his ears. How could it be that all the talented women in the division suffered from a lack of self-confidence?
3 Highlights:
“… What is atypical in this example is that the person with the more indirect style was the boss, so the store manager was motivated to adapt to her style. She still gives orders the same way, but the store manager now understands how she means what she says...“
“… It may seem, for example, that running a meeting in an unstructured way gives equal opportunity to all. But awareness of the differences in conversational style makes it easy to see the potential for unequal access…”
“… A manager aware of those dynamics might devise any number of ways of ensuring that everyone’s ideas are heard and credited. Although no single solution will fit all contexts, managers who understand the dynamics of linguistic style can develop more adaptive and flexible approaches to running or participating in meetings, mentoring or advancing the careers of others, evaluating performance, and so on…”
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How Resilience Works
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Diane Coutu
Summary: Resilience is a hot topic in business these days. Resilience is neither ethically good nor bad. It is merely the skill and the capacity to be robust under conditions of enormous stress and change. But how resilience really works?
3 Highlights:
“… Obviously, luck does have a lot to do with surviving. It was luck that Morgan Stanley was situated in the south tower and could put its preparedness training to work. But being lucky is not the same as being resilient. Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world, that is deeply etched into a person’s mind and soul…”
“… The third building block of resilience is the ability to make do with whatever is at hand. Psychologists follow the lead of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in calling this skill bricolage.1 Intriguingly, the roots of that word are closely tied to the concept of resilience, which literally means bouncing back…”
“… The fact is, when we truly stare down reality, we prepare ourselves to act in ways that allow us to endure and survive extraordinary hardship. We train ourselves how to survive before the fact...”
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It’s Okay to Be Good and Not Great
Source: Outside
Author: Brad Stulberg
Summary: Most people want results now. But generally speaking, results don’t work like that. Our society celebrates “optimization.” So it’s only natural that we would want to optimize ourselves. But our brains don’t work like computers. Perhaps one of the most detrimental consequences of digital technology is the illusion of connection. We think that if we can tweet, post, text, e-mail, or even call someone, we’re good.
3 Highlights:
“… After all, digital relationships save us the time and coordination of meeting in person, which in turn allows us to be überproductive—or so we tell ourselves. But here’s the thing: nothing can replace in-person community, and our failed attempts to do so come at a grave cost…”
“… Moreover, trying to live up to an inflated public persona—be it your online self or your workplace self—creates what psychologists call cognitive dissonance or inconsistency between who you portray yourself to be and who you actually are. This inconsistency is often associated with anxiety…”
“… If you rush the process or expect results too swiftly, you’ll end up disappointed over and over again. When I was going through an immense challenge in my own life, one of the best pieces of advice I got was from a doctor who told me, be patient, it’s a nine-inning game.…”
Access the full Weekly Pulse reading here >>
The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture
Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng
Summary: Leading with culture may be among the few sources of sustainable competitive advantage left to companies today. Successful leaders will stop regarding culture with frustration and instead use it as a fundamental management tool.
3 Highlights:
“… They can master the core change practices of articulation of the aspiration, leadership alignment, organizational conversation, and organizational design…”
“… They can define an aspirational target culture…”
“… Leaders must become aware of the culture that operates in their organization…”
Access the full Weekly Pulse reading here >>
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