Women negotiators, CEO’s as sources of dysfunction, the influence of situations on our behavior and thinking.
You are way too busy to read everything you want to read and yet you know the world is changing and you need to be an aggressive learner to keep up. I get it. Maybe I can help.
I am fortunate in that my job (and our work at IHHP) is to stay up on the latest research and insights from the world of leadership, performance and human behavior. To make it easier for you to be the aggressive learner you want to be, I have picked out three articles (ok, there is a book in their too!) I have read in this past that I think are worthy of digging into. Enjoy!
Memo to the CEO: Are you the source of workplace dysfunction?
I love this article by Robert Sutton of Stanford, someone who I have recently gotten to know. A big part of this article challenges us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: are we the problem? As an aside, this gets at an important leadership insight that we have identified in our research at IHHP: we fluctuate between showing up as our best selves and being an exceptional leader and showing up as our worst selves and being an unexceptional leader. We aren’t actually the “5.9 out of 7” score we receive on our 360 assessments; we are sometimes 7 out of 7 and we are sometimes 2 out of 7. The key is to know what precipitates us being our best or worst self.
The Person and the Situation
This is an older book that I read some time back – it came out way back in 1991 – but it is a gem! If you have more time on your hands over the holidays, give this a read. Actually, the best way to approach this heavier book is to commit to reading a few pages a week over the course of the year as it really is loaded with fantastic insights on many of its 320 pages.
Essentially it looks at how the situation we’re in influences the way we behave and think and how when we perceive the actions and intentions of others, we tend to make lots of mistakes. Written by a couple of professors (Ross and Nisbett), it is essential reading if any of your work has to do with working with other people…
https://www.amazon.ca/Person-Situation-Perspectives-Social-Psychology/dp/1905177445
A Pawn in Someone Else’s Game?: The cognitive, motivational, and paradigmatic barriers to women’s excelling in negotiation
In this academic paper, authors Kennedy and Kray look at women in negotiations. After looking at 20 years of research, they found that women do underperform relative to men in negotiation, but only under limited circumstances, which means the performance gap is unlikely due to lesser skills on their part. They examine three barriers between women and negotiation excellence and suggest remedies.
Here is the abstract. To download it, you will need to purchase.
Happy reading!