Dreading confrontation, many of us avoid or delay uncomfortable conversations even with co-workers who sit nearby. It’s even easier to
let issues languish when you only see your teammate on a screen.
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Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Liane Davey, a team effectiveness advisor and author of The Good Fight, offers guidance for managing potential conflict before it escalates:
 

• Instead of springing feedback on your colleague, call and ask if you can set up some time to discuss how things are going, and what could be improved. 
• When you have the conversation, try to use video in addition to audio so your facial expressions can help convey your positive intentions.
• Provide clear, judgment–free observations of your teammate’s behavior and describe the impact on you.
• As you’re talking, annotate your conversation with what you’re thinking and feeling in real time. For example, if you’re taken aback by feedback, say, “Wow, that’s a surprise to me — I had no idea!” If you’re struggling with the conversation, say, “This is difficult for me, but I’m glad we’re talking about all of this.”
• Don’t stop until you each have a clear vision for how a similar situation could play out better the next time.
• To ensure that your commitments don’t fade just because you won’t bump into each other in the hall, spend a few minutes at the end of your conversation developing an action plan, and consider scheduling a time to follow up.

 
How have you addressed conflicts with remote co-workers, and were your strategies successful? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

“The one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now is to hone your communication skills. You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it. And the transmission is communication.” 
 
Research backs this up with empirical evidence. A study from the Carnegie Institute of Technology found that 85 percent of a person's success comes from "human engineering"--the ability to effectively communicate, negotiate, and lead, both when speaking and listening. (Technical knowledge comprises the other 15 percent.)
 
Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication: Sign up for our BreakThrough Communication winter academy.

If your job involves serving people, part of your work is dealing with their frustration. It's all too easy to take it personally, and—let’s face it—sometimes they do get personal. You may also find yourself having to solve a problem you didn’t create, and then offering an apology on top of that.
 
But stop yourself if you have a tendency to apologize using some form of these six words: “ I’m sorry you feel that way.”
 
Writing in Inc., columnist Jason Aten notes that saying this isn’t really an apology at all. “First, you can't actually be sorry for the way someone else feels. You can only be sorry for your own behavior and the things within your control. More important, however, is that the sentiment behind those words is something along the lines of: ‘Look, I don't know why you're being irrational about this. This isn't my fault, and I think it's ridiculous that you're upset with me.’”
 
Telling someone you're "sorry they feel that way" avoids responsibility for your role in the situation. So, what are your options?

• If you did something requiring an apology, apologize. "I'm really sorry I didn’t deliver on our promise." Own whatever it was, say you're sorry, and do what is necessary to fix it.
• If you didn't do anything wrong, recognize that in many cases, it may well still be up to you to offer a solution. In that case, don't apologize. Instead, try this: "I can see how this would be extremely frustrating. Let me see what I can do to fix this." This acknowledges the problem and their feelings. It doesn't cast judgment on those feelings but validates them and lets the person know that you've heard them and care about making the situation better.
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How did you handle the situation the last time you had to apologize to a dissatisfied colleague or customer? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

New Years resolutions, if not exactly “made to be broken,” don't have great staying power. Seventy–five percent of “resolvers” keep their resolutions after one week, 64 percent after a month, and merely 8 percent twelve months later.

But the reasons go beyond lack of will power. According to Elizabeth Grace Saunders, time management coach and author of How To Invest Your Time Like Money, many people fail to accomplish new goals because they don’t consciously eliminate old activities from their schedule to make room for the new. It’s like “trying to stuff more papers into a file drawer that’s already packed tight.” 

If your resolutions involve workplace goals and behaviors, consider the following:

• Question all of your work commitments.  The start of a new year marks the perfect time to reevaluate what you’re doing, and why.
• Reassess your work style. Now assess how you accomplish work. Do you really need all those meetings? Can you interact less with messaging technology?
• Add new goals strategically. Once you intentionally create space, you can strategically add in the activities that you want in your life. To say “yes” to the new, you must say “no” to some of the old.
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What do you plan to resolve for this coming year, and how will you make room for it to happen? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

A recent study from Forrester estimated that 10% of U.S. jobs would be automated this year, and some estimate that many more jobs will be automated in the next decade. But perhaps asking which jobs will be eliminated is less relevant than asking which aspects of remaining jobs are unlikely to be automated.
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Stephen M. Kosslyn, former Dean of Social Science at Harvard and author of Building the Intentional University, posits that while routine and repetitive tasks lend themselves to non-human replacement, aspects of jobs that require two critical elements will be difficult to automate.

1. Emotion: Emotion plays an important role in human communication (think of a physician explaining treatment options to a critically ill patient). It involves empathy as well as all forms of nonverbal communication. Beyond that, emotion, which is nuanced and complex, interacts with many of our decision processes. For example, it helps us to prioritize what we do right now as opposed to later. As of now, the functioning of genuine emotion is difficult to build into an automated system.
   
   
2. Context: Machine learning operates on data sets that by definition were created previously. But context changes all the time—often rapidly. For example, earlier this year we were suddenly operating in the context of a pandemic. Humans can take context into account when making decisions or having interactions with others.

 
As Kosslyn points out, employers highly value the kind of “soft” skills that are intrinsically linked to contextual evaluation and emotion: critical thinking, clear communication, and holistic decision-making. “All of this suggests that our educational systems should concentrate not simply on how people interact with technology,” he writes, “… but also how they can do the things that technology will not be doing soon.”
 
What do you think humans can do much better than machines in the workplace? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

The pandemic will make this a holiday season unlike any other, but that doesn’t mean a holiday party is out of the question. Now, perhaps more than ever, teams want to feel bonded, express feelings of mutual appreciation, and have some good old-fashioned holiday fun.
 
Here are some suggestions from the Paperless Post blog for a festive Zoom celebration:
 

• Have an ugly sweater contest: This time-old tradition will hold up well in cyberspace. Just throw your tackiest pullover or cardigan over your sweatpants. Prizes can be awarded for Most Original Sweater, Best DIY, and even Best Team Sweater,
• Host a talent show: Everyone’s on screen anyway, so what better venue to show off a hidden bent for singing, storytelling, or stand-up comedy.
• Organize a virtual awards show:  Dunder Mifflin had its iconic Dundees. Imagine what you can come up with to acknowledge each of your team members for their special accomplishments and contributions—be the categories serious or whimsical.
• Have a home scavenger hunt:  Put together a list of items team members can find around their houses, or give one-off prompts like, “Show us the weirdest thing in your refrigerator right now.”
• Play “Holiday tradition, or not”: For a festive twist on Two Truths and a Lie, ask each person to share a quirky family tradition. The other players must guess if the tradition is real or fake.

 
Keep in mind that many party festivities, from charades to impromptu dancing, are easily adaptable to an online format.  Whatever activities you choose, the important thing is to acknowledge one another, particularly during a time that hasn’t been easy on individuals or companies.
 
What are you and your team planning to celebrate the holidays? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

If you can do the work well, you can lead other people to do it. Right?  Wrong. “Occupying a leadership position is not the same thing as leading,” says executive coach and management professor Monique Valcour. “To lead, you must be able to connect, motivate, and inspire a sense of ownership of shared objectives.”
 
There is no magic bullet or infallible management tool to ensure good leadership. Instead, Valcour advises creating practices to increase leadership proficiency using the following steps:

• Start with a problem you’d like to solve or a future result you’d like to achieve. What outcome would make a meaningful difference for you and your team?
• Articulate why it’s important to you now. Getting clear on your purpose and motivation increases creativity and persistence.
• Seek quality information to base your approach on. Check in with your coach or mentor, and search for relevant books, articles and studies
• Identify measures of success. How will you know if you're making progress?
• Ground yourself with an intention. Place a sticky note with this intention on your computer where you’ll see it first thing each morning—and your team will see it too.
• Choose behaviors to implement. For example, serve as a role model, stimulate thinking with questions, practice empathy, and praise proactive behavior.
• Seek feedback and celebrate progress.
  
  

“The developmental journey is fascinating and fulfilling if you embrace it,” says Valcour “You don’t have to wait to be trained; you can design leadership development practices any time you want.”

What are you doing to promote your own continuous learning as a leader? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

It can be tough to give tough feedback. The challenge is to do so in a way that motivates change without making the other person feel defensive. There are several common pitfalls in offering negative feedback: using the opportunity to blow off steam instead of to coach, surrounding negative feedback with so much positive feedback that it goes unnoticed, or simply avoiding and delaying because we anticipate the employee will become argumentative.
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, management professor and executive coach Monique Valcour notes that powerful, high-impact feedback conversations share the following elements:
 

1. An intention to help the employee grow, rather than prove how wrong the person was. The feedback should increase, not diminish, the employee’s motivation and resources for change.
   
   
2. Openness on the part of the feedback giver, which is essential to creating a positive connection. “If you start off feeling uncomfortable and self-protective, your employee will match that energy, and you’ll each leave the conversation frustrated with the other person.”
   
   
3. Inviting the employee into the problem-solving process by asking questions such as: What ideas do you have? What will you take from this conversation? What are some possible next steps? What might I do to help?
   
   

A single conversation can switch an employee on — or shut them down. A true leader sees the raw material for success in every individual says Valcour and “creates the conditions to let it shine, even when the challenge is tough.”
 
What was your experience the last time you had to deliver tough feedback? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

The ability to get things done competently and quickly is a key measure of success, but leaders can fall short if their efficient task-focus comes at the expense of a more relationship-based focus. Writing in The Harvard Business Review, executive coach Rebecca Zucker notes, “Things like building relationships, inspiring a team, developing others, and showing empathy can fall by the wayside” if efficient leaders believe these pursuits will slow them down.
 
The irony is that an intense, exclusive focus on efficiency can have a negative impact on organizational climate and make these leaders less effective overall. To combat this, Zucker offers advice for the overly task-focused:

• Solicit feedback: Ask key stakeholders how they think you balance task-focus and people-focus.
• Identify high-value ways to focus on people: For example, have periodic career development conversations with direct reports, or have coffee (live or virtual) with a colleague, getting better acquainted.
• Use self-observation and reflection: Notice when you are rushed and impatient. Discover if you are trying to avoid something or have a fear of slowing down.
• De-bunk your limiting beliefs: Talk to others who are good at balancing task- and people-focus to gain insight into how they do it.
• Practice self-management: Self-awareness can initiate a different approach. You might find yourself pausing to acknowledge a colleague’s effort, or taking time to teach a team member something new.

 
How do you balance task-focus and people-focus? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. 

Rude and divisive workers can contaminate an organization’s culture—their disagreeable nature spreading like a virus. They sap productivity and sow discontent. Best to avoid hiring them in the first place, but how?
 
Writing In The Harvard Business Review, Christine Porath, a professor of management at Georgetown University and author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace, offers this guidance:
 

• Interview for civility: Use structured, behavioral interviews. Ask candidates the same questions in the same order, including: What would your former employer and people who reported to you say about you?; What are some signals that you are under stress?; When have you failed?; What would you like to improve about yourself? Notice if they take responsibility or are quick to assign blame.
• Get your team involved: Have them take the candidate to lunch or dinner and give the candidate a chance to observe the team’s values and rapport. When teams are mostly remote, this can be a virtual event.
• Ask their references about civility: What was it like working with them; How did people who reported to them feel about them?; How did they react to authority?; Would you rehire them? And don't just stick to the reference list; talk to your own network as well.
• Check your own civility: Put your own best foot forward. It’s hard to expect someone to be civil if you’re not modeling the same behavior.

Have you ever hired a toxic employee, and how do you think you might have discerned their character ahead of time? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

While many companies have returned to onsite offices, others plan to have their employees remain remote for the foreseeable future. But shifting workplace dynamics during the pandemic have led many leaders to question what employee engagement looks like here and now.
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Writing in Inc., Marcel Schwantes, founder and Chief Human Officer of Leadership From the Core, says one fact remains constant: Employee engagement is about establishing a goal and a purpose for those you lead. “It's almost impossible to keep employees dedicated to their work without a larger purpose.” Schwantes asked four leaders how they do this:

• Jason VandeBoom, CEO of ActiveCampaign, says leaders must rally employees around a purpose beyond just money. His company puts customers front and center for employees. “A focus on customers, or the clients a company is helping, can bring employees outside of themselves. "
• Social goals "unite us and give us purpose," says Babak Varjavandi, CEO of Nakisa, a global technology company. He says social goals such as diversity, teamwork, and collaboration can go a long way in inspiring employee success. “They make it easy for employees to associate their work with the larger good and personal development.”
• Keith Kitani, CEO of change communications platform GuideSpark, says, "During a time that is bursting with uncertainty, leaders have to tap into their true emotions and lead with authenticity." He says leaders should connect emotionally with employees and highlight the "why" around the goals and purpose of the organization.
• Heather Kelly, CEO of public relations firm SSPR, advises taking time during all-company meetings to give shout-outs and real-time feedback to allow employees to feel support from everyone in the organization, especially from the executive leadership team. By making a team-oriented environment the priority of an organization, everyone feels empowered and encouraged in their role.

 
How are you keeping your employees engaged during these times? To join the conversation, click "comments"

In these unusual times, we may be spending more time than ever with family, and encounters with friends and co-workers might require lots of arrangements and negotiations. We might find ourselves butting heads about new topics, like sharing home WiFi bandwidth, helping kids homeschool, and wearing masks. That’s why NPR interviewed Kwame Christian, director of the American Negotiation Institute, about how we can have tough conversations without letting them boil over into full-blown arguments.

Christian’s technique revolves around a simple, three-step process:

1. Acknowledge and validate emotions. Recognize how everybody is feeling about a given situation, even if it's sensitive.
   
2. Be compassionately curious. Ask lots of questions and fully listen to the answers. 
3. Brainstorm. Once both parties have acknowledged how they're feeling and identified why there's an issue, come up with solutions together — so that there is buy-in from both sides.
   
   

Christian stresses that productive problem solving begins with recognizing the difference between the micro and macro levels. “On the micro level, there might be something specifically that we disagree with. So, we're not on the same page on this specific thing. But as we expand our perspective to the macro level, there are going to be some principles or goals that we do have in common. So, when I'm framing the conversation, I'm talking about that shared outlook and shared perspective. And then we can move to the micro and figure out what it is we do next.”

When was the last time you turned a confrontation into a collaboration? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

We’re getting used to wearing masks, but figuring out what we’re looking at can stump even experts in face reading. “We use face recognition in every aspect of our social interaction,” said Erez Freud, a psychologist with the Centre for Vision Research at York University in Toronto. In the faces of others, we find clues about their personality, gender, and emotions. “This is something very fundamental to our perception. And suddenly, faces do not look the same,” Dr. Freud said.

That’s why Dr. Freud and colleagues decided to study how masks impair  facial recognition. They recruited some 500 adults to complete a common face memory task online. Participants viewed unfamiliar faces, then tried to recognize them under increasingly difficult conditions. Half the participants saw faces with surgical-style masks covering mouths and noses, and scored substantially worse. In fact, 13 percent of participants struggled so much they may as well have suffered from prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Authors at the University of Stirling in Scotland posted a similar study: 138 adults completed online face-matching tests. When masks were superimposed, people performed worse — even when the faces belonged to familiar celebrities.

One of the main takeaways has been that facial recognition happens holistically, or all at once; we don’t scrutinize people’s features piecemeal. But all isn’t lost. Research shows that out of all facial features, we rely most on the eyes. Even if we struggle to know who we’re looking at when only their eyes are visible, we may still pick up information about a person’s identity and emotions.

“We also use other cues, and we can fall back on some of those other cues if they are helpful,” said Marlene Behrmann, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University. For example, we might recognize people by the way they walk or talk, or by their facial hair or hairstyle.
Have you been having a difficult time recognizing masked faces? What cues do you use? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

Garden-variety lies and corner-cutting are not uncommon, but where is the boundary between this sort of behavior and more egregious dishonesty? In a new paper, researchers in Spain have created what The New York Times calls “a field guide of lying and cheating patterns”…at least among participants in simple lab experiments”.

Researchers instructed 180 participants to perform a coin flip, electronically, and report the outcome. If heads, they won $5; if tails they won nothing. Unbeknownst to participants, the research team could track each coin toss. After the trial, the researchers factored out everyone who got lucky and flipped heads on their one try. The remaining participants fell into distinct groups. Some 20 percent were honest, flipping tails and reporting tails. Ten percent flat-out lied, rolling tails and reporting heads, for the reward. A third group didn’t bother to roll at all, and reported heads — they were “radically dishonest,” as the authors put it. Finally, about 8 percent flipped multiple times until they got heads, and reported that result to collect the cash. This group was termed “cheating non-liars.”

“This [last] group is the most interesting to us,” said lead author Dr. Pascqual-Ezama of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. “They’re willing to cheat, but they don’t lie about the last roll.” The mentality behind this behavior fits well into a vast literature detailing the psychological outs that people give themselves when cutting corners or breaking rules, small and large. Beginning in the 1990s, the psychologist Albert Bandura called these rationalizations “moral disengagement.” It’s a process of preserving self-respect by justifying cheating or worse, with thoughts such as, “Everyone cheats, why should I be shortchanged?”

Dr. Pascual-Ezama says coin-flips and dice-rolls are hardly a reliable guide for how people will behave in the world, where they face much greater, and often competing, social and professional pressures. “Still,” says the Times, “that 8 percent seems like a good group to interview about the developmental and childhood sources of compulsive lying-cheating syndrome. If they’d come clean, that is.”
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How do you think you’d behave in an experiment like this? To join the conversation, click "comments" on above.

“The email greeting, no one’s favorite thing to write even in the Before Times, has been exposed by the pandemic for its stodgy emptiness; a hollow, yet necessary, formality,” writes New York Times “Smarter Living” columnist Tim Herrera. “But now we’re forced to consider what we’re actually saying when we’re really not saying much.” 

“When the pandemic first hit, it felt so crazy, because there were deadlines that still needed to be met, so you were emailing people,” says Liz Fosslien, author of No Hard Feelings, which examines how emotions affect our work lives. “Like: ‘Hello, hope everything is OK given that the world is crumbling to pieces. Do you have that paper I needed?’”

So, what is appropriate now? How can we write an email and be casual without seeming inauthentic, or be personal without breaking boundaries? Should we try out a little humor, even though for many there’s not much that seems funny right now? According to Fosslien, a lot of that depends on your recipient. 
Before sending your next email, give it what Fosslien calls an “emotional proofread.” Put yourself in the receiver’s shoes. Consider what you know about this person, your relationship with them, and what they might be going through. “A quick gut-check before you hit send could save the receiver from unintended anguish.”

Do you have a go-to email greeting you are using these days, and do you ever adapt it according to specific circumstances? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.