Darwin said the fittest survive, but what kind of fitness counts most? Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe species that have thrived and successfully reproduced haven’t done it by beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that species endure — humans, other animals and plants — based on friendliness, partnership and communication.

“Dogs are exhibit A,” Hare says. “They are the extremely friendly descendants of wolves. They were attracted to humans and became friendly to humans, and changed their behavior, appearance and developmental makeup. Sadly, their close relative, the wolf, is threatened and endangered in the few places where they live, whereas there are hundreds of millions of dogs…”

The authors also point to the success of bonobos, apes that are often confused with chimpanzees. Chimps make war, but bonobos are natural sharers. “The most successful bonobo males have more offspring than the most successful alpha male chimpanzees.”

What does all this mean for us? For humans to continue to evolve successfully, Hare says, “friendliness is the winning strategy. Social problems require social solutions. The secret to our species’ success is the same as it is with dogs and bonobos. We are the friendliest human species that ever evolved, which has allowed us to outcompete other human species that are now extinct. When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”

Can you recall a time when friendliness helped you get ahead? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

We all like to think we’d speak up if we saw something objectionable happening at our workplace—perhaps something ethically questionable or some evidence of discrimination. In fact, research suggests that most people tend not to act, and rationalize their inaction.
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Heidi Grant, Associate Director of Columbia University’s Motivation Science Center and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, offers suggestions for those who do want to be diligent employees and lend their voice to the conversation:

• Recognize it will be difficult, and worthwhile: When people set out to do difficult, personally meaningful things, they’re more likely to follow through if they expect that the task will be challenging. 
• Make an if/then plan: Identify in advance the kinds of situations that could occur when you speak up. Then decide how you might handle each. Of course, you can never plan for every specific possibility, but feeling prepared will keep you from freezing up or backing out.
• Work to lessen the social threat that speaking up may create: Especially if you are communicating up the chain of command, make it clear that you’re not out to get anyone, or necessarily attributing ill will to anyone. Provide feedback about impact, without making any assumptions about intent.

 
If you have spoken up at work, what were the results? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

Holding audience attention during a presentation is always a challenge, and more so if you are giving it via Zoom. In a virtual setting, you cannot employ or read body language as much as you would in person, and your attendees might well be distracted by other things in their environment (kids, pets, beeping microwaves). 
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Carmine Gallo, instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and author of Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get From Good to Great, offers tips for sharpening your presentation skills: 
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• Reduce clutter; use fewer slides: Great presenters are great editors. Massive PowerPoint decks do not impress; they put viewers to sleep.
• Forget bullet points: Augment text with photos, videos, and graphics.
• Use your voice as a tool: Varying the pace, pitch, and volume of your voice increases your effectiveness.
• Give your audience something extra: Novelty recognition is a survival skill all of us share. It may be harder to incorporate “wow” moments when your presentation is virtual, but think about what you can do that’s unexpected.
• Rehearse: The world’s greatest speakers are great because they put in the time.
  

How have you adapted your presentation style so it can be as captivating virtually as it is in person? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

At a time when clear written communication is more important than ever, many of us may have temporarily lost our in-house editors—those co-workers we drop in on when we want a quick assessment of our first drafts. Learning to edit our own writing is a skill that will serve us well now and in the future.
 
Writing in The New York Times prolific freelance journalist Harry Guinness offers practical advice for DIY editors:

• All first tries can be improved: “Writing offers us one of the rare chances in life at a do-over: to get it right and say what we meant...” The time you put in reworking and refining can turn a “good enough” piece into something genuinely strong.
  
• Stay vigilant for common errors: Overuse of jargon, clichés, and “business speak” obscure the points you want to make.
  
• Don't ramble: When you’re not sure what you want to say, it’s common to phrase it three or four ways. A single direct sentence is almost always better than four that circle around a point.
  
• Give your work some space: If possible, put a draft aside and return later with a fresh eye. Even 10 minutes is better than nothing, although more is better—especially if you can sleep on it.
• Read your work aloud: You’ll catch more errors and get a feel for flow.
  
• Cut and cut some more: It’s more likely you’ve written too much than too little.
  
• Spend the most time with the beginning: If you don't capture the reader’s attention, all is lost.
  
• Pay attention to structure: For emails and other short pieces, the classic topic sentence followed by supporting paragraphs and a conclusion is hard to beat.
  
• Use resources: Nothing beats a good thesaurus. And the “Grammarly” writing assistant can help spot common mistakes.
  
  

What mistakes were you glad you found and what improvements were you glad you made the last time you edited your own writing? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

These days, anxiety is pretty widespread—and it’s tempting to want to soothe a co-worker or friend who is experiencing a high level of stress.  But, as you may have noticed, telling an anxiety-ridden person to “calm: down” can backfire. A new study suggests that the most effective way to calm someone down is simply to reflect and validate their feelings.

To figure this out, researchers tested out a variety of approaches to comforting 325 married participants who volunteered to think about a fight with their partners and report on how various attempts by a friend to cheer them up made them feel. 

Some of the approaches were "low person-centered,” meaning messages that minimized the person's distress or suggested they shouldn't feel so upset. Others were "high person-centered," i.e. they validated the person's stress, saying things like "you have every right to feel upset" or "it's understandable you are stressed out." The more empathic approaches were the clear winners. 

The bottom line: Minimizing people’s emotions can come off as controlling and condescending. As columnist Jessica Stillman writes in Inc., “If you're genuinely interested in making someone feel a little better when they're understandably stressed out, give up on cheering them up. You mean well but they'll probably just feel like you're trying to push them around. A far better bet, science shows, is simply listening with empathy.” 

When you’re feeling stressed and anxious, what kinds of interventions do you find helpful or less than helpful? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” So says Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. Unfortunately, the majority of training in today’s companies is ineffective. Although organizations across the globe spend hundreds of billions on training annually, surveys show 75% of managers are dissatisfied with their companies’ learning and development, and only 12% of employees apply newly learned skills to their jobs.
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Steve Glaveski, CEO of the startup accelerator Collective Campus and host of the “Future Squared” podcast, points out the biological reality that we quickly forget most of what we learn if we don't use it. To get around the “forgetting curve”, we need to implement “lean learning”: 

1. Learning the core of what you need to learn: For example, If you want to learn Japanese, focus on the 20% of words and phrases that show up 80% of the time. 
2. Applying it to real-world situations immediately: Real-world projects should be brought to workshops in order to apply what’s learned in real-time.
3. Receiving immediate feedback and refining our understanding: This can be achieved by embedding continuous learning into a live application, implementing peer learning, and offering micro (or bite sized) learning opportunities.
4. Repeating the cycle

Says Glaveski, “Lean learning ensures that employees not only learn the right thing, at the right time, and for the right reasons, but also that they retain what they learn.”

Can you remember a training situation where you remembered much of what you learned, and could apply it? What made that learning stick? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

If you’re a leader who encourages people to speak up and contribute ideas, you may assume no one will remain silent when they have an idea you haven’t thought of, or spot a problem you haven’t noticed. That assumption seems reasonable, but research suggests that people are motivated to speak up only if they believe their contribution will have an impact on the organization, and that they will not be punished for their comment. By contrast, people fail to signal a problem or idea to the boss when they think there will be negative repercussions for doing so—like getting shunned or fired.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review Michael Parke, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, offers strategies for managing both the “voice” and “silence” aspects of employee contributions.

To solicit voice:

• Explicitly encourage people to bring up ideas.
• Consider those ideas.
• Follow up and let people know what became of their ideas—not every idea will reach fruition but those who voiced them want to know attention was paid.

 
To manage silence:

• Monitor how you and others react to new ideas and opinions, especially when they involve raising problems.
• Protect people who offer ideas that fail.
• Frame and reframe questions in different ways to evoke new responses…e.g. “What should we do?” instead of “What could we do?”
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Have you ever assumed that people who don’t speak up are purposely holding back? Have you found ways to successfully bring in more voices? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

Governments and public health pronouncements aside, businesses can only reopen when their employees feel safe returning to work. In a recent survey of 735 U.S. employers conducted by the global human resources consulting firm Mercer, more than 45 percent said they are already struggling with workers who are reluctant to return to their workplaces because of fear of getting sick.

In a recent Inc. article, Peter Newell, a former Army colonel who spent years on wartime frontlines tackling ill-defined challenges in risky situations and who now runs the consulting firm BMNT, offers advice for navigating this unprecedented dilemma:
 

• Know you can't manage people’s fears; you can only support them: Encourage people to be honest about what they are feeling and listen to them. Communicate transparently about what you know and what you don’t.
• Map out exactly what returning to work will look like: For example, how will you handle meetings with co-workers and clients, and what types of business travel, if any, will take place?
• Directly address the stress your employees are going through: The pressures of lockdown have meant many people have taken few breaks, let alone vacations. Newell’s advice: “I'm asking folks, when all this ends, tell me how you're taking time off to get away.”

 
If your team is considering returning to the workplace, what are the greatest concerns and how are you addressing them? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

Although companies benefit when employees speak up, many employees are reluctant to offer suggestions, opinions, or concerns. Two theories attempt to explain why: The personality perspective attributes this reticence to shyness and introversion; the situational perspective ascribes it to environments that discourage speaking truth to power.
 
The two are not mutually exclusive, but Subra Tangirala, Dean’s Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Maryland, and Hemant Kakkar, a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at the London Business School, wanted to test which one mattered more (https://bit.ly/2E4HDVN).
 
The researchers surveyed 291 employees and their supervisors (from 35 teams overall) from a manufacturing plant, and from their data concluded that “both personality and environment had a significant effect on employee’s tendency to speak up with ideas or concerns.” But they also found that strong environmental norms could override the influence of personality on employees’ willingness to speak up at work. Even if someone was quite shy, they spoke up when they thought it was strongly expected of them. (Tweet it!)
 
Say the authors, “This finding suggests that if you want employees to speak up, the work environment and the team’s social norms matter. Even people who are most inclined to raise ideas and suggestions may not do so if they fear being put down or penalized. On the flip side, encouraging and rewarding speaking up can help more people do so, even if their personality makes them more risk-averse.”
 
Do you feel your organization’s culture promotes or discourages employees from speaking up? What specific work environment practices contribute to this culture? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs. 

“I’ve observed the same thing time and time again: how information is communicated to employees during a change matters more than what information is communicated.” So says communication consultant Patti Sanchez, coauthor of Illuminate, writing in the Harvard Business Review.
 



A lack of empathy when conveying news about organizational transformation can cause it to fail, says Sanchez. But the following strategies can help a leader relate to employee perspectives.
 

• Profile Your Audience at Each Stage: Interview individual employees during each phase to gain perspective on typical mindsets. Ask questions designed to uncover beliefs, feelings, questions, concerns.  Continually reconnect with your audience throughout the journey. 
• Tell Employees What to Expect: The more informed your people are, the more they’ll be able to deal with discomfort. (Tweet it!) It will also help you build credibility and enhance trust.
• Involve People at all Levels: A transformation won’t succeed without broad involvement. Be sure to share details relevant to each department.

Leaders who express genuine empathy for everyone involved will enable employees to feel valued and be inspired to help their initiative succeed.

Have you ever been through an organizational change and, if so, do you feel your leader showed empathy throughout the process? How so? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs. 

Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville, coauthors of the Harvard Business Review Leader’s Handbook, are often asked for the newest guidance for leaders. Clearly the “leadership industry” is booming, with hundreds of books written about the subject every year, new assessment tools based on neuroscience, computer aided algorithms for decision-making, virtual reality simulations, and online courses with university affiliations. 

But is there really an essentially new way to think about leadership? Writing in The Harvard Business Review, Ashkenas and Manville remind us that although there are a lot of new and interesting ideas, some of which may prove helpful, outstanding leadership has not really changed over the years. (Tweet it!) “It is still about mobilizing people in an organization around common goals to achieve impact, at scale.”

According to the authors, leaders with the greatest impact almost always deploy these six classic, fundamental practices:

1. uniting people around an exciting, aspirational vision;
2. building a strategy for achieving the vision;
3. attracting and developing the best possible talent;
4. relentlessly focusing on results in the context of the strategy;
5. creating ongoing innovation to help reinvent the vision and strategy; and
6. “leading yourself” by knowing and growing yourself so you can most effectively lead others and carry out these practices.

“Sometimes the starting point is different, or one of the six areas requires more heavy lifting than another,” say Ashkenas and Manville, “…but the same handful of practices are always present.”

What do you think about these leadership fundamentals? Do you think that one is most important? Are there any missing? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs. 

It goes without saying that good teachers are good communicators—or does it? (Tweet it!) Many universities and business schools rely on “expert” teachers who are tops in their field, but not necessarily skilled at transferring their knowledge to other people.
 

Writing in The New York Times , organizational psychologist Adam Grant points out that experts in any given field might have mastered basic material so long ago that they are especially challenged in conveying it to novices. In addition, the skills that got them where they are—e.g. research brilliance or entrepreneurial success—may not have prepared them to teach what they know to others.

“I’ve come to believe that if you want to learn something new, there are three factors that you should keep in mind when choosing a teacher — whether it’s a professor or mentor or soccer coach,” writes Grant. To quote…

1.  How long has it been since the teacher studied the material?
2. How challenging was it for the educator to initially master the material? The best teachers are often people who accomplish the most with less natural talent and opportunity.
3. How clearly does the teacher communicate the material? Evidence (http://www.nber.org/papers/w19406) shows that when college students take an introductory class from a lecturer who’s not on the tenure track, they go on to get higher grades in a more advanced class.

 
Tell us about the best teacher you ever had. How did this person communicate material in a way that resonated with you? Have you ever had an “expert” teacher who was hard to understand and learn from? If you are a teacher, what are your communication best practices? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication,
check out our online learning series.

Leadership coach and former Navy SEAL Jeff Boss says that many of his clients ask for a 60-day or 90-day plan to improve their leadership effectiveness. It’s not that plans aren’t valuable”, he writes in Forbes, “[but] I can’t think of any mission in the SEALs that actually went according to plan.”
 
Better than planning is preparedness (Tweet it!) —and to that end, Boss notes the top three things that effective leaders show up with every day.
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1. Questions: Effective leaders use questions to help themselves learn and to help others learn. They’re also smart about what to ask. “This means they listen fully before conjuring up a question rather than planning what question to ask as people are talking.” 
2. Open Ears: Other people have questions too. A good leader is receptive to the queries and concerns of others, noting them down and following up. 
3. Humility: “Humility opens the door to learning. It also allows you to defer to the person with the greatest subject matter expertise and context about the problem, so it gets solved in the best way possible.”

Do you show up at work with questions, open ears and humility? What are your other “show up” factors for effective leadership? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion

A Gallup report reveals that millennial career happiness is down while disengagement at work climbs: 71% of Millennials aren't engaged on the job, and half of all those employed plan to leave within a year. Bosses carry the responsibility for 70% of employee engagement variances.
 
When Millennial employees feel supported by their boss, their happiness on the job soars — as does company success. (Tweet it!) But building a healthy relationship involves the efforts of both parties. Writing in Forbes, “Under 30” columnist Sarah Landrum advises, “When you’re first hired, you should get to know your company’s culture and closely watch your boss as you learn the ropes.” Among variables to consider:

• Mood: Does your boss need coffee to start the day? If you see other employees lay low before the boss gets caffeinated, you should stay under the radar too.
• Communication: Don’t wait too long to break important news. In-depth topics may be scheduled for a meeting through a phone call or email rather than a surprise visit.
• Leadership: What kind of leader is your boss? Command leaders make decisions without input or challenge from others. Participative leaders value the input of team members, although many decisions remain with the boss after considering individual input. Know what you’re dealing with, and adapt your approach.
• Emotional Style: Some bosses are more emotionally reinforcing than others. Some might seem cold, but are actually just analytical. If you’re more focused on interpersonal relationships, that’s your strength, but your boss might have a very different style.

 
Do you think your relationship with your boss could be improved? What actions are you taking to make that happen? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion

We’ve heard that failure is a necessary part of success. (Tweet it!) Now a study in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience adds a new twist. It finds that reflecting on past failures—by writing about them—may help us stay calm in the face of new challenges.

According to an article in Forbes  researchers from Rutgers, The University of Pennsylvania and Duke predicted that writing about a past failure would actually reduce a person’s stress level during a stressful situation in the present, whereas writing about a random topic would have no effect.

To stress the participants, they subjected them to well-known social stress tests, such as preparing a speech in five minutes, which they had to deliver in front of a “speech expert.” As predicted, people who’d written about a past failure didn’t show the typical stress response (measured by the stress hormone cortisol) compared to the control group, who’d written about movie plots. The former group also did better on the tests of attention.

Why does this connection exist? The researchers say that “writing about failures may make a new stressor seem subjectively less stressful by comparison.” In other words, reflecting on past stresses makes new ones seem not so bad.

Have you ever used expressive writing to help you process a disappointment at work or in your personal life? What was its effect? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion