Leadership & Organisations

Leadership & Organizations

Practitioner articles in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and IbyIMD

Survivor Syndrome: What to do when you survive a layoff (HBR)

The colossal wave of downsizing in the last few years is dividing the workplace in two, between the leavers and the survivors. The negative impacts of change are frequently felt just as strongly by those who remain following major layoffs. If you’re a layoff survivor, how can you regain a sense of control over your work life?

How Your Physical Surroundings Shape Your Work LifeThe past few years have encouraged us to revisit many assumptions about our lives, including the state and function of our workplaces. More than ever, it’s clear that our workplaces both shape and reflect important parts of ourselves, impacting our performance and well-being. While there are clearly limits to the places we have available to us for work (and our agency in making them “ours”), there are always at least small opportunities to engage in placemaking. Drawing from their theory of workplace identification, which integrates research on environmental psychology, organizational behavior, and workplace design, the authors offer insight into how you might consider and shape the physical landscape of the workplaces you have available to you in ways that can help you become your best self at work.

What’s Your Leadership Origin Story?How you tell the story of your own path towards becoming a leader frames your leadership style, as well as the ways in which you cultivate and support other leaders within your organization. Based on an in-depth survey of 92 leaders, the authors shed light on four distinct types of leadership narratives: they found that the stories they heard were all framed around Being, Engaging, Performing, or Accepting. They go on to discuss gender disparities in their findings, and offer suggestions as to how leaders can better understand — and expand — their leadership stories.

4 Types of Employee Complaints — and How to RespondComplaining can have both positive and negative effects on organizational communication. Constructive complaining — or structured opportunities for employees to voice their concerns — offers valuable feedback to improve work processes, products, and services, and thus should be encouraged. Venting and chronic complaining have both advantages and disadvantages for the individual and the group and should be given the right space and time, rather than being stifled. Malicious complaining only creates personal gain that harms others and the collective, decreases productivity, and creates a toxic work environment. By managing these different types of complaints with the appropriate behaviors, managers can create a positive, high-performing work environment while monitoring and containing the risks and costs of complaining for themselves and their teams.

Is Your Organization Digging Trenches or Building Bridges?Entrenchment happens when an attitude, habit, or belief becomes so firmly established that it morphs from “what I believe” into “who I am,” and it can lead to polarization within teams and organizations. The current environment, where political divides and social movements permeate workplace interactions and many employees are working remotely, can create ideal conditions for entrenchment to take hold. To prevent or fight against these divisions, leaders first have to understand the divisive forces at play. Then, they can employ a few strategies aimed at encouraging empathy and identifying with others to help weaken the boundaries between subgroups. Resisting entrenchment is even more important in difficult times.

How Future Thinking Can Derail Your Company’s PresentFour common mistakes can derail leaders as they make strategic plans aimed at making their organizations future-ready.

Building change resilience to combat change fatigueProfessors Meister and Büchel explain how to best communicate, plan and prioritize as you manage ambiguity and change in your organization.

Peer Reviewed Academic Publications

Human Relations: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018726720909864?journalCode=huma

Academy of Management Review: https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.2020.0442

Book Chapter: Debating Bad Leadership (Palgrave) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65025-4_3

Journal of Management Studies: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joms.12538

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