Category: Journal

He was still living across the country after finishing his master’s degree, and he was starting to learn Arabic to be able to study the The white flight of Derek Black

Another New College student learned about the conference and posted details on the forum, where gradually a new way of thinking had begun to emerge. “Ostracizing Derek won’t accomplish anything,” one student wrote. “We have a chance to be real activists and actually affect one of the leaders of white supremacy in America. This is… Continue reading The white flight of Derek Black

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Living – NYTimes.com

Work-life balance was a term not yet coined in the years my children were young; it is aptly descriptive of the time distribution I experienced. My success in law school, I have no doubt, was in large measure because of baby Jane. I attended classes and studied diligently until 4 in the afternoon; the next… Continue reading Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Living – NYTimes.com

Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized. What Google Learned… Continue reading What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – NYTimes.com

But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy.… Continue reading What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – NYTimes.com

Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – NYTimes.com

Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’ What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build… Continue reading What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – NYTimes.com

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask… Continue reading What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – NYTimes.com

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted… Continue reading What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – NYTimes.com