Common wisdom holds that to enhance well-being and reduce conflict and stress, you’ve got to ease up on work. Conversely, to have a significant impact on the world and be successful by prevailing societal standards, you’ve got to put work above pretty much everything else in your life.

This is zero-sum thinking, and it runs counter to what I have observed in three decades of teaching, practice, and research on the possibilities for achieving success in all areas of life. There are many truly successful people in our midst who have achieved greatness not by forsaking their families, communities, and private selves, but, rather, by embracing these parts of their lives. They have found creative ways to reduce conflict and replace it with a sense of harmony between work and the rest of life. Not only does this reduce stress and its discontents, it is the very source of the strength that enables their admirable accomplishments.

https://hbr.org/2016/10/great-performers-make-their-personal-lives-a-priority

Investments in traditional leadership development are often misguided and a waste of money.

It’s not that development itself isn’t important. In a Deloitte study of 7,000 organizations this year, 89% of executives rated “strengthening the leadership pipeline” an urgent issue. That’s up from 86% last year, and the trend makes sense. Organizations are continuously promoting people into management, and those new leaders struggle with the transition. To help them in their new roles, companies spend almost $14 billion a year on courses, books, videos, coaches, tests, and executive education programs — and such spending rose 10% last year.

But there’s little evidence that much of this works.

Here’s what we learned about companies that have strong leadership pipelines and strong financial performance…

https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-5-elements-of-a-strong-leadership-pipeline

There are many reasons for envy to manifest itself in the daily theatre of the workplace: Competing for scarce resources or limited budgets, and vying for important assignments, are commonplace situations that can trigger predictable envy; Coveting attributes and qualities a colleague has that another might lack is another understandable possibility in the frailty of human nature; Losing a promotion to someone better qualified can also be a trigger for envy. Many of these situations are normal occurrences and cannot be avoided. They are a part of our workplace scenarios and many human resources practitioners have, at one time or other, witnessed a manifestation of these situations.

But there is an overlooked trigger for envy that may very well be an insidious cause of much discontent and disruption in the workplace. It is the leader’s unwitting behavior towards select people in the organization.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_65.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=04Oct16#np

Rumours, if you haven’t been a victim of one, you may have participated in one.

The whispers when a colleague is fired. The looks of understanding when two co-workers routinely “stay late to catch up on paperwork” on the same evening. The emails back and forth guessing at which department will suffer the largest budget cuts.

It’s difficult not to become involved in gossip at work. After all, people like gossip and interesting bits of information: you only have to look at the number of celebrity-focused publications to realize that we have a huge appetite for discussing other people’s lives. At work, however, this type of interaction is harmful and costly. It wastes time, damages reputations, promotes divisiveness, creates anxiety, and destroys morale.

So why do people start and spread rumors? Much of it has to do with our need to make sense of what’s happening around us. To understand what’s going on, people talk to one-another. And, together, they fill in the holes in the story with a little bit of fact – and a lot of guesswork. This new story spreads, with bits and pieces added along the way, until you have an out-of-control rumor spreading throughout your company…

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_25.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=04Oct16#np

How long has it been since you asked yourself what you want to be when you grow up?

If you haven’t considered the idea since high school, then you may have settled into a job that is not fulfilling your professional aspirations, or your purpose.

Each of us has particular talents that, when expressed or exercised, make the world a better place. Most likely you enjoy doing these things, and you find that people respond well to you when you do them. Perhaps they’re things you gravitate towards during out-of-hours activities, and that people respect you for.

When you develop these talents as far as you can, you can make your greatest possible contribution to the world, and enjoy personal and professional satisfaction that goes along with this.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_97.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=13Sep16#np

Have you ever worked on a project that had a tight-but-achievable deadline, and that needed your unique, expert knowledge for it to be completed successfully? Even though you found it challenging, you may have delivered some of your best work.

Or, think back to a project you worked on where there was little pressure to deliver. The deadline was flexible and the work wasn’t challenging. You may have done an average job, at best.

There’s a subtle relationship between pressure and performance. When your people experience the right amount of pressure, they do their best work. However, if there’s too much or too little pressure, then performance can suffer.

This relationship is explained by the Inverted-U Model, which we’ll look at in this article. This helps you get the best from your people, at the same time that you keep them happy and engaged.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/inverted-u.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20Sep16#np

Change initiatives fail when senior leaders don’t see that their organizations are social systems. Organizations are defined by bundles of local relationships, social expectations, and unwritten rules that exist between thousands of people. These people create tribes — collections of like-minded people who build patterns around how work gets done. This system is highly resistant to change, as anyone who as ever tried to “impose” change on a system knows.

The secret to changing an organization is to understand the fundamental units that make up the social system — these local tribes — and to invert the change process so that tribes own the change. To influence tribes in organizations, you have to give up control, and recognize that every change always goes through a process of localization as it gets executed.

https://hbr.org/2016/09/overcome-resistance-to-change-by-enlisting-the-right-people?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Just as we move through different stages in our life, so we also move through different stages in our career. And just as demands for our time in our personal life can vary, so can demands at work.

When peaks of demand in one area match troughs in another, life can be good. However, when demands are in synch we can experience dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, depression and a whole host of other ills. This makes it important to find an appropriate balance between your career and your life.

In 1980, Donald Super introduced a theory that describes career development in terms of Life Stages and Life Roles. Super’s original work on career development began in the 1930s and he wrote his defining book, “The Psychology of Careers,” in 1957. He modified his theories in 1980 to account for the fact that people were no longer continuing on a straight path of career development.

Super called this theory the “Life Career Rainbow.” The Life Career Rainbow represented in this article is adapted from Super’s work to further take account of modern career life patterns.

Here, we look at how you can use the Life Career Rainbow to find the work/life balance that suits you at this stage of your life and career.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_95.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20Sep16#np

How much time do you spend at work doing things that don’t contribute to your success? At first, you may say “not much.” But – especially if you haven’t used Activity Logs before – you may be surprised by how much more time you can find.

When you properly understand how you use your time at work, you can minimize or eliminate low value activities. This means that you can do more high value work, while still being able to leave the office at a sensible time.

So, how can you understand this? One useful way is to keep an Activity Log, and that’s what we’re looking at in this article.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_03.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20Sep16#np

The human brain is highly protective, leading us to sense and respond to danger automatically. This is quite useful when the threat is real, be it a hungry bear or a livid boss. But often we perceive more danger than there really is, and that can be debilitating.

Think, for example, how easy it is to psych ourselves out (and read the response as “negative”) when we initiate an honest but difficult conversation with a peer or boss. And think how easy it is to feel attacked and raw when we’re on the receiving end of tough feedback, whether or not the person giving it is actually offensive, defensive, or angry. Because we seldom test these reactions for accuracy, our thoughts quickly spiral to a place where they are no longer useful. Our sensitive “danger radar” make us feel safer in the short-term but can undermine our long-term goals — for instance, having honest conversations that allow for learning while leaving both parties feeling psychologically intact.

So how do we learn to challenge our automatic, often inaccurate, thought patterns and replace them with more realistic and productive interpretations?

https://hbr.org/2016/08/dont-let-your-brains-defense-mechanisms-thwart-effective-feedback