Letting people stay in their comfort zone has a bad press; more people recommend setting stretch goals for your people so that they develop. These two ideas are actually complementary, as the simple chart Shows The inner or comfort zone represents the set of skills and tasks that a person has mastered; they’re comfortable doing …
When discussing with clients how to lead their staff, one question that arises often is, how much initiative should my people show? In their classic HBR article, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?  Oncken and Wass lay out a five-level scale of managerial initiative (1 – 5 in the figure). My clients’ staff are more resourceful and …
In August 2013, Melanie Glickman and I were invited to run a mini-workshop at a post-doc retreat in the Swiss Alps. The beautiful landscape was conducive to good and creative work. One of the workshop topics was what career options are open to post-docs who do not want to pursue the traditional academic career option of …
Clients regularly ask me about how they might criticise a colleague or employee, without that person taking offence – or how they might broach a delicate topic with someone. In most cases, the first step involves offering the colleague or employee some feedback. This is because an easy way to broach the topic (be it …
I often hear from clients about the side effects caused by the tension between their desire to collaborate and their people’s need for individual success. These can take the form of people hiding data from their colleagues or not putting them in shared directory structures. Some researchers resort to labelling their bottles of materials in a …
Darwin’s “Missing Link” That Could Revolutionise Your Team Read More »
Late one evening, when we were all sitting around and philosophising about life, a friend of mine said to me, “you know, you’ve clearly cold-bloodedly masterminded your career.” Through the rear-view mirror, it all looked planned. Hand on heart, none of it was planned. Instead, I developed and adopted a strategy that increased my options …
Ask a fresh-faced, bright-eyed Ph.D. student at the outset to name their career goal and a majority will say, “professor.” Although most of them will never get there. The numbers that achieve this goal are very low indeed, varying somewhere between 0.5-10%, depending on the country and discipline. One of the problems is that, inside academia, a non-academic …
It’s often said that the most important task for leaders is to develop their people. While there’s more than a grain of truth in this, there’s also an old saying from personal growth, Let It Begin With Me. To be able to develop others, you need to care for your own development if only so they can …
I caught up with my old friend, Mike Crawford while preparing a talk on research strategy. After a 30+ year career in academia, including 26+ years as a professor at U Texas at Austin, Mike joined a technology start-up as CTO in Idaho in 2004 and subsequently spent nine years at Siemens as a Fellow Engineer, before …
Meetings are the bedrock of getting things done in organizations, or at least they could be. Despite all the practice we get, most people complain about meeting quality. Don’t expect them to improve on their own. Eric Barker’s Barking up the Wrong Tree blog has pulled together useful meeting resources in an article 5 ways to …
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