When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.
Perhaps gaining power doesn't cause people to act like takers. It simply creates the opportunity for people who think like takers to express themselves.
I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.
When young women get called bossy, it's often because they're trying to exercise power without status. It's not a problem that they're being dominant; the backlash arises because they're overstepping their status.
Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don't trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships - people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.
No one wants to hear everything that's in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.
It's true that every leader needs followers. We can't all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous - especially for an entity in formation.
Meditation isn't snake oil. For some people, meditation might be the most efficient way to reduce stress and cultivate mindfulness. But it isn't a panacea. If you don't meditate, there's no need to stress out about it.
When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn't know we had.
When takers talk about mistakes, they're usually quick to place the blame on other people. Givers are more likely to say 'Here's the mistake I made; I learned the following from it. Here are the steps I'm taking to make sure I don't let people down in the future.'
Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it's easy to thwart.
Kids who evolve into creative adults tend to have a strong moral compass.
Teams need the opportunity to learn about each other's capabilities and develop productive routines. So once we get the right people on the bus, let's make sure they spend some time driving together.
Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.
Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating.
We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives but that are better left unspoken.
If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent.
Saying no frees you up to say yes when it matters most.
If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.
In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.
As a man, it is true that I will never know what it is like to be a woman. As an organizational psychologist, though, I feel a responsibility to bring evidence to bear on dynamics of work life that affect all of us, not only half of us.
If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.
For women to achieve equal representation in leadership roles, it's important that they have the backing of men as well as women.
Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.
Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.
From a relationship perspective, givers build deeper and broader connections.
Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.
Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.
Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
I have lots of micro-goals of trying to get things done, whatever the amount of time available.
I love discovering compelling new ideas and doing what I can to help spread the word about them.
I try to get as close as I can to cleaning out my inbox every night.
If I had the day off and knew everyone else was voting, I wouldn't miss it. It would become a routine part of my responsibility as a citizen - like paying taxes, only less soul crushing.
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.
In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
When you're good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.
One of the signs of a bad coworker is a pattern of persistent undermining - intentionally hindering a colleague's success, reputation, or relationships.
If we want girls to receive positive reinforcement for early acts of leadership, let's discourage bossy behavior along with banning bossy labels. That means teaching girls to engage in behaviors that earn admiration before they assert their authority.
The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.
The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.
To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.
In life, there's no such thing as an unmitigated good.
If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
We have many identities, and we can't be authentic to them all. The best we can do is be sincere in our efforts to earn the values we claim.
The opposite of an underminer is a supporter. When colleagues are supportive, they go out of their way to be givers rather than takers, working to enhance our productivity, make us look good, share ideas, and provide timely help.
