January 2017 – Melissa Williams-Gurian

26Jan 2017 by melissa No Comments

Want to Grow Your Life? Allow Boredom.

Article

In a recent story in Wired Magazine, How Being Bored Out of Your Mind Makes You More Creative, author Clive Thompson describes two recent studies that suggest that working on boring tasks is good for creativity. Writes Thompson, “In one [study], researchers asked a group of subjects to do something boring, like copying out numbers from a phone book, and then take tests of creative thinking, such as devising uses for a pair of cups. The result? Bored subjects came up with more ideas than a nonbored control group, and their ideas were often more creative. In a second study, subjects who took an ‘associative thought’ word test came up with more answers when they’d been forced to watch a dull screensaver.” The psychologists Thompson spoke to speculated that boredom may…

Conversational Chemistry

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Brain science can help leaders understand how to have great conversations. That’s one important message I learned from reading the work of Judith Glaser. Glaser, an executive coach and author of several business books, including Conversational Intelligence, describes the kinds of conversations that activate higher-level intelligence such as trust, integrity, empathy, and good judgment. One of Glaser’s important insights is that our conversations create biochemical reactions—in ourselves, and in others. It starts at the “moment of contact,” she says, between one person and another. To make this work for you, it's helpful to read Glaser's work, to understand the neuroscience behind our interactions. But for starters, here are a few conversational rituals any leader can adopt to deeply connect with others, in a way that builds trust and creates the…

Great Bosses Do These Three Things

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If one of your resolutions in the New Year is to become an even better boss, new research suggests your employees won’t just be happier as a result—they’ll also become more productive employees. Stanford Business professor Kathryn Shaw worked on a case study with Edward Lazear and Christopher Stanton which used data-driven analysis to study the influence of supervisors on employee productivity at a bank. According to the study results, the difference in productivity between employees with the best supervisors and others is significant, and measurable. “Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10 percent of boss quality with one who is in the upper 10 percent of boss quality increases a team’s total output by more than adding one worker to a nine-member team would,” the study found.…