#Coaching

Nov 13, 2015

Listening To Music While Working Can Be Distracting

I’ve heard business professionals claim that listening to music while working made them more productive. While it’s true that music can lift your mood and give you a relaxed focus, it can also decrease your performance on cognitively demanding tasks. So when can music improve performance? Annie Murphy Paul, in an article in Time.com, wrote “Music can improve performance when a well-practiced expert needs to achieve the relaxed focus necessary to execute a job he’s done many t

Sep 10, 2015

Talking Too Much and Not Listening

In a previous life and time, I worked as a mental health counselor. I was trained in the art of listening and would periodically have my listening skills evaluated by professors, supervisors, and even peers (on videos and in live sessions). It was stressful and sometimes I felt more like the patient/client than the therapist. After pivoting from the mental health field to the corporate world, I was naïve enough to think that I would no longer need to tap into my counseling sk

Aug 22, 2015

The Pitfalls of Telecommuting

[NOTE: This post was updated January 2017] I was contacted by a TV Producer at BBC News regarding my thoughts about the pitfalls of working at home. I am reposting my responses to her as well as add some additional information which, due to a tight schedule, I was not able to include in my original answers. Question: People often tout home working as being the future – but it isn’t really happening – at least in the UK. Why Not? I wrote about telecommuting (working from home

Jul 7, 2015

Job Crafting: Shape, Mold, and Redefine Your Job

In his book, Drive (2011), Daniel Pink wrote that one of the motivating factors for employees is having the autonomy over four areas of work: what they do, when they do it, how they do it, and with whom they do it. Pink called these the four Ts: employee’s task, time, technique, and team. When I was working for a school system overseas in the Northern Mariana Islands, serving the islands of Saipan, Rota, and Tinian, I came up with the idea of creating a crisis management work

Jun 1, 2015

Stop Telling People You’re a “Thought Leader” Because You’re Not

Is Thought Leadership Old Wine In New Bottles? There are certain words/phrases that irk me to no end — thought leader or thought leadership is one of them. I cringe every time I see the words “thought leader” or “thought leadership” on a website or by a person’s name. David Brooks wrote a satirical, op-ed piece in the New York Times in December 2013 titled, “The Thought Leader.” Describing the life of a “thought leader,” Brooks wrote: “[The thought leader] doesn’t have studen

Mar 25, 2015

100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Manager and HR

Description (from a Lominger flyer): In 100 Things, three internationally-recognized experts in human capital management provide the research behind the best people practices in an easy-to-read and easy-to-reference format. You’ll find research, discussion and a “so what” section (that tells you what best practices to follow as a result of the research) on the full range of HR people issues you deal with all the time—change management, HR effectiveness, measurement, campus re

Aug 10, 2014

In Chinese: Crisis Does NOT Mean Danger and Opportunity

[NOTE: This post was updated January 2017] JFK was wrong. On pinyin.info, a website about the Chinese language, Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, firmly corrects an American linguistic blunder that interprets the word “crisis” in Chinese as meaning both “danger” and “opportunity.” “The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishfu

Jul 26, 2014

I Will Teach My Daughter Not to Be Afraid

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” -George Bernard Shaw About a month ago, my wife and I became parents for the very first time. We are so blessed to have a healthy baby girl. She is truly a miracle. I joke with my coworkers that my daughter has very strong lungs. Peop

Jun 10, 2014

10 Life Lessons from Basic SEAL Training from Admiral William H. McRaven

For those unable to watch the video on my blog, you can watch it directly on YouTube (University of Texas at Austin 2014 Commencement Address – Admiral William H. McRaven), https://youtu.be/pxBQLFLei70. This is an inspiring and powerful 20-minute commencement speech by Naval Admiral William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, at the University-wide Commencement at The University of Texas at Austin on May 17, 2014. Admiral McRaven’s commencement spe

Feb 23, 2014

Locus of Control and The Zorro Circle

In his book, The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor talks about how by first limiting our focus on small, manageable goals, we can then expand our sphere of power from there. Achor used the movie “The Mask of Zorro” (starring Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins) as an example and describes what he calls The Zorro Circle. For those who have not seen it, there is a scene where young Alejandro (Zorro) is taught how to master the sword and other skills by first training in

Feb 9, 2014

Book Review: Scaling Up Excellence

As owner of the WorkplacePsychology.Net website, which continues to get a high number of visitors daily, I am frequently asked to review books. In fact, publicists and sometimes even authors will ask me to review their books. I rarely need or want to reach out to authors. Robert I. Sutton is one of those authors for whom I make an exception. Back in December 2013, I reached out to him for an advance copy of his new book to review. A few years earlier, I had reviewed professor

Sep 10, 2013

Why Leadership Is Important and Why People Want to Be Followers

[Note: This post was updated July 2022 for freshness & clarity.] I believe leadership is important because, if we examine history, no significant changes or advancement have occurred without some type of leadership. In the United States, we can see how leaders have mobilized followers to accomplish amazing things. Here are a few examples: George Washington → American Revolution Martin Luther King, Jr. → Civil Rights Movement Steve Jobs → Apple Computers (iPhone, iPad, iPod) I

Aug 8, 2013

Would You Work If You Won the Lottery?

The question is simple: If you were to win the lottery (also known as the lottery question), would you continue to work? The answer might surprise you because most people say yes. In fact, a survey of lottery winners showed that even those who won the lottery continued to work! The General Population Responses from 7,871 men and 7,549 women to the General Social Surveys conducted by the NORC for 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987-1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and

Jul 24, 2013

Workplace Bullying Is Not Employee Dissatisfaction and Is Different from School Bullying

This post is in response to an article titled “Thou Shalt Not Bully” that was posted on HCOnline, Australia’s online magazine for senior human resource professionals and corporate decision-makers. In the article, the author said: “[D]espite the best intentions of the [anti-bullying] legislation [in Australia], employers are faced with the prospect of an avalanche of complaints based on perceptions. Bullying has become the catch-all term for employee dissatisfaction.” The auth

Jul 3, 2013

Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Identity Crisis and How to Fix It

[NOTE: This post was updated February 2022 for freshness & clarity.] Recently, I’ve been struck by how stuck people and even organizations are in defining who they are and determining where they’re going. In particular, I have been very interested in following the struggles of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), to define and distinguish itself in an ever-crowded space. I examined seven I-O psychology textbooks hoping to find a simple, clear defin

Jun 19, 2013

Leadership and Management: Are They Different?

[Note: This post was updated March 2021 for freshness & clarity.] Northouse (2013) wrote that leadership and management are similar in many ways. Both involve influencing, achieving goals, and working with people. However, while they may share some similarities, there are distinct and important differences. Northouse said the study of leadership goes as far back as the times of Aristotle, while the concept of management came about “around the turn of the 20th century with the

Jun 5, 2013

Locus of Control: Stop Making Excuses and Start Taking Responsibility

[NOTE: This post was updated June 2020 for freshness & accuracy] In my former career as a mental health counselor, I encountered many clients who struggled with taking charge of their own lives. While their struggles might have differed, the idea behind helping them was almost always the same, and quite basic. We’re taught to guide clients from seeing themselves as being victims of life’s circumstances to being movers of those life events. In other words, help clients reach d

Sep 30, 2012

Good Liars: Their Characteristics and Why They are So Hard to Detect

[NOTE: This post was updated December 2017] Politicians and car salesmen are notorious for being dishonest. But what’s often overlooked are skilled liars who might be a coworker, a supervisor, a top executive, a family member, or even a neighbor. It isn’t until a major scandal, like the ones involving Ponzi schemers Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff, that people take note that lying is more pervasive and much more difficult to detect than we think. The scandal in 2009 involved

Aug 22, 2012

Book Review-The Orange Revolution

I’m a very picky book reader. Prior to reading “The Orange Revolution: How One Great Team Can Transform an Entire Organization,” I had actually started and given up reading several other business books. But “The Orange Revolution” restored my belief that business books can be entertaining, researched-based, and instructive. Culling research from a 350,000-person database (employees from 28 industries) by the Best Companies Group, as well as from their own interviews with exce

Mar 21, 2012

Overreliance on Computer May Leave You Ill-Suited for High-Trust Jobs

[NOTE: This post was updated March 2018] Many of us have seen, heard, or read about the computer geek who is so consumed about interacting with his computer that he forgets how to interact with other people in a real-world situation. Well, there’s actually research to confirm this! But what is really surprising is not just anecdotal but goes far beyond it. It is estimated that 20% of all digital natives* satisfy the clinical criteria for pathological Internet use (Mullen, 201