ConceptsNest

Everyone wants to improve their company culture . Culture has become the ultimate buzzword these days. Leaders also seem to talk about it all the time . Let’s look past the buzz and grasp the roots of organizational culture. If we want to influence our company culture, we have to start with a keen understanding of what culture actually is. What Is Company Culture? Culture is the thing we cannot necessarily touch and feel — it is the invisible binds and unspoken rules that enforce “how people do things around here.” However, this definition can be insufficient at times. “The way we do things” feels awfully vague and amorphous, especially when it comes to thinking about how to intentionally create a company culture we’re proud of. As a result, our attempts to influence culture get muddled . We conflate culture with surface-level relics, confusing culture with “Things To Make People Feel Good.” - ping pong tables, happy hours and free lunches. Sure, those are part of “the way we do

  “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”- Leo Tolstoy. Why don't facts change our minds? And why would someone continue to believe a false or inaccurate idea anyway? How do such behaviors serve us? The Logic of False Beliefs Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive . If our model of reality is wildly different from the actual world, then we struggle to take effective actions each day. However, truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. Humans also seem to have a deep desire to belong. “Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers . Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our e

  We tend to think that we are who we are and there is not much we can do about that. But the fact is, we choose our personality and who we are. Our personality is shaped by the choices we make over time. One of the most frequent questions in personal development probably is “Can I change my personality type?” According to most personality type theories, the person’s type is inborn and does not change . However, people can develop traits and habits that differ or even directly contradict the description of their type.   An example may help us understand better. Suppose lights in the room suddenly go off and we are in complete darkness. We may be able to navigate our way to the door, but which of our senses will come into play? Touch? Hearing? Smell? It would be anything but vision, our preferred sense. As soon as the lights come back on, we will switch back to using vision again as it makes it much easier to navigate around the room. The way our personality works is quite ident

A Short Story- Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine: In 1952, polio killed more children than any other communicable disease. Nearly 58,000 people were infected. The situation was on the verge of becoming an epidemic and the country desperately needed a vaccine. In a small laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, a young researcher named Jonas Salk was working tirelessly to find a cure. (Years later, author Dennis Denenberg would write, “Salk worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years.”). Despite all his effort, Salk was stuck. His quest for a polio vaccine was meeting a dead end at every turn. Eventually, he decided that he needed a break. Salk left the laboratory and retreated to the quiet hills of central Italy where he stayed at a 13th-century Franciscan monastery known as the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. The basilica could not have been more different than the lab. The architecture was a beautiful combination of Romanesque and Gothic styles. White-was

“ I need to figure out how to motivate my employees.”  When was the last time we thought that to ourselves? It could have been the other week when you noticed one of your direct reports dragging his feet on a project that’s critical to the company. Or, perhaps it was the other month when you felt frustrated that your team was not being proactive about addressing customer issues. We hear this sentiment of “how to motivate employees” frequently from managers we work with. We, as leaders, are not the only ones thinking this. Employees  themselves  admit that they do not feel as motivated at work as they would like. According to research, only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.   However, this question of, “How to motivate my employees as a manager?” is a misguided one. It implies that motivation is something we  give  another person. That is patently false. Motivation is not a thing we give to peopl