Most Popular Editorials: How to Talk to an Employee Who Isn’t Meeting Their Goals

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How to Talk to an Employee Who Isn’t Meeting Their Goals Having to tell someone that they’re not meeting their work standards can get awkward fast. Luckily, simply asking them to evaluate themselves can do a lot of the work for you. If they can spot the problems on their own, it saves you a lot of trouble. If not, make sure that your goals and visions are aligned. State the non-negotiables and how it can help them further their career. Be clear about your employee’s failings by describing specific examples and behaviors you observed, giving them guidelines about how they can get back on track. Ask them to create an improvement plan and then review together, filling any gaps they might have missed, setting deadlines, and explaining repercussions if the goals are not met. Confrontation about shortcomings is much easier when it’s done with a shared vision, clear expectations, and a plan to move forward. Continued here

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I Left My Corporate Job -- and These 8 Things Became Clear | Inc.com After more than two great decades at Procter & Gamble, I made the leap--a planned exit from corporate life to go all-in on my former side hustle of writing, speaking, and teaching. Now this is my full hustle and believe me, I'm hustlin' (and loving every minute of it). Continued here

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How to Get Your To-Do List Done When You’re Always in Meetings You keep waiting for the “perfect time” to sit down and knock out your work presentation in one go, but at the end of the day you realize you spent your time in meetings. You may never get your perfect time or ideal day, so start working within the reality that meetings happen — and that you can get important stuff done in between them. Try to break down the big task into bite-sized ones you can fit in between your meetings. You can also try scheduling in your project work time by blocking off a couple hours at a time and trying to stick to that schedule. Once you have that time, you can prioritize which projects you want to work on and in what order. Don’t let meetings keep you from getting those projects done. There’s plenty of time, if you can strategize and prepare for it. Continued here

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Brené Brown’s Empire of Emotion | The New Yorker In August, Brené Brown, the Houston-based writer, researcher, professor, social worker, podcast host, C.E.O., and consultant-guru to organizations including Pixar, Google, and the U.S. Special Forces, met with a group of graduate students at the McCombs School of Business, at the University of Texas at Austin, to talk about emotions. Brown, fifty-five, was wearing a shiny maize blouse, jeans, and a black face mask. It was the first day of her new class, Dare to Lead, and she stood onstage in a small auditorium. There were about a hundred people in the room; Brown had them stand up and introduce themselves. “Howdy!” a Black student in a fleece jacket said, giving a Longhorns salute. “Who else is from Washington, D.C.?” Other students were from Texas, Nigeria, Ohio, Hong Kong. They were concentrating in fields like accounting and management, and they were going to confront one another’s humanity. Continued here

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How to Live to 100: A Definitive Guide to Longevity Fitness - InsideHook At this point, we’re all familiar with the trope. A local news station visits a retirement home to celebrate Muriel’s 106th birthday. She’s deaf or blind or both or neither, sitting in a wheelchair in the “good spot” next to the TV set, and a reporter asks her her secret. You’ve lived through both World Wars?! How’d you do it? Then Muriel gets to flash a mischievous grin and tells us she smoked a pack a day for 50 years. Continued here

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How to Identify Your Shadow Emotions (and Why You Should) At some point in our childhood, we learn that living in a society means controlling certain emotions. We suppress, in particular, emotions we consider to be “negative”—fear, anger, jealousy, selfishness—for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we consider them shameful. However suppressed these negative emotions are, they are still there, creating what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a “shadow self,” complete with “shadow emotions.” Continued here

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How to raise a boy: my mission to bring up a son fit for the 21st century | Parents and parenting | The Guardian My little son has a gang he roots for. All boys, dudes everywhere – they’re his gang. I figured this out, recently, when we sat down to watch the Grand National. He’d picked a horse in the family sweepstake and his choice was out in front for most of the race. When it fell back, out of contention, my son paled a bit. Possibly he’d already spent the sweepstake winnings in his head (on stickers, sweets, toy balls) but he took the disappointment quite well, I thought, for a four-year-old. The race was won in the end by a female jockey. It was the only time a woman had ever finished first in a Grand National, the commentators shouted. And all at once my son did cry, real fat gushers, instant snot moustache, the works. Now this was too much, if a girl had gone and beaten all the boys. Continued here

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How to make a 5-hour workday the most productive Scandinavian countries dominate the World Happiness Report—Norway being the third most productive country in the world and Helsinki winning the title of the best city for work-life balance. And their standard working week is less than 40 hours long. They work a whopping 359 hours less than Americans every year. Continued here

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Climate change: Five dealmakers who will influence the outcome at COP26 - BBC News Not only do countries have differing national priorities, but to make things even more confusing, nations forge alliances with each other and form negotiating blocs within the talks. Countries can be members of several different groups at the same time. Continued here

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The Brutal Truth You Need to Accept If You Want to Stop Feeling Constantly Overwhelmed | Inc.com If you feel there aren't enough hours in the day, there are a million and one gurus and companies out there willing to sell you a solution. They've got scheduling hacks, project management tools, and relevant research to offer. Some of this stuff is even useful. But even if you implement every good idea in the bunch, I've got bad news for you: You're still going to feel endlessly overwhelmed.  Continued here

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The Long History of Japan’s Tidying Up | The New Yorker “You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly,” a guru writes. “If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again . . . but if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them.” You would be forgiven for mistaking this advice as a passage from one of Marie Kondo’s best-selling books. But they are the words of Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and a nourisher of the American counterculture. He wrote them in 1970, more than a decade before Kondo was born. Continued here

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Three Simple Ways to Find the Meaning of Life - The Atlantic People who believe that they know their life’s meaning enjoy greater well-being than those who don’t. One 2019 study found that agreeing with the statement “I have a philosophy of life that helps me understand who I am” was associated with fewer symptoms of depression and higher positive affect. Continued here

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How Leaders Can Get Honest, Productive Feedback Great leaders are great learners. Their never-ending pursuit of information pushes them to constantly improve and sets them apart from the rest. Feedback serves a crucial role in this process, but getting and learning from it isn’t always easy. If you want to get the feedback that is necessary to improve your leadership, there are a few steps you can take. First, build and maintain a psychologically safe environment. Sharing feedback is often interpersonally risky. To increase the likelihood of your colleagues taking that risk with you, show them that their honesty is valued. You can do this by asking open-ended questions like, “What did you hear when I shared my strategy?” or “How did it feel to you when I sent that email?” Next, be sure to ask for both positive and negative feedback. Listen carefully when receiving it — even if you disagree. You may feel happy, angry, confused, or frustrated by what you hear. Recognize that your reactions are about you, and not the other person. Lastly, express gratitude. Now that you have some new data, you can reflect on the meaning and implication of what you heard, consider what you need to work on, and make a plan of action. Continued here

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How Russia Is Cashing In on Climate Change - The New York Times Nowhere do the prospects seem brighter than in Russia’s Far North, where rapidly rising temperatures have opened up a panoply of new possibilities, like mining and energy projects. Perhaps the most profound of these is the prospect, as early as next year, of year-round Arctic shipping with specially designed “ice class” container vessels, offering an alternative to the Suez Canal. Continued here

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Highly Intelligent People Are Less Satisfied By Friendships In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers Norman Li and Satoshi Kanazawa report that highly intelligent people experience lower life satisfaction when they socialize with friends more frequently. These are the Sherlocks and the Newt Scamanders of the world — the very intelligent few who would be happier if they were left alone. Continued here

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The On/Off Trick and Other Best Hacks for Handling Stress - Nir and Far Unlike other animals, which (as far as we know) react solely to what’s going on in their environment, humans can imagine entire realities in our heads. These alternate realities make us act in all sorts of strange ways. For instance, while zebras will run from the sound of a lion in the brush, humans will stampede at the start of a Black Friday sale, imagining the deals we’ll miss if we don’t elbow our way through. Continued here

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'Waning' Immunity: What Falling Antibody Counts Really Mean - The Atlantic In early March, Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, celebrated a milestone: hitting the point of full vaccination, two weeks after getting his second Pfizer shot. Since then, he’s been watching the number of coronavirus antibodies in his blood slowly but surely decline. Continued here

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Simplify Your Time Management With the 'Rule of 4' | Inc.com Simon Sinek has spoken about how much value he's gotten from studying the work of his longtime professional rival Adam Grant. Watching another person do very similar work but with his own unique strengths on display, Sinek claims, both frustrated him and helped him grow. For me, the person who very often makes me feel that way is Oliver Burkeman.  Continued here

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3 Ways Senior Leaders Create a Toxic Culture The people at the top of an organization have a disproportionate level of influence over those they lead. If you and your fellow executives fall into bad habits, it’s likely that those further down in the organization will emulate them. There are three common habits you especially want to avoid: (1) Scattered priorities. The implications for an organization whose leadership team is poorly focused are serious: Wasted resources, wasted effort, and widespread confusion become the norm. (2) Unhealthy rivalry. Leadership teams must operate as a unified force. Shared goals must be accompanied by shared accountability. (3) Unproductive conflict. Speaking negatively behind one another’s backs, withholding honest perspectives, or vetoing decisions after they are made should be unacceptable. Continued here

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Chart: A Global Look at How People Spend Their Time When it comes to paid work, Japan emerges the highest on this list with approximately 5.5 hours per day. However, this country also has some of the highest overtime in a workweek. In contrast, European countries such as France and Spain report nearly half the same hours (less than 3 hours) of paid work per day on average. Continued here

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How to retrain your frazzled brain and find your focus again | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian Picture your day before you started to read this article. What did you do? In every single moment – getting out of bed, turning on a tap, flicking the kettle switch – your brain was blasted with information. Each second, the eyes will give the brain the equivalent of 10m bits (binary digits) of data. The ears will take in an orchestra of sound waves. Then there’s our thoughts: the average person, researchers estimate, will have more than 6,000 a day. To get anything done, we have to filter out most of this data. We have to focus. Continued here

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You're Trying to Do Too Much - Scott H Young I’ve been teaching online courses for 10+ years. A typical student has an array of varied interests and passions. They want to learn Spanish and guitar. And also machine learning and web development. Oh, and they want to start an online business—so they’d better learn marketing too. Continued here

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Why Business Travel's Demise Could Have Big Consequences | Time The traveling life has its perks—Henrichs, the CEO of Alloy Labs, a consortium of community banks, has Executive Platinum status on American Airlines, Gold Elite status at Marriott, and membership in not one but three private airport lounges. He has 350,000 miles, which he can use to fly his whole family across the world for free. Continued here

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Explained | Why do governments want a global minimum corporate tax rate? - The Hindu The story so far: As many as 136 countries entered into an agreement earlier this month to redistribute taxing rights and impose a global minimum corporate tax on large multinational corporations. With the new agreement signed at a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, countries want to put an end to tax competition that has over the years forced global corporate tax rates to drop. Continued here

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COVID-19 pandemic drove flu to historic lows, and may have eliminated one virus type completely - ABC News There is a chance this particular virus — the Yamagata virus — might be lurking in a pocket of the world somewhere, according to Ian Barr, deputy director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute, and co-author of one of the studies. Continued here

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Facebook's Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford's | WIRED When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen appeared before Congress last week, it felt like it might finally be a turning point. Haugen’s testimony created a major crisis for a company that until recently seemed unable to be regulated, and unlikely to be broken up. Scandals before this have made splashes yet somehow haven’t resulted in meaningful change. But if history is any indication, the tide is about to turn. Continued here

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This startup is creating personalized deepfakes for corporations Major companies in India are using Rephrase.ai to create avatars of celebrities and executives, and commercial use is coming soon. Continued here

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Is Quitting Contagious? - Scientific American Blog Network Employee retention is a top-of-mind concern for any organization looking to be competitive in today's market. For all that technology has to offer, in our knowledge-based global economy a company's primary assets are still its employees. It's concerning—and somewhat of a red flag—when employees quit in succession. Why does the departure of a key team member serve as the catalyst for turnover? While there are a number of reasons why employees may decide to leave an organization, including job satisfaction and organizational and economic market factors, an often overlooked reason may be their coworkers. When a group of employees leave an organization in a rapid cycle, it may be due to the influence of their immediate peer group. Continued here

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Minimalist beauty: how to keep your regime simple | Wallpaper* It’s a bit of an understatement to say we have a soft spot for minimalism here at Wallpaper*. From architecture to design, art to fashion, we can’t resist an elegantly pared-down creation. It should come as no surprise, then, that we’re enthusiastic proponents of minimal beauty too.  Continued here

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Beyond income: Redrawing Asia’s consumer map | McKinsey

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Microsoft’s Satya Nadella on Flexible Work, the Metaverse, and the Power of Empathy For episode 1 of the HBR video series “The New World of Work”, editor in chief Adi Ignatius sits down with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to discuss rapidly evolving trends in how we collaborate, especially in a hybrid world. Nadella suggests that technology can create a metaverse that will help bridge the virtual and real worlds. He also talks about experiments at Microsoft and elsewhere that ensure both weak and strong ties remain strong in hybrid work, and discusses the overriding power of empathy as a leader and as a catalyst for innovation. Continued here

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Eat this to save the world! The most sustainable foods – from seaweed to venison | Food | The Guardian Was ever a word so misused as “sustainable”? “Healthy” comes close, and indeed the two are often bandied around together, in trite “good for you, good for the planet” taglines that often appear on foods which are anything but. The question of what we should eat to help combat climate change and environmental degradation has never been more important – nor so confusing. In July, the government will publish its National Food Strategy, based on a year-long independent review, which should shed some light on the matter. In the meantime, there are some foods which, with caveats, you can scoff with a clear conscience. Continued here

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Inside 'Wheel of Time,' Amazon’s Huge Gamble on the Next 'Game of Thrones' | GQ Not long ago, this quarry, 40 kilometers outside Prague, held a carefully built fake town called the Two Rivers. Then, a few days back, the producers and set dressers of Amazon's The Wheel of Time burned it down. The town's inn, an intricately rendered two-story building, is now blackened, its left side plunged into spiky rubble: Smoke machines give the impression that it is still smoldering. There are holes in roofs, artfully destroyed beams. Every house—interior and exterior—has been charred enough so that it shows on camera. The actors who wander the Two Rivers are made up to match. Rosamund Pike, who starred in Gone Girl, is smudged with soot. Rain has begun to come down in earnest, pooling in the muddy streets and making the extras and the stuntmen shiver. Michael McElhatton, who played Roose Bolton on Game of Thrones and is playing a character called Tam al'Thor on The Wheel of Time, sits on a stump in the middle of it all in a big down jacket, staring at nothing in particular. Continued here

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⚠️ Caution! ⚠️ These emoji mean different things in different countries

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How Netflix's Choice Engine Drives Its Business - By Eric Johnson - Behavioral Scientist It’s Friday night after a long week, and you’re definitely going to relax and watch a movie. So you turn to Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service. It is also the prototypical choice engine: its goal is to help you find something to watch. It does not just passively present options, it tries to customize the set of things that you see, it gives you some control over what is presented, and it even helps you comprehend new options you might like. Continued here

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'The Body Keeps the Score': Are Trauma Books Helpful During the Pandemic? - The Atlantic Nothing about The Body Keeps the Score screams “best seller.” Written by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the book is a graphic account of his decades-long career treating survivors of traumatic experiences such as rape, incest, and war. Page after page, readers are asked to wrestle with van der Kolk’s theory that trauma can sever the connection between the mind, which wants to forget what happened, and the body, which can’t. The book isn’t academic, exactly, but it’s dense and difficult material written with psychology students in mind. Here’s one line: “The elementary self system in the brainstem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal.” Continued here

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Procrastination is hurting Future You. Present You can help. If you found this article on social media, it’s likely that the bulk of the comments are some variation of “I’ll read this later, lol.” For a lot of reasons, those people aren’t as clever as they think. First of all, it’s far from being an original joke. Second of all, not reading an article immediately would only be an example of procrastination if there was a reason you needed to read it but have decided—for no valid reason—to do something less important instead. Continued here

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7 Questions to Ask Your New Boss The most important relationship to get right when starting a new job is the one with your boss. How do you build trust right from the beginning? And how do you get the feedback you need to succeed? The author offers seven questions to try. You will accelerate your career success if you can manage your boss better, which requires you to understand them better, which requires a deliberate strategy.  Continued here

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Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ - The Atlantic Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk. Continued here

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Agility Hacks In the past 20 years, the agile approach to improving products, services, and processes has swept the business world. Rooted in software development, agile has spread to many other functions, and some companies have turned much of their organization, including the C-suite, into agile teams. Continued here