In turbulent times like these, it’s natural for people to hold back and avoid taking risks at work. This can mean a reluctance to report mistakes, ask questions, offer new ideas, or challenge a plan. People, whether they’re aware of it or not, try to protect their reputations and jobs. Unfortunately, the same behaviors that feel risky to individual employees are precisely what their companies need in order to thrive in this uncertain economic climate.

By Constance Noonan Hadley, Mark Mortensen, and Amy C. Edmondson

The flow of feedback is important for everyone, but all too often, it ends up feeling forced, formal, and infrequent. As a result, people’s development stalls and team growth is stifled. To overcome these challenges, managers can take the lead on creating a shared understanding of what feedback is for, increasing the speed and ease of feedback, and unlocking difficult conversations through the art of asking. The authors present several strategies for creating a culture of fearless and frequent feedback.

By Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis

"Soft" and "hard" skills are typically pitted as opposites, but history shows they're not. This cultural categorization captured my curiosity years ago, and when I wrote about how the technical/non-technical divide impacted my identity [1], it went viral.

By Andréa Goulet

In October 2018, the Japanese IT company Yumemi launched a so-called “Agile Organization Declaration.” Over the years, this inspired them to launch a series of unique workplace practices such as the "Everyone-CEO system,” an unlimited paid leave policy, radical transparency, an extremely decentralized organization structure, and the self-determination of salaries. Recently, I interviewed Toshiyuki Kataoka, the CEO who has been driving this change. This is what I learned.

By Yuji Yamada

User story mapping is a powerful tool for coming up with timely, user-focused key results with your product development team.

By Jeff Gothelf

What makes a good goal? Most of us have heard of "SMART goals" (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound), but in my experience, SMART is only the tip of the iceberg. OKRs, to their benefit, seek to encourage some positive goal-setting habits, but ultimately they are still goals.

By John Cutler

Make sense of messy thoughts with an Affinity Map

By Kim Witten