Curious Minds at Work

As you move up in leadership roles, you gain more power. Initially, you may take it in stride, thinking it’s something you earned and something you’d never let get in the way of being the manager you want to be.

But as the pressure to perform grows, the gap in power between you and your team creates blind spots that can erode these relationships.

Former Microsoft executive and Fortune 500 coach, Sabina Nawaz, experienced these challenges in her own career and, today, she coaches executives working through them. It’s why she wrote the book, You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). And in this conversation, she shares tools to help leaders manage their blind spots.

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Managing up is crucial for your success. It’s about knowing your career goals and aligning them with your manager’s needs and priorities. Yet it’s a skill we’re rarely taught and one we rarely see done well.  

For Melody Wilding, this gap in how to manage her career became clear when it caused her to lose her job. It’s what made her want to write her latest book, Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge.

In this conversation we talk about how to get aligned with your manager on what’s most important to them in ways that also help you, how to engage in effective networking, and how to promote yourself in the workplace.

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On the surface, trust seems simple. You either trust someone or you don’t. That’s why I was so intrigued by Charles Feltman’s book, The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work.

Charles is a leadership coach and trust expert. And where others view trust as binary, he sees it in four dimensions.

He describes what each dimension looks like and explains how to assess the gaps. Then he talks about how we can address those gaps in ourselves – and with others, including our managers.

I’m able to see trust in a completely different way and think you will, too.

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We’re all virtual communicators. Even if we don’t work remotely, we’re texting, using social media, and making phone calls. But the question is, are we good at it? Do we know the best practices that can set us apart?

Andrew Brodsky can teach us. He’s a management professor and virtual communication expert. In this episode, we discuss his book, Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. We talk about ways to build trust, increase likability, and manage digital conflicts. He shares insights we can immediately put into action.

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Most advice on power is about why we need it or how we can get it. And it's typically focused on things outside us, like titles or promotions.

While these external markers are important, they can leave us empty inside. 

Advice that focuses solely on external power leaves out how to build and maintain the crucial internal power we need.  That’s why Chris Lipp decided to mine the research on personal power and, ultimately, to write a book on it. In this interview we talk about his latest book, The Science of Personal Power: How to Build Confidence, Create Success, and Obtain Freedom. 

Chris’s book gives us an opportunity to build the inner foundation for success, so we can match it with external achievements. If you're looking for a book with concrete ways to center and inspire you in your work - and in your life - you'll find it here.

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Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist and the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He believes leaders are made, not born, and he’s spent decades proving it.

In this interview, we talk about his findings and how they apply to today’s leaders. We also discuss his latest book, Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. In it, he shares three characteristics people repeatedly bring up when describing truly great leaders: they act as visionaries, exemplars, and mentors.

Adam’s written an insightful guide for current and aspiring leaders looking to take their craft to the next level.

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Conversations play a big role in our personal and professional lives. It’d be hard to build or maintain a relationship without them.  

That’s why Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School Professor and conversation expert, has written the book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She’s found that if we improve our conversations, even a little, the results can be game changing.

In this interview, we talk about the framework she’s developed to help us do that. We also discuss how to improve our one-on-one and group conversations. Finally, we learn effective ways to manage difficult conversations, including apologies.

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With few exceptions, we have digital footprints. And each time we scroll social media, run a Google search, or use a smartphone to navigate, we’re adding data to that footprint. While we gain a lot from our ability to do all these things, we also feed companies the data they need to target us.

Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist and professor at Columbia Business School. Over the course of her career, she’s consulted with companies eager to profit from our data. In recent years, she’s intentionally shifted her consulting work in support of organizations that want to protect consumer data.

In this interview, I talk to Matz about her book, Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior. We discuss the methods companies use to profile us and how that profiling puts all the power in their hands. We also discuss promising ideas for pushing back, including solutions to empower and unite us.

Matz has written an accessible, highly readable book that anyone with a smartphone needs to read. 

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We go to the dentist, get our eyes checked, and get our cars inspected. These regularly scheduled health and safety audits let us know how we’re doing.

But we rarely audit how we spend our time.

Sure, most of us have a calendar. Yet few of us study how these calendar events impact our happiness. We rarely track the connection between what we spend our time doing and how well we’re flourishing.

As a result, we can find ourselves feeling unhappy, frustrated, and what scientists call “time poor.”

Researchers like Cassie Holmes want to change that. They’ve learned there’s a strong connection between how we spend our time and how happy we feel. In her book, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most, she shares ways we can optimize our calendars for happiness, including ways to avoid distraction, extend joy, create a meaningful schedule, and avoid regret.

Holmes’ tips on time tracking and time auditing are simple and powerful. As the year draws to a close, this may be just the book you’re looking for as we head into a new year.

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If you’re a woman in the workplace, you know the deck is rarely stacked in your favor. For example, promotions are harder to come by. The gender wage gap is real. And power can feel elusive.

Psychology professor and researcher, Alison Fragale, has studied the power problem for decades. What she’s figured out is that the solution lies with status. But, as she argues in her book, Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve, if women shift their focus to cultivating status, they get further ahead in solving the power problem.

Alison Fragale has unlocked the key to achieving greater status in the workplace. And she shares practical tips on how to get started. It’s a book I’ll be recommending to all my friends

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The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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