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How to Get Experts to Work Together Effectively

How should teams of experts working on knowledge-intensive projects be structured? Should they be hierarchical? Or will flexible, self-organized groups perform better?  Teams often struggle with how to get the most value from the members’ expertise, to minimize conflict, to integrate their diverse expertise, and to leverage it during all phases of a project. The traditional approach is to put the person with the most experience and expertise in charge — for example, a head coach or a chief programmer. The assumption is that this person has the expertise to make the best decisions about how to allocate tasks and responsibilities. Teams that adopt this model feature a rigid hierarchy, whereby final decisions are centralized through this single, formally designated individual. The downside of this approach is that when projects increase in complexity and team size, the central individual can become a communication and coordination bottleneck for the team. Another approac

How to React to Biased Comments at Work

Bias at work can be overt and insidious. It can be shocking and enraging. But the subtle “Wait, what just happened?” moments are far more frequent. Take these examples: A client assumes you are in a subordinate role because of your age. A prospective customer only makes eye contact with your white colleague. A coworker calls you “angry” while your equally assertive male counterpart gets labeled “strong” (a far too often occurrence for women as   one of our previous studies   showed). Moments like these leave you questioning others’ intentions and your own perceptions. The inner dialogue can sound a bit like, “I’m upset. But should I be? Do I have a right to be?” At best, this shadowy bias is exhausting. At worst, it is soul destroying. Bias’s sometimes slippery nature also makes it difficult to eradicate in the workplace. Leaders implement policies that prohibit discrimination against protected classes, but rules can’t prevent unconscious, unintentional bias. How do you legis

How to Tell Your Boss You Have Too Much Work

These days it seems like most people have too much on their plate. Everyone complains about feeling overworked. So how do you tell your boss you simply have too much to do? No one wants to come across as lazy, uncommitted, or not a team player. How can you protect your image as a hard worker while saying uncle? What the Experts Say No matter how busy you are, it can feel exceedingly difficult to talk to your boss about your heavy workload. The reason is twofold, according to Julie Morgenstern, productivity expert and author of  Never Check E-Mail in the Morning .  First, you may worry that by saying something you’re going to lose your job. “In the bottom of your belly is this feeling that if you can’t handle the work, there’s someone else who can; you feel dispensable,” she says. Second, “the natural tendency is to think, ‘I am not working hard enough, smart enough, or efficiently enough. I should be able to handle this.’ So you suffer in silence.” But doing so is dangerous for

How To Keep Working Into Your 60s And Beyond

A  study  by University of Michigan researchers I just read about in the  Squared Away   blog  from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College noted that “about 40% of Americans who were still working when they turned 62 had moved to a new occupation sometime after age 55.” But when older workers  change occupations  later in life, the study added, “they experience a decrease in hourly earnings.” Let me unpack that study, which was called  Occupational Transitions at Older Ages: What Moves are People Making?  Then, I’ll offer my five rules to follow if you want to keep working into your 60s or beyond — especially if you want to change careers to do it. Taking a Pay Cut After a Career Switch I wasn’t terribly surprised by the researchers’ pay cut finding. The truth is, based on the workers I’ve studied and interviewed for  my books  and articles, most workers who change careers take a step down in salary when they start over. But here’s the interesting part: Th

3 Tips For Finding Your Ideal Workflow

When most of us think of flow at work, we may think of charts, project plans and deadlines. But there is another kind of work flow that is incredibly important, especially for entrepreneurs. Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized the concept of “flow” in the early 1990’s. According to his theory, flow manifests itself when a person’s natural skills align with the challenges they face. When people operate outside of their flow, problems arise.  For example, if an individual works in a highly challenging environment in which their natural skills are outclassed, they tend to experience terrible anxiety and stress. Conversely, if an individual’s advanced skills are wasted in an industry that is neither interesting nor challenging, boredom and apathy quickly set in. In the world of business, this situation occurs when an individual’s natural skills and proclivities are simply not a fit for the career they chose. That’s why I believe that finding the right

How to Handle Stress in the Moment

You hear a lot of advice about how to reduce stress at work. But most of it is about what to do over the long term — take up yoga, eat a healthy diet, keep a journal, or  get more sleep . But what do you do when you’re overcome with stress in the moment — at your desk, say, or in a meeting? Perhaps you’ve heard bad news from a client or were assigned yet another project. How can you regain control? What the Experts   Say Eighty percent of Americans are stressed at work, according to a  recent study  by Nielsen for Everest College. Low pay, unreasonable workloads, and hectic commutes were the top sources of tension, followed closely by obnoxious coworkers. What exacerbates the problem is that “people walk into work already laden with stress,” says Maria Gonzalez, the founder and president of Argonauta Strategic Alliances Consulting and the author of  Mindful Leadership . “If there is a hardship at home, you bring that to the office and it gets layered with your professional st