The limitations of the cross-cultural lens for explaining individual behavior

In this 1983 article, Indrei Ratiu describes how the “most international” managers consider both cultural and individual factors when interpreting their international colleagues’ behavior. When working internationally, it is a good idea to study cultural patterns, but it is often even more important to pay close attention to the person in front of you right […]

All those models making you feel dizzy? CIAO is a simple framework that helps you connect the feedback and feedforward loops that are the engine of continuous learning

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one framework to organize all that feedback, reflection, ideation, coaching, planning (i.e. thinking and communicating about the past and future) that make you an effective leader? As action-oriented beings, when we think about the past, we usually do so with the purpose of influencing something in the future. Whatever […]

The power of leaders rests on the expectations of their followers, and that’s why power is often so fleeting.

Back when I was a graduate student, I used Kuhnert and Lewis’s transformational / transactional leadership model together with French and Raven’s five bases of social power (rewards, coercion, expertise, legitimacy and referent – the power of “like”) in my research exploring how the Hojo family wrested political power from the courtiers in Kyoto to […]

What I see depends (at least partly) on what I have learned to see; what you see depends (at least partly) on what you have learned to see.

Many (if not most) of our communication, relationship, influence and collaboration challenges emerge through errors of omission rather than errors of commission. Back around 2007, when I created this graphic for a program on interpersonal influence that I developed for the Japanese subsidiary of a global investment bank, social neuroscience had not yet become that […]

You know more than you know that you know. How do you access all that knowledge waiting for you to peer just below the surface?

In a recent interview on Hidden Brain, University of Missouri psychologist Ken Sheldon explores how intuition (i.e. accessing information that gets processed beyond the awareness of day-to-day consciousness) is often the doorway to problem solving. (link at bottom of this post) The interview focuses on how you can build a life that incorporates more of […]

To lead a transformation, you ALSO need to pay attention to the transactional needs of your potential followers

Why do people follow you? To gain rewards and avoid punishments? To maintain a mutually-positive and useful relationship? Or do they follow you because they want to help you create a future they believe in? Transformation involves transactions. It’s not possible or even desirable to ignore transactional forms of leadership. Likewise, not all transformational visions […]