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Who is more engaged and more committed to their work and rates their leaders the highest? A. People who work in the office B. People who work remotely If you picked A, you might be as surprised as the investment firm I worked with recently, which found in reviewing results of a 360-degree feedback process that the answer was, in fact, B. The team members who were not in the same location with their leaders were more engaged and committed — and rated the same leader higher — than team members sitting right nearby. While the differences were not enormous (a couple of tenths of a point in both categories), they were enough to provoke some interesting speculations as to why this might be happening. It made perfect sense to me, though. Here is why: Proximity breeds complacency. I've worked with leaders who sit in the same office with those they manage but go for weeks without having any substantive face-time with them. In fact they may use e-mail as their prim...

"It costs ten times as much to complete a unit of simple work when the data are flawed in any way as it does when they're perfect." This simple rule of thumb provides a point of light on the topic that those of us in the data profession have not done well. We struggle to provide powerful business cases for improving data quality that command attention and focus the effort. Most senior executives are well aware that their data are not up to snuff. But absent a business case, data quality doesn't make the cut among competing priorities. Of course, true leaders know this is no excuse. Given the growing importance of data to every aspect of their business, they know they must develop an understanding of the costs of poor data quality, shortcomings in the methodology notwithstanding. These costs include direct but previously hidden costs, more important but intangible costs such as a loss of trust, and lost opportunity costs. This post aims to help leaders as...

Boredom is surprisingly stressful. And when we're busy, but still bored, it's even more so. How many of us feel this way? I do, and I suspect you might too. By the looks of it, my own working life should actually be quite exciting. I travel twice a month to such exotic places as Kuala Lumpur, Doha, New York, and Helsinki to teach bright executives. I write books and articles, give interviews for newspapers and radio. I get to meet interesting people from society's upper echelons. I have been lucky enough to win some fairly prestigious awards. I get to spend months living full-time with teams of high performers in such unique environments as elite sports and war hospitals. I have more projects in the pipeline than I can shake a stick at. I am busy. And I am bored. Unable to shake off my melancholy, I went out on a limb and told my boss. As a huge credit to him, he said: "Fine ... take your sabbatical year and do something completely different". What I susp...

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile. He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high ( 84% ), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans," and for the first time in American history, "less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature." Literacy has been improving in countries like India and China , but that literacy may not translate into more or deeper reading. This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more...

Why do some job hunters give up when they are just in sight of their goals? I've just seen Simon, a client who has been looking for a job for 6 months. Like many people on the market, he started out optimistically but has given up — not officially, mind you, but he's suddenly taken an urgent interest in redecorating his house. Based on work with scores of clients like Simon, I suggest that there are six types of frustrated job hunters out there. The first type are people who think they know how to get hired, but don't . They have a lack-luster CV in overstuffed with clichés, a poor sense of what the market is looking for, and pay weak attention to the messages (both explicit and otherwise) they broadcast. If you've ever said to a friend, "All this job hunting advice is insultingly basic," this could be you — and you could be ensuring that you stay stuck in first gear. While some candidates say that job hunting and interview preparation are all common sen...

Conjure up the term "bad boss" and what comes to mind? Scenes of red-faced people berating subordinates in public. Smarmy souls taking credit for other people's work or saying one thing and doing another. Cutting remarks. Yelling. Feel free to continue — we're sure you can. This is iconic bad boss behavior — defining in our minds the very essence of what bad bosses do. When we see these things portrayed on TV or in the movies, we can't help laughing, even while we're thinking "Whew! I don't do those things; I'm not a bad boss." But, not so fast. Our research suggests that the offensive actions so often associated with being a bad boss make up less than 20% of the behavior that actually defines the worst bosses. When we analyzed the behavior of 30,000 managers, as seen through the eyes of some 300,000 of their peers, direct reports, and bosses on 360-degree evaluations, we found that the sins of the bad boss are far more often t...