What's New
Every week we publish new articles and add books to the library. Here's everything that landed this week.
Designing for team psychological health and what leaders can actually control vs what they cannot
Leadership development literature tends to err in one of two directions: either understating the leader's influence on team psychological health, implying it is largely individual and therefore beyond leadership intervention, or overstating it, implying that…
Why Motivating People Doesn't Work and What Does
Susan Fowler
Why Motivating People Doesn't Work and What Does by Susan Fowler. Fowler's account of why leader attempts to motivate team members through recognition programmes, incentives, and culture initiatives frequently produce the opposite of the intended effect — and what the SDT-based optimal motivation approach looks like in practice — provides the most practically applicable available complement to the Hackman structural priority finding and the Edmondson psychological safety influence-versus-control distinction. Her specific account of what is and is not within the leader's authority to change in team members' motivation quality maps directly onto the control boundary this article identifies as the most important honest mapping in leadership development.
Designing for team psychological health and what leaders can actually control vs what they cannot
The most honest and commercially useful thing to establish about leader influence on team psychological health is where it ends — because the leader who believes they are…
Recognition and the psychology of feeling seen + what people actually need beyond compensation to remain engaged
Recognition and positive evaluation are not the same thing. One confirms that a standard was met; the other…
The loneliness of leadership and why the higher you sit the less honest information you receive
Leadership seniority does not reduce information flow — it reshapes it. The leader at the top of a…
The feedback dynamic and why most leaders believe they give useful feedback and most employees believe they do not
The gap between how leaders perceive the feedback they provide and how employees experience it is not produced by dishonesty on either side — it is produced by…
How trust forms between people in workplace environments and the psychological mechanisms that build it + the asymmetry that destroys it
Trust in workplace relationships accumulates through specific, sequential mechanisms that require months to years of evidence — and…
How leaders actually develop and what the research says about leaders who keep improving from those who plateau
Experience is not the same as development. The leader with thirty years of experience and no deliberate practice…
Building a personal decision-making system and what the research supports as durable rather than aspirational
The conditions that most require good decision-making — high pressure, cognitive depletion, emotional intensity — are the same conditions that most reliably defeat willpower-based decision quality improvements. A…
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