Weekend Leadership Reading: 1/12/18

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Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about multitasking, seeing through the leader’s lens, mindfulness and the art of managing people as people, the industrial and tech revolutions compared, and a staggering statistic about US managers.

From Wharton: The Real (and Imaginary) Benefits of Multitasking

“If your idea of multitasking is watching a football game on television while texting your friends on your smartphone and checking email on your tablet, you’re not alone. In today’s technology-driven world, multitasking is an integral and necessary part of life. But are you really getting anything done effectively when you try to do many things at once? New research from Wharton marketing professor Rom Schrift and doctoral student Shalena Srna shows that multitasking is a mere illusion because it is impossible to execute more than one task at a time. Nevertheless, the perception of multitasking seems to be beneficial to performance. Schrift and Srna, who authored the paper, ‘The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance,’ with Yale marketing professor Gal Zauberman, shared their observations with Knowledge@Wharton.”

From Bill Barnett: The Leader’s Lens

“It was time to run an online survey of the employees at a large technology company. My work with their leadership team had raised some interesting research questions, so one of the vice presidents asked her assistant to help me make it happen. She said to her assistant, who I will refer to here as Amelia, ‘Please help Bill to get access to everything he needs. We want to get everything arranged pretty quickly.'”

From the London School of Economics: Mindfulness and the art of managing people as people, not ‘resources’

“Managers are often induced to be mindless, imbibing a cultural narrative that portrays people as mere instruments to advance corporate or team goals, writes Michael Pirson.”

From Edmund L. Andrews: Which Revolution Is More Historic: Industrial or Tech?

“It’s an article of faith that technological innovation is crucial to prosperity and is currently changing our lives at an unprecedented rate, but how do we know if the pace of pioneering breakthroughs is any faster today than it was during Thomas Edison’s era? In fact, some economists argue that today’s information revolution has had much less impact on our lives than the big inventions of the late 19th century had on people living then.”

From Corinne Purtill: Almost 70% of US managers are scared to talk to their employees

“In 2016, a survey of more than 2,000 US adults (paywall) asked managers what they found most difficult about communicating with employees. Some 37% of managers said they found it hard to give negative feedback to workers about their performance, 20% said they struggled to share their own vulnerability, and another 20% disliked being the messenger for company policies. But a full 69% of respondents said that they found ‘communicating in general’ to be the hardest part about communicating with employees.”

Thanks to Miki Saxon for pointing me to this article.

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