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Category Archives: Group Dynamics

Building

Monday, October 5, 2009

We talked Thursday about asking what we want from interactions with our colleagues at work, whether peers, juniors, or seniors. We want to place the relationships in a sustainable and productive context, and to be sure we begin to see ourselves as co-contributors rather than the center of a universe with only uncooperative problems for satellites. It’s a powerful question . . .

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Connecting

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

We often think that the best managers – or, especially, “leaders” – connect on a deep and profound level with their employees, establishing a mutual understanding and commitment to each other. The sad reality, though, as mentioned yesterday, is that most of us lack the perspective, maturity, and discipline to pull it off. That may seem a harsh claim to make, but if we . . .

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Roundup: from decidedly dopy to dubiously decisive

Friday, September 18, 2009

Excellent stories have been stacking up, with no logical place or time to link to them. So, we’re going to do a roundup today as a venue for offering these truly worthwhile resources. . .

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Assumed identities

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

As the creature emerged from the chrysalis, the documentary narrator, himself a prominent scientist in the field, announced that the previously observed grub was now revealing its true identity – the adult form of a wasp. But is that true?

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Culturally coherent complementarity

Monday, August 10, 2009

As mentioned in response to an always thought-provoking comment to a recent post by Fred H. Schliegel, much of what has been written here over the past few months has had three purposes. One is to relate the topic at hand to its application at work; another is to consider the manner in which it is understood and manipulated by those of us who think about or attempt to act upon it; and the third is to offer a look at it with respect to its place in current events – especially political and social events particularly, but not exclusively, in the United States. This can be difficult to do, of course, in a basically brief format like this. . .

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Destructive diversity

Monday, August 3, 2009

Typically, diversity is not destructive at all. Even when it seems most unproductive, it might be working its greatest creative magic. But when it is a conscious construction, it can at the very least be problematic – in its very deliberateness introducing tensions into the dynamics of the workplace that have nothing to do with [...]

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Humanitarian intervention

Thursday, July 23, 2009

We’ve noted over the past two days that a historic feature of international law holds that regimes that are tolerated by their people must be viewed as fundamentally legitimate. A problem with this is that it is often impractical for those people to do other than try to tolerate the otherwise intolerable, lending an implausible legitimacy to some pretty unpleasant regimes. As a result, leaders and followers alike can find themselves desperately collaborating in some disturbingly Orwellian devices to help them accommodate to the facts on the ground. This happens in the world of work, as well . . .

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