Learning Center

At a recent conference, Lisa tearfully described to me her agony as sole caregiver for her disabled husband for 33 years. Her pain hints at the burden of 34 million Americans caring for loved ones with dementia, disabilities, and other enduring illnesses. Most caregivers report significant stress, which mirrors my experience the last seven years as chief caregiver for my ...

During a February presentation at the Harvard School of Public Health Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist spoke about the rise in preventable deaths by suicide, alcoholism and addiction calling them “deaths of despair.” Public Health researchers around the world have started to recognize that loneliness plays a significant role in these deaths of despair and, as a result, loneliness ...

Next time you start feeling the unwelcome onset of stress and all of it’s debilitating symptoms, take a couple of deep cleansing breaths and apply some of the life saving techniques that astronauts have developed for staying calm in crisis situations. Astronauts have the most stressful, and dangerous, of occupations and their training is the gold standard for successfully managing ...

Work environments have an abundance of stressors, but having a boss who behaves badly may be the worst. The experience of being treated unfairly or rudely is always unpleasant, but when it comes at the hands of someone who has significant power over your income and career it can be devastating. The problem is often compounded by the well-meaning, but ...

According to a recent survey of senior executives the success rate for major change initiatives is only 54%. Why do so many organizational change initiatives fail? Organizations are certainly aware that their success depends on the ability to change and adapt to rapidly evolving conditions effecting markets, customers, suppliers and competitors. They assign their top management talent, often reinforced with ...

Organizations are on a quest to identify the essential elements of employee engagement. They dream of building cultures and work environments that will capture every last ounce of employee discretionary effort. They want employees who arrive at work every day with all the optimism, ambition and enthusiasm that they brought on their first day believing that happy people create more ...

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Abraham Joshua Heschel   Harold Ramis died last week. He cowrote and directed Groundhog Day, a ...

Last October, I had an opportunity to ask 25,000 strangers five questions concerning their attitudes and feelings about work. Today’s post reviews some of the responses I received to one of those questions: “What are your strategies for balancing the demands of work with those of your personal life?” As you might expect, there is great variability in how people ...

The idea of employee burnout been in circulation since the 1970s and continues to be relevant in contemporary discussions of job stress and the employee experience of work. The original burnout metaphor refers to the smothering of a fire or the extinguishing of a candle by depriving it of the resources (oxygen) it needs to burn brightly. By extension, the ...

Last month, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) added to its list of honors by moving into the number one spot on the 2012-13 U.S. News & World Report “America’s Best Hospitals” list.  MGH is a complex institution with more than 23,000 employees that handles some of the world’s most difficult and complicated cases. Hospital staff arrive at work every day knowing ...

While we do not have access to the performance appraisals Snow White might have completed for Happy and Grumpy , the business research consistently demonstrates that happy employees produce more, miss less work, are less likely to quit and make a greater commitment to their jobs than grumpy employees. In their recent review of this research in the Harvard Business ...