Learning Center

According to the Department of Labor, 61.1% of married-couple families in 2016 had both parents working. In my counseling work, and in my role as husband to a working wife, I bear witness daily to the power spouses have to support or undermine their partners. As I enter my 50th year of marriage, still working and still married to a ...

We spend a high percentage of our waking hours interacting with our work colleagues. Conventional wisdom has it that coworkers don’t have to like each other; they just need to do their jobs. According to some very interesting research coming out of Carnegie-Mellon and M.I.T. (not exactly epicenters of the “touchy-feely” school of business management) conventional wisdom, once again, turns ...

A new research study from Stanford University and the Harvard Business School has named workplace stress as a contributor to at least 120,000 deaths a year and up to $190 billion in health care costs. 120,000 mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and coworkers who die prematurely, in part, due to work environments that are allowed to remain toxic. ...

Meetings are important. For better or worse, most organizational decisions are still made in groups. Meetings are a ubiquitous element of organizational life even as teams are now often geographically dispersed and collaborating online as well as in person. A productive meeting energizes, coordinates and galvanizes a team. Dysfunctional meetings, on the other hand, lead not only to bad decisions, ...

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 ...

People who have a persistent propensity to complain, find fault and judge others harshly can sap your energy and optimism if you are not careful. One of my EAP clients recently compared the effect of a colleague’s unrelenting negativity to a toxic cloud of second hand smoke: irritating, suffocating, and pervasive. It got me thinking about how challenging it can ...

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) provide organizations and their employees an array of  counseling and supportive services to address the negative effects of workplace stress. This is an extremely important mission, and EAPs are uniquely positioned to deliver on it, but I think we should be doing even more. We should be going beyond simply repairing the damage caused by organizational ...

Advances in brain imaging technologies are extending the reach of scientific comprehension into the complex and fascinating recesses of human motivation. By studying detailed pictures of the brain’s responses to different situations neuroscientists are changing our understanding of why people act the way they do. Business leaders have an opportunity to translate these discoveries about human motivation into organizational cultures ...

If you take the pleasure of getting things done at work and multiply that by the pleasure of getting better at what you do, the result is improved job satisfaction, higher motivation and diminished levels of stress. It’s a simple formula: we come to work to get something done and when we do our level of well-being and engagement increase. ...

It was about an hour before I was supposed to “run” my first therapy group. The clients, ranging in age from 20 to 60, were in various stages of recovery from heroin addiction. I was 26 years old, had never run a group by myself, and was suddenly feeling a little panicky about the assignment. Among them, the group members ...

There is nothing better than an impending disaster to clarify the distinction between the essential and the trivial. When total annihilation is on the horizon no one is wasting any time worrying about whether it’s going to rain this weekend. The standard formula for disaster movies builds upon the stark choices offered by the threat of total calamity. In response ...

I met Steve Mellor in the mid-1980’s when he was a young HR professional and I was a green EAP consultant. We bonded immediately as allies and comrades learning to make a place for ourselves in the corporate world. Along the way, we also took time to compare notes on the joys and challenges of being husbands and dads. Later ...

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 ...

What a joy it is to recycle stuff that has been gathering dust. It’s not just the space it opens up, although that’s pretty satisfying. The best part of repurposing things is that you also silence their nagging challenge: “I have value. Why aren’t you using me?” So it was with pleasure that I cleaned out the area below my ...

One of my best management experiences was coaching my son’s Little League baseball team. I may not be able to remember the name of the movie with what’s-his-name in it that I saw last week but I can tell you the name of each kid on the team and what position they played. That group played hard and had a ...

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” More than ninety heads of state, and tens of thousands of South Africans, met in a Soweto soccer stadium today to celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela. What accounts for the deep reverence we ...

“Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.” Franz Peter Schubert Today’s post is the third in a series. Part 1 explained how I won the Listserve lottery and earned the prize of polling 25,000 strangers about their feelings about work. Part 2 looked at some of the answers I received ...

Workplaces with high levels of employee stress and anger are increasing their risk for many negative business outcomes including: Employee fatigue, concentration difficulties and diminished problem-solving abilities Diminished quality, productivity and customer service Under reporting of critical business issues (in order to avoid blame) Poor teamwork and coordination among individuals who are resentful and feel that they have been treated ...

Meetings are the place where an organization can access the collective knowledge of its members to make the best possible tactical and strategic decisions. Meetings are the place where organizations can work out conflicts, coordinate individual efforts and get everyone on the same page.   Meetings are an inevitable, necessary and ubiquitous element of organizational life. To my knowledge, no ...

In a couple of weeks I will celebrate my 44th wedding anniversary. I’m not bragging. Honestly, I feel lucky that I didn’t screw it up when I think how very young and immature and needy I was at the outset. Like all marriages, mine dodged a few bullets along the way and should be considered a work in progress, but ...

In 1982, Zingerman’s Deli served their first magnificent overstuffed sandwich in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The founders, Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw, were united by their dream of the perfect corn beef on rye. That year was my (lucky) 13th year in Ann Arbor and I just couldn’t get enough of their insanely addictive food. I left Ann Arbor in 1983, ...

Every morning I wake up and, after having a cup of coffee and reading The Boston Globe, I go to work on the Sudoku puzzle. Like millions of other people I look forward to testing myself against the day’s 9×9 grid. We puzzle people (let’s not forget the crossword folks) happily engage with this task even though we are never ...