Justin Locke, Author at TalentCulture

People Skills 101: Anger Management

(I wrote this article a few years ago, and I am amazed at how much it applies to current events–jl) When we talk about management fundamentals, this can refer to managing other people, or it can refer to managing your own life. In either case, when you are talking about managing, you are really talking about managing emotions. Managing at the emotional level is a broad topic, but today we are here to discuss one single emotion, and that is … anger. Anger is of course a powerful emotion. It is essential for one to manage it properly, otherwise one risks considerable

Healing vs. Achievement

While giving a recent acceptance speech at a BAFTA award ceremony, actress Kate Winslet shared an inspiring message: Don’t listen to the people who hurt you, shame you, and belittle you. Believe in yourself and follow your dream. She ignored the people who insulted her, and made it to stardom. So can you. This advice is repeatedly given with the best of intentions. We hear it at awards ceremonies, graduations, and in Facebook posts every day. It is reiterated by inspirational speakers, coaches, and business gurus. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I am going to take issue with this

Time to Measure The Efficiency of Emotional Energy

Can we develop processes that will lead to more efficient use of emotional energy? One of the goals of a successful enterprise is to achieve greater “efficiency.” As any aficionado of Toyota Lean thinking will tell you, greater efficiency leads to greater profits. And of course our lives are now filled with emphasis on greater efficiency of energy use. But while we constantly strive for greater efficiency in both manufacturing processes and our use of the energy that drives our machines, there is an another opportunity for greater productivity through greater energy efficiency that is largely untouched. Brace yourself for a

The Dark Side of Improvement-ology

In the rush to offer “content,” social media has become a veritable tsunami of advice on how to improve just about everything, be that a process or yourself. These books, articles, classes, seminars, webinars, workshops, and videos all sound wonderfully helpful and well-intended, but, as Gerald Weinberg said, “There’s always a trade-off.” One should be aware of the dark side of improvement-ology. It runs a constant risk of corroding precious confidence in yourself. To illustrate using some artistic examples: When I was a music student, I was often told in lofty tones that “there is never enough rehearsal time.” This seems

Finding Top Talent Without College Degrees

The next time you post a job opening, you might want to think twice before automatically including a requirement for a college degree. You may think that this is a suggestion that you lower your standards. Actually, it’s an invitation to raise them. Requiring a degree may save you sifting through unqualified riffraff, but it also excludes folks on the opposite end. People with a lot of ambition, talent, and/or leadership potential often do not fit in to the college process. They are too busy doing what they love doing, and doing it professionally at an early age, to wait four

Diagnosing Emotional Un-Intelligence

The New York Times and Forbes Magazine recently published articles about “Emotional Intelligence” and its applications in the world of work. Social scientists disagree about the exact nature and validity of Emotional Intelligence, and, as the Atlantic Monthly points out, no “people skill” is good or bad but that intention makes it so. But if Emotional Intelligence is something you would like to cultivate, either in yourself or in others, here is a slightly different tack on the issue: Instead of listing and emulating the attributes of people who possess emotional intelligence, let us consider why some people are not emotionally

Leading a Horse To Water: Too Much Training Within Industry

For those of you who are not familiar with TWI, a.k.a. Training Within Industry, well, have you ever seen those WWII era posters lionizing Rosie the Riveter? The collective ability of Rosie and her many colleagues to manufacture tanks and B-29’s at an astonishing rate was one of the main reasons why the Allies won the war. But Rosie and friends were not master machinists. They were housewives and secretaries, hurriedly pressed into service. There was no time to train them to be true masters at any given machine shop trade, so instead, the people running the factories invented “TWI.” TWI

Koping With The Kool-Aid

Presumably you know what “Drinking the Kool Aid” means, but if not, let’s just say it refers to people who blindly and unquestioningly accept a given dogma or belief. For those of us who have not drunk the Kool-Aid (or are at least reasonably certain of same), there is a never ending problem in life: how to cope with those who have. Models of How The World Works Every workplace (as well as every institution and social group) has its own set of dogmas, that is to say, a set of beliefs that are a sort of “model” of how the

In Management, Stupidity Is An Advantage

We live in a world laced with smartism, i.e., a universal presumption that being smart is better than being stupid. But in the modern work world, at least in management, it is better to be stupid than smart. Realizing that this goes against everything you have ever been taught, here are just a few of the ways that stupidity and ignorance are superior approaches to management tasks: 1) The Dumber You Look, The More Stuff People Tell You. If people think you are smarter than they are, they won’t tell you anything, because they will assume that you already know everything.

In Management, Nothing Is Fabulous

Peter Drucker, and many others, have often used symphony orchestra conductors as a metaphor for the role of a CEO/leader in the corporate world. That said, in all the many daily lists, blogs, and tweets regarding “what great leaders do every day” and the many “attributes of a great leader” articles, there is one management skill of great conductors that never gets mentioned, metaphorically or otherwise, and that is . . . their doing of nothing. Henry Mancini was perhaps the best example of this. You never saw a guy do so much nothing in your life. Very sweet, very pleasant, very

There Are No “Almost Great” Leaders

Once upon a time, I had the extraordinary privilege of playing for some of the greatest conductors in history. But before you tsk-tsk me for self-aggrandizement, let me also say that I once had the not-so-extraordinary experience of playing . . . for some of the worst conductors in history too. Many were just dull or mildly annoying, but there were also quite a few that were, well, what can I say . . . they were a genuine check-the-clock-every-45-seconds-wondering-if-life-is-really-worth-living-and-should-I-quit-the-bass-and-take-up-animal-husbandry experience. But here is the odd thing: there was no middle. I never once encountered an “almost great” conductor. They were

Does Management Advice Actually Work?

So I was getting a root canal last week and I asked the doctor if they were going to use a checklist. “After all,” I said, “as everyone knows, Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto showed that the use of checklists dramatically reduces the chances of medical error, like maybe root-canaling the wrong tooth.” She replied, “Atul who? Open wide.” ZuhhWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Once the Novocain wore I off I went to over to Whole Foods for something to eat. I noticed that the checkout lines were all backed up, and I asked the manager, “Tell me, have you ever considered taking a Toyota Lean approach to

The Limits Of Lists For Leaders

If you read any books or articles about improving management and leadership, you may have noticed that many of them feature a list of actions for you to take in order to achieve better results. To give you just a few examples, there are the seven characteristics in Collins’ Good to Great, Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Dan Pink’s list of three things that motivate people. Lists aren’t just used to describe effective methods or laudable attributes in business; you have no doubt seen endless lists of steps you can take to lose weight, improve your health, or reduce stress. In

The Industrial Revolution, Renaissance 2.0 … And You

For many years I paid my rent by producing fund-raising videos for hospitals. I had several clients who kept using the phrase “patient-centered care.” For example, they would say, “Our new cancer care facility is built on a model of ‘patient-centered care.’” Now I will freely admit I am not the brightest bulb in the universe, but even I knew enough not to open my yap and say, “Well, just out of curiosity, what the heck was your care centered on previously?” But just in case YOU’re curious, allow me to step in and answer that question for you: previously, the

The Invisible Mastery Of Leadership

When I was a teenage bass player, to be honest, I wasn’t very good. I mean, I could play a handful of pieces reasonably well, but that was only because I played them over and over again. If you gave me a new piece of music, uh-oh. I had to start from zero in figuring out how to play it. And the majority of music students around me employed the exact same piecemeal approach. I was eager to get better, but I had no idea of how to go about it. So I asked an accomplished violinist for advice. He replied

Are You Numbing Your Workforce?

There is a classic TedTalk featuring Brené Brown, in which she points out that “we cannot selectively numb emotion.” In other words, if you are numbing yourself emotionally to something that bothers you, you have to numb yourself on all other levels as well. Back when I was a young professional bass player, I was all too aware of this phenomenon. Playing music demands extreme emotional “engagement,” but I can vividly recall those occasions where various workplace irritants would force me to “numb up.” My colleagues and I would collectively cope by simply delivering the bare minimum performance needed to get paid. Some

The War On Authenticity

(Editor’s note: The following article discusses the recent #TChat event: “Authenticity Is An Inside Job That Starts With Self” – Click here to view the recap of this event. Did you miss out on last night’s #TChat event? Stay tuned for the #TChat Recap!) A recent TalentCulture “TChat” on Twitter addressed the topic of “Authenticity.” “Authenticity” has become a very popular buzzword of late, much so that the New York Times did an article on the subject. When we talk about authenticity in the workplace, well, while TalentCulture.com is a blog about workplace issues, let’s remember, workplaces do not exist in a cultural vacuum; they

Power: The Dark Side of Leadership

I have a little confession to make. I find power to be delicious. For most of my life I have worked as a kind of modern-day impresario. I produced events and media, everything from promotional videos to chamber music concerts to recording sessions with full size symphony orchestras. I was a one-man HR office; I had to hire videographers, graphic designers, actors, audio engineers, composers, musicians, editors, you name it. And I will be the first to admit, when you have power to hire and fire, and you have a budget to spend on vendors who are dying for your business,

What Truly Motivates People? Is It Money, Or Something Else?

Dan Pink’s book “Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates us” has thrown a major monkey wrench into how we think about motivation. For years it was assumed– and it certainly seems logical to believe– that the best way to motivate desirable behaviors was to offer cash rewards. But it turns out that there is considerable science that refutes that notion; in fact, offering cash rewards, at least in the realm of creative work and problem solving, actually encourages worse results. This topic has opened up a broader discussion, of what human beings are. At work we are doing fewer and fewer

Stay up-to-date with HR, tech and the future of work. Get our weekly newsletter!

Justin Locke

Justin Locke

People Skills 101: Anger Management

Healing vs. Achievement

Time to Measure The Efficiency of Emotional Energy

The Dark Side of Improvement-ology

Finding Top Talent Without College Degrees

Diagnosing Emotional Un-Intelligence

Leading a Horse To Water: Too Much Training Within Industry

Koping With The Kool-Aid

In Management, Stupidity Is An Advantage

In Management, Nothing Is Fabulous

There Are No “Almost Great” Leaders

Does Management Advice Actually Work?

The Limits Of Lists For Leaders

The Industrial Revolution, Renaissance 2.0 … And You

The Invisible Mastery Of Leadership

Are You Numbing Your Workforce?

The War On Authenticity

Quick Links

Topics

Newsletter Signup

Stay up-to-date with HR, tech and the future of work. Get our weekly newsletter!

Justin Locke

Justin Locke

Subscribing to Ho-Hum Newsletters? We have the fix!