Quotes

Complex tasks are often better handled in the back of our mind, and that's often true of creative tasks - when you have something complex to deal with in writing or research or responding to an email. I'll start working, put it aside, and sometimes I'll wake up the next morning with a solution, or I'll find one when I exercise.

To generate creative ideas, it's important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.

As more women 'lean in' and we collectively continue to fight sexism, there's another barrier to progress that hasn't been addressed: Many men who would like to see more women leaders are afraid to speak up about it.

We all have original ideas. Even if we don't see ourselves as supercreative or as wild nonconformists, we have insights every day about how the world around us could be better. It might be a better way of running meetings in your office that would be less mind-numbing. It might be a little twist on a product or a service.

Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.

You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they're afraid to be punished if they don't. For startups, there's so much pivoting that's required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you're in bad shape.

Frenemies are worse than enemies, and it's not just in the workplace.

As a man, it is true that I will never know what it is like to be a woman. As an organizational psychologist, though, I feel a responsibility to bring evidence to bear on dynamics of work life that affect all of us, not only half of us.

I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.

Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.

Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.

In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.

I love discovering compelling new ideas and doing what I can to help spread the word about them.

If you want to find out if someone's a taker, it's not actually that useful to know what they've accomplished. What you want to want to know is how they explain them.

If I had the day off and knew everyone else was voting, I wouldn't miss it. It would become a routine part of my responsibility as a citizen - like paying taxes, only less soul crushing.

Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating.

If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.

Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.

For women to achieve equal representation in leadership roles, it's important that they have the backing of men as well as women.

The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.

I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.

Productive givers focus on acting in the long-term best interests of others, even if it's not pleasant. They have the courage to give the critical feedback we prefer not to hear, but truly need to hear. They offer tough love, knowing that we might like them less, but we'll come to trust and respect them more.

Perhaps gaining power doesn't cause people to act like takers. It simply creates the opportunity for people who think like takers to express themselves.

The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion - it's reality.

To make sense of bossiness, we need to tease apart two fundamental aspects of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power lies in holding a formal position of authority or controlling important resources. Status involves being respected or admired.