3 Key Empathy-Based Methods to Uncover the Truth About Your Stakeholders

Last updated on: June 18, 2020 at 8:29 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Using empathy to establish a good relationship with your organization’s stakeholders can pave the way to increased productivity and a stronger bottom line. By identifying your organization’s key influencers, you will be able to address a group of stakeholders whose decisions will have the most impact on your organization. Learning the truth about your key influencers is critical to strengthening your relationships with them. One important thing that leaders need to keep in mind prior to engaging with their... Read more

The Secret of Getting Optimistic and Pessimistic Employees to Collaborate Effectively

Last updated on: June 3, 2020 at 3:56 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

How often do conflicts occur in your enterprise because someone proposed ill-considered or insufficiently thought-out ideas? What about because someone opposed innovative, out-of-the-box ideas? If you have either problem, you might be plagued by two very common cognitive biases, the optimism bias or the pessimism bias. The optimism bias describes the many people who tend to make overly positive assessments of future risks and rewards, while the pessimism bias refers to those who make excessively negative assessments. These... Read more

How to Prevent Failure in Working From Home to Address the Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic

Last updated on: May 6, 2020 at 2:04 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

So many organizations are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential disasters that can occur as a result of this transition. An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced a few months before the pandemic hit. Pete is a mid-level manager in the software engineering unit of an entrepreneurial startup that quickly grew to 400 office-based employees doing Electronic Health Records (EHRs).... Read more

12 Mental Skills to Defeat Cognitive Biases

Last updated on: April 9, 2020 at 4:24 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Falling for the dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases often costs you an arm and a leg. Yet such serious mistakes happen all the time in business! For instance, one of the biggest decisions that a company can make is to merge with or acquire another company. Yet there’s an atrociously high rate of judgment errors made in M&A activity. Research shows that about 80% of M&As fail, destroying value rather than creating it. What about another critical... Read more

Saving Your Relationships From the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic

Last updated on: April 2, 2020 at 4:23 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Your relationships will be undermined or even destroyed by the coronavirus pandemic, unless you take proactive steps right now to save them. Don’t believe me? Consider the facts. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has led to extensive measures for social distancing, figuratively and literally. We’re asked to keep at 6 to 10 feet apart from other people, and not have any gatherings over 50 people. Schools, colleges, day cares, restaurants, bars, and other public gathering venues are shut down... Read more

8 Powerful Questions You Need to Ask Before Stakeholder Engagement

Last updated on: March 26, 2020 at 10:36 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership. Stakeholders can be anyone from your front line employees to suppliers to business partners, and your organization’s relationship with them is dynamic and can change over time. There are many advantages to identifying and getting to know your stakeholders, and even more disadvantages to not engaging with them. A failure to understand their needs can lead to blindspots for managers and executives, which can have disastrous effects, such as... Read more

The One Huge Mistake Everybody Makes in COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic Preparation

Last updated on: April 7, 2020 at 9:05 am By Gleb Tsipursky

According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 coronavirus will definitely develop into a widespread pandemic: it’s more a question of when, not if, it will happen. With growing outbreaks of diagnosed cases in 12 states, and vastly larger numbers of undiagnosed cases, there’s serious cause for concern. If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog: And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog: Or simply... Read more

Why You Should Hire Women Over Men, According to Science

Last updated on: March 7, 2020 at 8:57 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Care about your bottom line? Then you should preferably hire women rather than men. This is true regardless of whether you factor in diversity considerations. Separately from the beneficial financial, social, and cultural impact of having a diverse workforce, hiring women over men makes dollars and sense. You might be surprised to hear someone who is a man say that. Well, don’t be. I always go with research-based findings from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, even if the... Read more

This Valentine’s Day, Men and Women Should Make Different Buying Decisions

Last updated on: February 13, 2020 at 5:34 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Women and men around the country will be choosing a gift for their sweetheart for this Valentine’s Day. Yet their shopping decisions will be driven by gendered decision-making imperatives that powerfully influence their buying choices. They will both make bad decisions unless they take proactive steps to address problematic gender-based decision-making styles. How We Make Our Buying Decisions. Neither men nor women will realize how their own gender drives their shopping decisions. We tend to think that we’re rational... Read more

10 Steps for Strategic Planning to Defend Your Future

Last updated on: January 29, 2020 at 4:51 pm By Gleb Tsipursky

Did you know that the typical five-year strategic planning forecasts perform about as well as dart-throwing chimpanzees? Cognitive science and behavioral economics scholars have conducted research on people who are the most skilled forecasters among us. Apparently, they perform no better than chance on economic predictions more than three to five years out. Given that gloomy information, you might be asking why I wrote an article about strategic planning at all. You’re in the same boat with my consulting client... Read more