WorkTies

Many professions have templates, or prototypes, for who is expected to fill a role (e.g., pilots are male, sales people are extraverted). When workers do not meet all elements of a role prototype, they may have trouble entering an occupation or being seen as legitimate within the profession. These challenges may be exacerbated when workers see their job as a calling, or a role tied to immense passion and meaning, since a calling would come with an intense desire to occupy sai

Most organizational research treats surprise as something that happens to us—e.g., market disruptions, crises, or unexpected setbacks that require reactive management. But our research reveals a powerful alternative: leaders and professionals who proactively engineer surprises as strategic tools. In other words, this review shows how leaders, peers, and employees can engineer surprises to drive performance and productive change in organizations . Surprise as a Strategic T

Leading in a Tangle of Relationships Bumped up two weeks, Engineering insists on another sprint, and HR reports that yesterday’s hybrid-work tweak is already eroding trust. Green-light one request and you alienate another group; stall, and everyone wonders whether you have a backbone at all. Modern leadership, it turns out, is less about choosing a direction and more about threading a path through overlapping loyalties, clashing incentives, and complex relationships. Pause fo

“There is always pain in the room.” This comment from Peter Frost, a compassion scholar, has never rung more true than it does teaching...