ManagementCast by IMD

When disaster strikes, or when goals are simply missed, blame often lands on the bosses. From CEOs to team leaders the buck has to stop somewhere, and when it does, action needs to be taken.

But how should leaders approach failure?

Zhike Lei says leaders in both civil society and corporations tend to try and tackle problems alone. But this is not the best approach. 

Effective failure management comes from tapping into the collective intelligence of a wider team. When businesses fail, says Lei, senior staff members of an organization need to play a visible role in driving engagement with others.

In this episode of ManagementCast, Professor Lei talks about adapting, innovating, and learning from failure, and the central role of leadership.

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Zhike Lei is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She is an award-winning organizational scholar and an expert on psychological safety, team dynamics, organizational learning, error management, and patient safety.

Lei studies how organizations, teams, and employees adapt and learn in complex, time-pressured, consequence-laden environments. As a global management educator, she has taught executives and PhD, DBA, EMBA, and MBA candidates, as well as undergraduates, and has won numerous teaching awards and recognitions.

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

Experimentation can bring many benefits in the workplace. New products, cost-saving efficiencies, and profits are often the result of new and progressive ways of thinking. But having the confidence to try new methods comes with risks. Often we must fail on our way to success, and that failure can give rise to fear.

Many fear admitting mistakes, says Zhike Lei, due to shame, or the possibility of losing their position. That in turn leads teams to avoid innovation, growth, and eventually success.

So how can we lead and achieve in the face of failure?

Lei suggests managers the world over need to compensate for their negative biases and those of their team members by fostering an open and trusting environment. In her second appearance on ManagementCast, she discusses how to create a failure-positive workplace and the central role of fear in our psyche.

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Zhike Lei is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She is an award-winning organizational scholar and an expert on psychological safety, team dynamics, organizational learning, error management, and patient safety.

Lei studies how organizations, teams, and employees adapt and learn in complex, time-pressured, consequence-laden environments. As a global management educator, she has taught executives and PhD, DBA, EMBA, and MBA candidates, as well as undergraduates, and has won numerous teaching awards and recognitions.

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

World-beating organizations are always striving for success, but sometimes even the most dedicated teams fall short. Companies miss their sales goals, lose out on funding rounds, and have PR disasters.

Failure, in short, is a natural part of life, and how firms cope with it is of vital importance.

Zhike Lei says this may seem obvious, but in practice, many are unable to meet failure in productive ways. They don't see it as the opportunity it is: the chance to give and receive feedback and to innovate and change for the better.

Over four episodes, Lei will take ManagementCast listeners through that journey, and explain how to turn failure into success.

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Zhike Lei is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She is an award-winning organizational scholar and an expert on psychological safety, team dynamics, organizational learning, error management, and patient safety.

Lei studies how organizations, teams, and employees adapt and learn in complex, time-pressured, consequence-laden environments. As a global management educator, she has taught executives and PhD, DBA, EMBA, and MBA candidates, as well as undergraduates, and has won numerous teaching awards and recognitions.

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

Capital Conversations: Insights into the world of venture capital is the latest series podcast from IMD and its Venture Asset Management Initiative. Exploring the dynamic realm of venture capital, where innovation meets investment and ideas transform into thriving enterprises.

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To subscribe click on the links above, or search Capital Conversations: Insights into the world of venture capital in your podcast player.

Our next installment of ManagementCast will feature IMD professor Zhike Lei.

During the last three episodes of ManagementCast, Alyson Meister has outlined some of the most pertinent topics in mental well-being today, including how to develop a positive stress mindset, what to do when designing a workplace, and why solving the recovery paradox is so important.

This week, Meister is looking forward. Her research in the coming months will provide fresh new insights into the emerging trends in management, from the potential for psychedelics in the workplace to the effect of "overwhelm" on individuals and the mental construct of “should”. Through several research avenues, she is exploring how people put pressure on themselves throughout their careers, and what they can do to alleviate that.

In her fourth appearance on ManagementCast, Meister gives a preliminary look at her findings, and muses on what comes next in the world of workplace well-being.

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Alyson Meister is IMD’s Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She helps organizations to develop inclusive and resilient leaders, teams, and workplaces. Her research specialties include topics surrounding identity and diversity as well as workplace stress, mental health, and well-being. She was named on the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2021 and subsequently nominated for a Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award.

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

Full-time employees will spend an estimated 90,000 hours working, or around one-third of their adult life. It is no surprise, then, that workplace stress shapes our mental well-being, but just how much of a toll is it taking? 

The answer, it seems, is a lot. The latest Gallup polls show that nearly half of employees feel high levels of stress at work. In fact, workplace stress is at an all-time high. The personal cost of all this is huge, says Alyson Meister, but it's also just bad business. Meister warns that keeping employees on the edge of burnout stifles innovation and reduces efficiency. Creative thinking is impossible when you're just in survival mode. 

In her third appearance on ManagementCast, Meister discusses how to promote a culture of well-being and why companies need to promote change and engagement with staff to get the most out of their workforce.

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Alyson Meister is IMD’s Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She helps organizations to develop inclusive and resilient leaders, teams, and workplaces. Her research specialties include topics surrounding identity and diversity as well as workplace stress, mental health, and well-being. She was named on the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2021 and subsequently nominated for a Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award. 

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

You would never want your pilot, your surgeon, or your favorite athlete to go to work depleted and exhausted, so why do we expect this in the office? 

Somehow the business world has been won over by the assumption that you can just keep pushing; that you can drink a Red Bull and push harder or pull an all-nighter and stay at the office 24/7. For decades that has been the stamp of commitment and engagement while avoiding recovery was something to be celebrated.  

But this way of operating, says Alyson Meister, is deeply inefficient. She says we need to challenge wide-held assumptions about how much we can, and should, be doing in the workplace and that the lack of adequate recovery is quite literally killing people.  

Meister argues that recovery is more of a skill than a passive process and, in her second appearance on ManagementCast, she explains how executives of all levels can learn how to unwind more effectively. 

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Alyson Meister is IMD’s Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She helps organizations to develop inclusive and resilient leaders, teams, and workplaces. Her research specialties include topics surrounding identity and diversity as well as workplace stress, mental health, and well-being. She was named on the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2021 and subsequently nominated for a Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award. 

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

Stress is something most of us dread. Even the word itself can conjure up negative emotions, and evoke memories of long sleepless nights.

But what if stress itself was something different? What if we could turn stress into a positive force? What if we could change our stress mindset?

That, says Professor Alyson Meister, is the key to unlocking a happier, healthier, and perhaps even longer, life. Meister says that a 'stress mindset' is a core belief we have about the way we handle pressure; and that our mental attitude dictates how our body responds. A positive stress mindset, she says, can influence everything from the levels of cortisol in our body, to how many sick days we take in a year.

Mental health and the effects of mental health have been important to Meister from a very young age, and she says workplace wellbeing has reached a critical turning point. In her first episode of ManagementCast, she discusses how to develop a positive attitude to stress, the ways we can use threats to our advantage, and how to turn pressure into constructive energy.

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Alyson Meister is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She helps organizations to develop inclusive and resilient leaders, teams, and workplaces. Her research specialty includes topics surrounding identity and diversity as well as workplace stress, mental health, and wellbeing. She was named on the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2021 and subsequently nominated for a Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award.

As long as the locus of power in an organization lies outside of the LGBTQ+ community, allyship will play a central part in creating inclusive workplaces. But in 2023, says IMD professor Misiek Piskorski, it's no longer enough to be a positive role model. True leadership, is about creating allies around you. 

He argues that the privileged few need to advocate on behalf of others for equal recognition and the ability to advance in the organization regardless of who they are. This process can be fraught with problems, so for those in power, allyship today will require energy, thought, and commitment. 

In episode three of IMD's Pride Month specials, Piskorski discusses ways to encourage allyship without constraints, how to overcome fear, and what it takes for leaders to reach their full potential. 

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Mikołaj Jan Piskorski, also known as Misiek Piskorski, is IMD’s Professor of Digital Strategy, Analytics and Innovation and Dean of Asia and Oceania. He is an expert on digital strategy, platform strategy, and the process of digital business transformation. 

Working with businesses across the globe, Piskorski aims to demystify digital transformation by taking this complex and complicated topic and distilling it down to its core principles, and to the five or six key decisions that companies need to take. The multilayered framework that he developed to help companies devise a digital transformation strategy consists of a series of easy-to-understand steps. This exercise is made more accessible by the use of cases to show how other companies have tackled the process. Companies come out at the end with a detailed strategy they can implement in full or in part. 

In 1992, Professor Robert Hooijberg caught a glimpse of what it means to be anything other than a white heterosexual male in the workplace. Since then, he has taught diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) programs across the globe. 

Hooijberg, too, has a special insight into the importance of allyship. He does not identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, but his son does. As a transgender man, he has encountered incredible biases and even violence in the workplace.  

Professor Hooijberg says it’s our collective responsibility to combat such hatred. He passionately believes that the workplace needs to be a safe space regardless of your sexual orientation or gender identity. He is interested in creating an environment where everybody can flourish and thinks commercial enterprises need to be invested in that goal. 

In this in-depth interview, Professor Hooijberg talks about the importance of allyship, how to support family, friends, and colleagues in the face of adversity, and the pride he feels for his son. 

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Robert Hooijberg is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at IMD. His areas of interest include leadership, negotiations, team building, digital transformation, and organizational culture, with a specific focus on the alignment of culture and strategy. He helps organizations create powerful performance-oriented cultures aligned with strategy and has developed an innovative approach to the study of cases on the topic.

ManagementCast is back for its second season, and to kick off the series IMD is proud to present the first of several special episodes to celebrate Pride Month. 

The first is with Alexander Fleischmann, a research affiliate at IMD who has been writing about LGBTQ+ issues for more than 15 years. In that time, he has witnessed radical changes in how LGBTQ+ individuals are treated in the workplace and in the research he has engaged with throughout his career. 

In this in-depth interview, Fleischmann says business culture can be measured in how it deals with marginalized positions and that the biggest task of the upcoming years is how to cater to underrepresented groups. "It's not about making minority politics," he argues. “It’s about asking how we can evolve our overall culture. How can we make it inclusive for everyone by looking at how formerly marginalized groups are treated?" 

Fleischmann believes it's crucial to make clear that this culture of inclusivity benefits everyone. In his first appearance on the show, he discusses what drew him to LGBTQ+ and inclusivity research, what's changed in the last two decades, and what still needs to change in the workplaces of tomorrow. 

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Alexander Fleischmann received his PhD at the Institute for Gender and Diversity and Organization from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is now a research affiliate at IMD.