Do you want to make a positive difference in our world? It would be a dream come true to counter the anger and division that often surrounds us. As parents, there’s a way we can do it: by teaching empathy to kids. Teaching empathy to kids is as essential as teaching them to have good hygiene or nutrition.

The skills that can make you highly successful aren’t necessarily innate. You can practice them, and get better at them. That’s according to bestselling authors and leadership researchers Brené Brown and Simon Sinek, who sat down with Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant for a recent episode of his “ReThinking” podcast.

Brené Brown, bestselling author, researcher, and University of Houston professor, was surrounded by creativity as a child. “I grew up in a pink stucco house in New Orleans where my mom was always a maker. All the curtains in our house were homemade, and all the art in our house was from us kids. I had dresses that matched my mom’s that matched my dolls’.”

Einstein and Mozart were massively productive because they understood the value of easing back and chilling out. Modern theories of learning say that success is impossible without some degree of failure. Aim for the Goldilocks zone when setting a failure rate: roughly 16 percent.

Managers launching a new initiative often try to start big. They work to gain approval for a substantial budget, recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting, then look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins. But starting with a big kickoff campaign is more likely to activate resistance than it is to win over a majority. It’s also unnecessary. Decades of research shows that you don’t need to convince everybody for an idea to take hold. In fact, a significant minority is completely sufficient to create change.

Did you know that May is Mental Health Awareness Month? Now is a good time for our professional community to raise awareness around mental health and wellness issues. When you do, you’re helping to support successful employees, workplaces, organizations and society at large.

In a previous article, we described a group of 71 leaders who were able to elevate their leadership effectiveness from the 23rd percentile to the 56th percentile — that is, from being poor leaders to good ones. While many readers were impressed that it could happen, many more were curious (and even doubtful) about how it could happen.

A colleague and I were discussing if it was possible to recover from being seen as possessing a significant flaw in honesty and integrity. We identified various people who had tried to improve their honesty and integrity and seemed to make some progress, but for most people, this seemed to be a pit from which there was no escape.

Just because you’re communicating, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it well. At the core of every great relationship is great communication. The same is true of great teams. Effective communication is necessary for any leadership team to work together cohesively, engage employees, and create loyal customers. Some of the symptoms of poor communication include disconnection, gossiping, and inefficiency.

In 2009, Simon Sinek delivered a TED Talk that explored his notion that all great leaders share a trait--what he called "knowing the why." It has become the third-most-watched TED Talk of all time. Some 14 years later, the best-selling author's ideas continue to resonate with entrepreneurs, and he's now scaling his message of servant leader­ship through his new online learning platform, the Optimism Company. Begun as a pan­demic pivot, it boasts 20 employees working to infuse a spirit of helping others into the self-help industry.

If you want to succeed really, really badly, the paradoxical solution proposed by many successful people is to ease up. Albert Einstein was obscenely productive, but his productivity came in bursts. Between those bursts, he was gentle with himself. “If my work isn’t going well,” he said, “I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”

Embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a valuable step that employees are pushing for, and companies are leaning into. As organizations strive toward inclusive work environments that harness the potential of diverse teams and mindsets, DEI training initiatives play a vital role in promoting understanding, respect, and appreciation for individual differences. However, without addressing cultural competency, organizations might find their DEI efforts falling short of achieving true inclusivity.

To be a leader in 2023 is to encounter challenge after challenge. We are living through an incredibly tumultuous period, from waves of layoffs at tech companies large and small, to thorny financial situations like Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. Often when you’re managing through turbulence, you have to stay calm on the surface, while you’re paddling like crazy underwater.

Sooner or later, almost all of us will find ourselves trying to cope with how to manage conflict at work. At the office, we may struggle to work through high-pressure situations with people with whom we have little in common. We need a special set of strategies to calm tempers, restore order, and meet each side’s interests.

Growing up, I was social and outgoing, but I was never fond of putting on a show, even in smaller settings. In my high school years, I hosted several online and offline events that improved my public speaking skills. Shortly after moving to the Netherlands, I got a speaker slot at a TEDx event happening at the University of Groningen. Funny enough, I'm a first-year student at the university myself, so the pressure from age discrimination was definitely on. Plus, my family and friends were in the audience, making it infinitely harder.

I recently had the opportunity to be on the Lead on Purpose podcast with founder and host, James Laughlin. We geeked out on rugby, drumming, sports, and leadership. James is a world-renowned high-performance leadership expert and has won seven world championship titles. He now has the opportunity to interview former world leaders, pro athletes, Navy SEALs, and CEO's. I am not a world leader nor pro athlete, but I do fall into a couple of those categories and run a management consulting firm focused on building high-performance teams and leaders in organizations across the globe.

Are you having a hard time making a big decision?

Maybe you're trying to work your way through a thorny business problem. Maybe you can't make up your mind about what to do with a promising employee. Maybe it's that you're caught between two choices in a personal or relationship matter. Good news: There's a simple question you can ask yourself (grounded in neuroscience) that can guide you through indecision, overcome analysis paralysis, and ultimately help you make better, bolder choices.

When tasked with implementing large-scale organizational change, leaders often give too much attention to the what of change — such as a new organization strategy, operating model or acquisition integration — not the how — the particular way they will approach such changes. Such inattention to the how comes with the major risk that old routines will be used to get to new places. Any unquestioned, “default” approach to change may lead to a lot of busy action, but not genuine system transformation. Through their practice and research, the authors have identified the optimal ways to conceive, design, and implement successful organizational change.

We are spending more time indoors and online. But recent studies suggest that nature can help our brains and bodies to stay healthy. I’ve been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful.

In a recent article, we explained that achieving sustainable, profitable growth requires companies to actively choose growth through a holistic approach comprising three elements: developing an aspirational mindset and culture, activating pathways, and executing with excellence. We then set out to bring those pathways to life through the ten rules of growth (see sidebar, “The ten rules of value-creating growth”), based on an in-depth study of the growth patterns and performance of the world’s largest public companies.