Learning Culture: Help Your Team Grow and Improve

A learning culture encourages a growth mindset and psychological safety. It is the best way to help your employees learn what they need to succeed.

Six Leadership Styles—and How They Affect Team Performance

January 20, 2026

Trust and Building Teams

Strong leaders rely on a variety of leadership styles, adapting how they lead based on context, people, and stakes. Key Takeaways about Leadership Styles Decades of leadership style research—including Daniel Goleman’s work on leadership styles and performance—show that how you lead directly affects results. Some leadership styles consistently improve engagement and outcomes. Others quietly undermine them, even when intentions are good. Think of leadership as a toolkit. Leaders with limited tools tend to overuse the same approach—often at the expense…

employee engagement vs employee satisfaction at work

Employee Engagement vs Employee Satisfaction: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters for Your Business

December 5, 2025

Motivation and a Culture of Performance

When comparing employee engagement vs employee satisfaction, which should you measure? If your company is still relying on employee satisfaction surveys, it may be time to shift toward measuring employee engagement — the metric most strongly linked to performance, retention, and profitability. For more than a century, researchers have tried to understand what helps employees thrive and what drives productivity. Today, most organizations focus on employee engagement, not satisfaction, because engagement is what truly predicts effort, innovation, and long-term value.…

manager giving effective feedback in the moment

Effective Feedback: How Great Managers Help Their Teams Grow

December 3, 2025

Motivation and a Culture of Performance

If you want to give your team effective feedback that actually helps them grow, focus on making it future-forward, specific, and frequent. Most of us have negative experiences with feedback—criticism that felt harsh, vague, or demotivating. No wonder so many managers hesitate to offer it. But here’s the good news: research shows that when people receive meaningful employee feedback, they learn faster, perform better, and stay more engaged. So, the question becomes: How can we make giving feedback a positive,…

Do a favor, give a gift, empathize, be grateful for My Gratitude Project

Empathy and Leadership: What Gen Z Gets Right | My Gratitude Project Day 21

November 21, 2025

Gratitude Project

A new poll reveals how empathy and leadership work together. Ask your grandfather about empathy and leadership, and he might draw a blank. His attitude about empathy and yours probably differ significantly. These generational expectations are showing up in the workplace and in polls that help us understand important trends. In a recent poll, Deloitte Digital asked Gen Z what they wanted most in their boss. Empathy ranked second for Gen Z, and fifth for their bosses. What is happening…

Cognitive Bias and Empathy: Seeing the World Clearly | My Gratitude Project Day 15

November 15, 2025

Gratitude Project

What gets in the way of empathy and change? Mostly it’s what psychologists call cognitive bias. Cognitive biases are unconscious and irrational brain processes that literally distort the way we see the world. Psychologists have identified over 180 cognitive biases that skew how we perceive and remember events in the past and influence how hard we are willing to try or resist change in the future. Here are a few of the biases that come up a lot at work:…

Empathy and Change: The Paradox That Transforms Us | My Gratitude Project Day 11

November 11, 2025

Gratitude Project

Ironically, empathy and change are more closely related than most people think. Empathy and change might seem to be opposites, but the secret of empathy is that it is what most people need in order to be ready to change. Resistance operates a lot like Newton’s Third Law of Physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What it means is that forces come in pairs. It may not seem like it, but if you push against…