133: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers – Balancing Tight and Loose Cultural Norms in Your Workplace with Michele Gelfand

Ep133 Michele Gelfand rule makers rule breakers tight and loose cultural norms workplace TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

Workplace cultures vary greatly in terms of how strict or loose they are. Ideally, where a given workplace falls on this spectrum reflects the values and necessities of that business or organization. This raises a crucial question for us as leaders: how do we determine what is just the right amount of tightness or looseness in our workplace cultures?

Workplace cultures vary greatly in terms of how strict or loose they are. Ideally, where a given workplace falls on this spectrum reflects the values and necessities of that business or organization. This raises a crucial question for us as leaders: how do we determine what is just the right amount of tightness or looseness in our workplace cultures? Professor Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland (my alma mater!) joins me on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to discuss the high impact role of cultural norms in the workplace. Listen to find out what factors tend to determine tightness or looseness in both organizations and nations, how leaders can harness the power of cultural norms to promote a higher level of effectiveness in their workplaces, and how you can use an understanding of Michele’s ideas to help you become a better negotiator. Plus, discover how these ideas can translate usefully on an individual level as well! Be sure to tune in and share what you learn with others.

ABOUT MICHELE GELFAND:

Michele Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her pioneering research into cultural norms has been cited thousands of times in the press, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, and Science, and on NPR. The recipient of numerous awards, she is a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • Michele explains her approach to culture and cultural norms, and the questions and discoveries that set her on the path she is on today (4:52)

  • What determines a tendency to either stricter or looser cultures in both nations and organizations? (7:15)

  • Halelly and Michele dig deeper into the correlation between risk-ridden environments and tight, strict cultures (9:14)

  • How leaders can harness the power of cultural norms to promote a higher level of effectiveness in the workplace (10:28)

  • “The best leaders are ambidextrous. They can balance both tight and loose.” (13:24)

  • How can you tell what is just the right amount of tightness or looseness for your organization? (14:33)

  • Culture, especially culture that has been ingrained over a long period of time, isn’t easy to change. Where do you start? (15:13)

  • Halelly shifts perspective to talk about how Michele’s ideas on culture can help us on an individual, personal level (18:40)

  • Understanding the tight vs loose dichotomy can help us negotiate with people who have very different mindsets than our own (21:18)

  • Halelly connects Michele’s ideas with the Myers Briggs personality model, and Michele weighs in on differences and similarities (21:43)

  • Matching your mindset and the cultural mindset of your organization (23:26)

  • What’s new and exciting on Michele’s horizon? (26:20)

  • One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership effectiveness (27:07) 

Resources:

Transcript:

Episode 133 Michele Gelfand

TEASER CLIP: Michele: You know, in these organizations, they tend to have different people, different practices, different leaders, tight organizations and units and teams tend to have people who are careful and conscientious, their practices tend to be standardized and efficient and formal. There’s a lot of socialization and onboarding, and leaders tend to be pretty independent. They call the shots. We find that loose organizations have people who are much more open and risk taking, lots of discretion and experimentation, they’re informal – sometimes even to the point of seeming chaotic – and their leaders tend to be visionary and collaborative. But nevertheless, even though groups have to veer tight or loose, for good reason in organizations, what I find is that sometimes organizations get too extreme in either direction, and that’s where we have a lot of problems.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Hey TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, where we develop leaders that people actually want to follow. This week I am bringing to you a very interesting perspective about cultural norms and cultural norms that affect you both at a national level, at an international level, an organizational level and even inside of your family and your close relationships and I’m excited that this week I have a university professor from the university that I attended, both for my bachelor’s and my master’s degree, University of Maryland, College Park. Her name is Michele Gelfand and I think that you’re going to enjoy listening to her insights. She talks fast, so strap on your seatbelt and get ready. Here we go.

TalentGrowers, this week I have professor Michele Gelfand. She’s a distinguished university professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, my alma mater. Her pioneering research into cultural norms has been cited thousands of times in the press, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review and Science and on NPR, and now on the TalentGrow Show. She’s the recipient of numerous awards, past president of the international association for conflict management. Michele, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.

Michele: I’m so happy to be here.

Halelly: I’m glad that you’re here and before we start to dive into your book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, how tight and loose cultures wire our world, I always ask my guests to describe their professional journey. Where did you start and how did you end up where you are today, briefly?

Michele: Sure. I’m a cross-cultural psychologist, and I’ve been passionate about studying culture for several decades. Culture is this really interesting phenomenon. It’s omnipresent, all around us, but we rarely recognize it. It’s really invisible. But it’s affecting everything from our politics to our parenting, our leadership, our organizations, yet you need to know more about it. I actually discovered the field of cross-cultural psychology really serendipitously. I was pre-med and I went to London for a semester and I felt so much culture shock as a junior in college and I remember calling my father and asking him for advice. I was telling him how strange it was, for example, for people just to go from London to Paris for just the weekend. My dad said something that changed my life, actually, and really steered me into this career. He said, “Think about it like it’s going from New York to Pennsylvania,” in his Brooklyn accent, and that gave me so much courage and comfort that the next day – this is a true story – I booked a trip to Egypt. And it was just like going from New York to California, I reasoned. I told my dad, who was kind of a little bit upset that I was flying away to somewhere so far, and it was in Egypt and later travels that I realized just how powerful a force culture was. I knew very little about it. And by extension, about myself. So I ditched my plans to become a medical doctor and I got a PhD in cross-cultural social and organizational psychology to use the tools of science to understand our deeper cultural code. Life happens when you’re making other plans, as they say.

Halelly: Wow, well good for you for following your newfound passion and going for it. Something that you may not know – and TalentGrowers, I don’t think know – is that when I was studying at the University of Maryland, what I studied was intercultural communication. I didn’t really get into that field of work. We can talk about why, but it’s always been very, very intriguing to me. So in your book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, you describe a way of viewing our cultural diversity through a new lens, and you look through how we adhere to social norms. Some people are what you say tight. They stick to the norms pretty closely and they follow the rules, and other people you say are loose, so they don’t choose strict rules and prefer to be free to do what they feel like. It’s an interesting way of looking at cultural diversity, and I wonder, what made you study this? What made you discover this lens, and how do you compare it to some of the already-existing ways that we look at diversity or cultural differences?

Michele: This is such a great question. Often it’s the case that we think about culture in terms of rather superficial characteristics, like red versus blue or east versus west or rich or poor. I wanted to understand the more deeper cultural codes that drive our behavior. Much of the research in my field has been focused on values, but I started to see lots of differences around the world in terms of norms or these kind of unwritten, sometimes formalized, standards for behavior that seemed to be so diverse across the world. For example, why can’t you bring gum into the country in Singapore, and at the same time you take a short trip over to New Zealand and you see people in New Zealand walking barefoot in banks and burning couches on college campuses or you take a trip to Germany and see people waiting very patiently on the street corners in many places, even if there’s no cars around, but in my home state of New York City, where people jaywalk all the time with their kids in tow, and I started noticing that there seems to be a distinction between how strict or permissive or what I call tight and loose, differences around the world.

So I set out to really try to systematically study this. We did a study with a large interdisciplinary research team around the world to try to assess tight and loose, the strictness of social norms, across 33 nations. It was published in Science some years ago. What was fascinating, just like we can place people on dimensions of personality, like extraversion or introversion, we can also, generally speaking, understand which nations are tighter or looser. Places like Japan and Singapore, Austria, Germany, veered tight in our data. Places like New Zealand and Brazil and Greece and the U.S. to some extent were veering loose. What was so super interesting about this is why did these differences develop and that’s what I was looking at in that study.

It turns out that culture has quite a bit of an important rational. It’s not random. What we found is that culture, this is at a national level but later we show this with states, with social class, cultures that have a lot of threat tend to develop strict societies, and that threat could be from Mother Nature, it could be disasters and famine or it could be human threat, like invasions or population density or economic failures. When you have a lot of threat, it’s pretty simple. You need strong rules to help coordinate to survive those threats, those collective action problems. So groups that tend to be looser tend to have less threat in our data, and so it’s super exciting to try to understand this pattern across nations. We later then showed you could put the U.S. on a new map that shows how tight or loose the 50 states are. Again, the states that are the tightest were the ones that have the most disasters, pathogens and other threats. Social class is also another level of analysis. Organizations, I know many of your podcast listeners are deeply interested in organizations, and we can see that tight/loose also differentiates organizations.

What’s also really interesting is that tight/loose, whether it’s at the level of nations or states or organizations, produces a very similar trade off. That is that tight societies and groups tend to have a lot of order. They have a lot of synchrony, they have a lot of uniformity, and they have a lot of self-control, and loose cultures tend to be more disorganized. They tend to have less self-control, less synchrony, but on the flipside, loose cultures tend to be very open to different types of people, to different ideas. They’re more creative and more adaptive to change, whereas tight cultures struggle with those issues.

That’s the kind of gist of the book is that we can take this lens, this simple lens, and understand cultural differences at many different contexts including, by the way, in our households. That’s something I write about in Rule Makers, Rule Breakers is how we understand and diagnose tight/loose and use it to our benefit.

Halelly: Wow, okay! That’s a lot. Let’s break this down a little bit. You say that you can kind of guess or assess whether a culture is more likely to be loose or more likely to be tight, if you can assess that it’s a place that has more risk, more danger?

Michele: Those kinds of factors push groups toward having greater tightness. Actually, it doesn’t even have to be chronic levels of threat. I studied this over like 100 years, and even looked at it in traditional studies they did hundreds of years ago that the same template could be seen, the groups that had the most threat tended to have the tightest norms. What’s really important also is that this can change dramatically, so for example, I can bring people into my laboratory and I can activate threats like terrorism or natural disasters or other types of threats that we have, and within minutes you can see people tightening up. They want stronger rules. It’s like this instinctive kind of process where when we’re under threat we tighten up. And we see that happening all around this country. When people feel threatened, whether it’s real or imagined, they – actually in our research – they desire stronger norms, more autocratic leaders, and so this is something that’s both we find it chronically with groups but also it can change rather quickly.

Halelly: Interesting. For our listeners, as they are existing within organizations – although of course most of our listeners are experiencing also cultural diversity in the organizations, because obviously the world is becoming much more globalized and people from different countries travel and work in other places – but even if we think about what you just said, the organizational culture, and maybe even the cultural diversity, however you want to take this, what are some important things that leaders need to know about looseness and tightness in their environment?

Michele: This is such a great question. I actually just visited Glass Door to talk about this with their organization and you know, the biggest point is that we can use the power of social media norms, in terms of the tightness and looseness. Again, harness the power of them to have better effectiveness in our organizations. For leaders out there, and people who are interested in having better workplaces, we need to diagnose the level of tight/loose in an organization and think about how it fits with our needs. We know – and I wrote about this in Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, that the level of tight/loose in organizations also tends to evolve for good reasons. Tightness abounds in industries that face threat and need coordination. Think about nuclear power plants or hospitals or airlines, police departments, construction – they develop a lot of rules due to their life or death kind of stakes. Even organizations that are accountable to laws and regulations tend to be tight. Think lawyers, auditors, bankers. They’re bounder to higher standards of professional accountability and have a lot of compliance monitoring.

Industries tend to veer tight or loose, depending on the need for coordination. Loose organizations have less threat and they’re more informal, they’re more mobile, they’re more diverse – think design consulting – and these organizations, they tend to have different people, different practices, different leaders. Tight organizations and units and teams tend to have people who are careful and conscientious. Their practices tend to be standardized and efficient and formal. There’s a lot of standardization and onboarding, and leaders tend to be pretty independent. They call the shots. We find that loose organizations have people who are much more open and risk taking. There’s lots of discretion and experimentation. They’re informal – sometimes even to the point of seeming chaotic – and their leaders tend to be visionary and collaborative. But nevertheless, even though groups have to veer tight or loose, for good reason in organizations, what I find is that sometimes organizations get too extreme in either direction, and that’s where we have a lot of problems.

For example, take United. Some years ago, they had a massive PR problem. United needs to veer tight, given its industry, but arguably was getting too tight, and I advocated in an op-ed that you need to introduce some discretion, flexibility to that tight system. We want it to be tight. It needs to be tight. But we need to find, as leaders and managers, ways to introduce discretion. At the flipside, you have organizations like Uber or Tesla that veer loose but arguably have also gotten too loose, that need to introduce some structure into those contexts. I call that structured looseness. This is what I call really broader principle, the Goldilocks principle of tight/loose. Each person in an organization needs to diagnose the level of tightness and looseness in their team and in their unit and organization, and think about whether or not it’s too tight or too loose and start recalibrating those social norms. The best leaders are ambidextrous. They can balance both tight and loose. And even innovation, as a basic process, requires both tight and loose. It requires the looseness that helps people come up with great ideas, but it requires tightness to help implement them and scale them up. It’s remarkable, a hidden dimension, not something we think about, but once we have the language of tight/loose, we can start diagnosing it in organizations and really discussing it and negotiating it. I have been studying mergers and acquisitions across the tight/loose divide, and again, the larger the difference between the level of tight/loose, the much more difficult it is, these mergers. And I have ideas of how to help negotiate that before we actually try to merge, and we hit this kind of iceberg of different people and practices and leaders that constitute tight and loose organization. So the leaders out there, the managers, people who are in organizations, should think about tight/loose and how to really negotiate it for maximum effectiveness.

Halelly: Okay, so there’s the Goldilocks effect – how do they know what’s just the right amount?

Michele: It’s a good point. I think once you start getting to the point where tightness becomes so overwhelming that people don’t feel comfortable expressing dissent, just like what happened in the United case, or they don’t feel comfortable challenging the rules, or in the looseness context, once looseness kind of becomes extreme, things can be unpredictable and chaotic, and they’re equally problematic, these extremes. We can try to diagnose them, and then we can help make shifts. If a group is getting too loose, we can start engaging in more structure, in more monitoring, more benchmarking. Vice versa, with very tight groups, if we feel like things are getting too standardized, too formal and too conformist, we can start to help people have spaces to brainstorm in a safe way, to give them some voice and discretion. Even places like the military – I’m working a lot with military on issues of tight/loose – places like the Navy, you need to be tight. But how can we introduce some discretion that’s not safety related? Often it’s the case that we have a lot of rules, but the question is, do we really need all of those rules? That’s a good way to start, is to really think about what rules really matter.

A lot of organizations that want to change in either direction, it’s not easy, because people are used to having a lot of control in tight cultures. They’re used to having autonomy in loose cultures, so leaders need to really help people to feel, “We’re loosening up but we still have a lot of control, or we’re tightening up but we still have a lot of autonomy.” And to really talk with their employees about these shifts. Again, the best leaders can use the terminology to try and help people understand and participate in the kind of changes. In the book I talk about different scenarios when I’ve interviewed managers and firms that have been trying to either become tighter or looser, the kind of problems they had and the kind of solutions they came up with. The kinds of, sometimes having gone almost to the exact opposite extreme and having to scale back a little bit, because people didn’t like the changes. There’s no simple recipe, but again, once you have the language and understand the concepts, it starts becoming exciting to try and actually implement change and help people understand the reason for it and how it will maintain the same core of what norm strength is needed, given the industry, but how we might recalibrate that a little bit so we can have some balance.

Halelly: Culture is very hard to change. When people become embedded in cultural norms of their organization, of their native culture, whatever the source is, obviously the more long-standing your adherence to certain norms or your exposure to certain norms is, the harder it will be to change.

Michele: That’s right, and definitely our research shows it’s harder to change in tight cultures. We’ve done a lot of work not just in field research, but also with computer modeling, to show that it actually takes a lot longer to change norms in tight cultures, which have more inertia. But it’s still possible to change, especially when we can understand why these differences exist in the first place and how we’re going to change, but not go through a total change. Gradual, incremental type of change.

Halelly: That makes sense. If you’re a rule follower, this is the way we’ve always done it is kind of the mantra. This is probably very anathema to innovation or to really shifting quickly or pivoting in a changing environment. This is going to be a problem for those kinds of organizations.

Michele: I agree, and actually we have some research I talk about in the book where we can see even as young as three years old, we see differences in groups in terms of how much they are tending to norms and noticing norm violations. It happens really early. Actually, norms are something that we become aware of even before we can speak. So there’s a lot of interesting research on this. You take a person who is now in their 30s or 40s or 50s, or so forth, and try to change their level of norms abidance or breaking, and it is something that is a process. It can’t happen overnight.

Halelly: Makes sense. So, now that you’ve spoken about how early this can start, we can shift to this perspective. We went to cultural to organizational and we can shift perspective to our interpersonal or personal effectiveness. What are some things that are going to help us harness this understand to improve our own effectiveness in our personal relationships and just in our own well being?

Michele: I mean, this is a great question, because ach of us has our own default setting on the tight/loose mindset. I talk about this in a book. I even have a mindset quiz that you can take on my website that helps people to see where do you naturally fall? We also can recalibrate, depending on the situation. When we’re all in a library, we all quickly tighten up, versus when we’re at a party. But each of us has our own default setting for our own personal reasons and experience. People who veer tight on this quiz are rule makers. They are people who are tending to norms and register in this rules, managing their impulses. They tend to like a lot of order and structure, kind of like I use the Muppet metaphor that [inaudible] talked about. These people are like Kermit the Frog and Burt. This is what I call the sort of tight mindset. But people who veer loose are rule breakers. They don’t tend to notice rules as much, they’re more risk taking, quasi-impulsive, they embrace ambiguity. They’re like the Cookie Monster.

Halelly: Or Animal!

Michele: Or Animal, exactly! With his crazy hair. But understanding your own mindset and where it comes from can be really empowering because it helps us to see why we act or react with different people around us and why we struggle in some situations, once we can label this as, “Okay, they have a different mindset than us. This is a different situation that conflicts with my tight mindset.” If you’re of a tight mindset and you’ve got a loose situation or vice versa, that lack of fit can be causing a lot of stress. Also, it’s as I mentioned, what’s really exciting about understanding tight/loose from my point of view is that we can help to negotiate with people around us who have very different mindsets than us. A lot of the conflicts we have, whether with our spouse or kids or bosses or colleagues are in large part causes by differences in tight/loose mindsets.

If you think about your parents, are you a helicopter parent who likes to enforce a tight ship? Are you co-parenting with someone who is more laissez-faire, lets kids do their own things? It applies to vacations. I talk about this with my family, my extended family. On vacations, I have conflict with relatives who like to have everything structured and planned, versus having a lot of spontaneity and lack of planning, which might seem very chaotic to people with a tight mindset. It also happens with financial decision making, with how messy we are. We can negotiate it. I actually, with my teenagers and husband, we talk about, “What domains do we really need to be tight in? And what domains can we loosen up in?” We can actually think about it and prioritize it and help trade off, like it any good negotiation. What are our priorities and how do we kind of negotiate the domains that we feel can be tight and loose? We actually can do it. We’ve done it many times in my household.

Halelly: Neat. You know, it’s interesting, I can’t help but to think of an overlap between what you’re describing and how we describe personality differences. So for example, in the Myers-Briggs, when you describe judging versus perceiving, a lot of times there is an openness to new stimuli and new ideas and not being oriented toward closure, whereas someone who has more of a judging orientation to their energy, they like closure and they like structure and they like things to be kind of prescribed. Have you ever done any research comparing them?

Michele: I haven’t used the Myers-Briggs, but we can see that clearly across nations, states, individuals, that tight mindsets are associated with conscientiousness as a trait. But I find that it’s associated with a cluster of personality traits, not just one. For example, tight mindsets are associated with high self monitoring, which means monitoring the rules around you and trying to fit into the situation. It also relates to emotional regulation. I count how much I’m managing my impulses, which is more related to other dimensions of personality. Then you have also kind of the need for structure, cautiousness, prevention focus that you’re describing that relates to conscientiousness. So, it really kind of is a cluster of personality characteristics, all that relate to your attention to rules or lack thereof.

The other thing is that I think what tight/loose tries to focus on is the basis of the evolutionary basis for these differences. A lot of times, people veer tight or loose for good reasons, based on their childhoods or based on their experiences or based on their occupation that they’re in. I mean, for example, my husband is a lawyer – he’s got to be tighter than me because he constantly has the kind of occupational context that pushes you toward that kind of risk aversion or rule making behavior. And so I think once we step back and think, “Why does that person have a different mindset than me?” Versus this is just something that arose randomly, it helps us to have more empathy for people. That’s what I think helps when we think about how to create better relationships and negotiate. Part of that comes from understanding ourselves. Why are we the way we are? Why have I developed a more quasi-loose mindset versus others? That’s what’s kind of exciting about it, to diagnose our own and others and to try to empathize and understand and then negotiate.

Halelly: Makes sense. The more that you have an awareness of this difference even exists, like any other difference, a lot of times we just see the world through the lens that comes naturally to us. When you look at someone who seems to be behaving very differently or seems to be motivated by very different kind of impulses, you look at them like, “Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you?” So this is nice, because then you understand that it’s because they are oriented differently or they’re wired differently or were raised differently and now I can put what I’m noticing into a different perspective and then I can approach it with, as you said, empathy and willingness to negotiate.

Michele: I think that’s right, and I study negotiation, so I think what’s really encouraging is we can say, “Well, what’s really important to you?” If I’m really messy around the house and I’m really irritating my spouse, okay, but what domains am I going to lobby for that I want to be looser? Vacations or other things. Part of it is prioritizing. What are the most important domains that we must be tight or loose in? We might not always agree on that, but I’m pretty messy and my kids are messy, and I think that might bother my spouse more than me, but it’s also that there are other more important domains that need to be tight. That’s what, I think, good to think about in terms of priorities.

Halelly: And like pick your battles, right?

Michele: Exactly. In organizational life, also, helping to understand the conflicts we have through a tight/loose lens helps us to feel empowered that we understand them more. I’ve had a lot of people send me, through my website I have a place where people can send in stories, and I’ve had a lot of people send in stories about how they realize that some of the issues they’ve been having in an organization relate to these differences. Or in their marriage or when they travel places. Often we send people abroad based on their technical expertise. We don’t send them based on their fit with the cultural context, and I recently was showing that ex-patriots that go to cultures that match their personal mindset are much happier, for example. The same can be said for an organization. People whose mindset matches the culture of the organization, we know from decades of research in organizational culture and fit, that that matters. I think more generally, understanding this can help us in a lot of different contexts.

Halelly: Awesome. Well, we’re almost out of time, so before you share one specific actionable tip, what’s new and exciting?

Michele: Just one?

Halelly: Just one. What’s new and exciting for you these days? What’s got your attention?

Michele: I’m really interested in changes of norms, and we’ve been starting to develop some techniques where we can look at changes in norms in tight/loose over long periods of time. We just published a paper recently looking at changes of norms across the last 200 years in the United States, and trying to track what’s associated with that. As we become looser, we become more creative in our research, but we also tend to have less order and so it’s really exciting to start thinking about culture as dynamic and shifting. Also, we’re doing a lot of work on tight/loose ambidexterity, how do we help leaders diagnose the extremes or balance their units and their organizations better when it comes to norms? That’s really super exciting.

Halelly: Nice. Sounds good and I look forward to seeing the results of that research. What’s one – even though I know you have so many to share – what’s one actionable tip or piece of advice that you have for our listeners that they can take action on today, this week, that can help them ratchet up their own leadership success based on your lens?

Michele: I would say probably the best actionable thing would be to take the tight/loose mindset quiz at my website, which is MicheleGelfand.com. Because then you can get a sense of where do you fall on the spectrum and you can start thinking about using this concept, this terminology, to diagnose issues that maybe have been something you couldn’t quite understand as clearly. The lens will help people understand themselves and then start using it to diagnose people around them.

Halelly: Sounds good. We’ll link to that in the show notes. I imagine that a way for people to stay in touch with you would be to visit your website. Are there any other ways that you’d like people to stay connected and learn more from and about you?

Michele: Sure. My website really has everything on there. It has all my stuff from the popular press, all my research articles, it has lots of pictures, it has other tools that I think people could be interested in, and of course I’d really love to hear from your audience. I really want to see how we can partner together to help improve organizational effectiveness and I’m always open to emails you sending your stories and I hope that you’ll read Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, because I wasn’t able to really get the gist of a lot of it, and there’s also lots of information about the book on the website too.

Halelly: Great. We’ll link to the book as well in the show notes. Thanks for joining us today on the TalentGrow Show. You are now the second University of Maryland professor. The first one was Dr. Edwin Locke – he’s a professor emeritus.

Michele: Fabulous. I love your show and thanks so much for having me.

Halelly: Thank you for taking time today and sharing your insights. All right, TalentGrowers, I hope that you enjoyed that fast ride with Michele Gelfand, and that you learned a lot and that you’re going to take action based on what you learned. I’d love to hear what action you plan to take or if you are fast, what you learned from taking action. We link to everything in the show notes page, which is on my website, TalentGrow.com for this episode, and as always I welcome your feedback because I am on a learning journey and I keep growing based on feedback. I need your feedback and of course suggestions for future topics, future content, future guests, always welcome. Share this episode with one other person that you think can also benefit, and that way we can grow the listener base and get more people to gain value from the work that I put out into the world. Thank you in advance for that. I appreciate you listening. I hope that you stay in touch and listen to the next episode, but until the next time, I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this is the TalentGrow Show. Thanks for listening. Make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.


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Ep056: How to build high trust workplace cultures with neuroscientist Paul Zak

Ep20: Create a Connection Culture with Michael Lee Stallard