I recently appeared on the BBC World Service to discuss intimate relationships in the workplace. My research has found that 60% of workers during their lifetimes have an intimate relationship in the workplace. By ‘intimate’ I mean something beyond friendship but not necessarily up to physical contact — the Greeks had a word for it: agape, meaning “divine, unconditional,
self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love”.
You can listen to the clip on the BBC site here . Nada and I discussed this topic in further detail in our book Intimacy .

Following up on the recent news that top performing women have higher levels of testosterone , in this audio clip Andrew and I discuss the issue, as well as womens’ career progressions, what happened in Norway when it became the law for women to represent 40% of a company’s board , and how risk is related to testosterone. Listen to the clip here:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Says Andrew:
Prompted by this article by Gil Corkendale on the inequality of wages for women in the City of London, I believe that it continues to be nonsense that women are being paid less than men. The current economic climate exacerbates my concern that inequalities will continue to exist—the need for cost reduction is so high that women will continue to be casualties like anyone else. There’s clearly a lack of diversity being shown in imaginative remuneration packages for women, and other minority groups are suffering the same fate. [...]

I recently came across this article in the Financial Times by Michel Ferrary of the Ceram Business School, in which he argues that companies (and the boards and senior management therein) with a higher number of women managers are better able to face the economic downturn. This finding will certainly find favour across a number of quarters.
However, the research that we have conducted–which spans 12,500 top teams and well over 2,000 boards–suggests that there is no difference in operational or strategic performance between male and female managers. In fact, gender emerged as the least predicted demographic concerning effectiveness of performance.  It should be noted that similar findings applied to education, sector, religion, geographical location and personal background. [...]

Is the global financial crisis motivating people to seek extramarital affairs? Anecdotal evidence from FT columnist Lucy Kellaway suggests this is the case . In the process of doing research for a novel, she found that the adultery-enabling website Illicit Encounters has seen a 300% increase in registrations from London-based men in the financial sector since September. [...]

Earlier this month I came across this survey suggesting that nearly half of all workers think their bosses are incompetent. This can make for a difficult working environment.
In my book Essence of Leadership , I identified 5 reasons for continual tensions in organizations:

Differences between subordinates and bosses (the boss is accountable for a subordinate’s behaviour and contribution).
Differences between the operating businesses and the group centre (i.e. the centre is focused on a broad range of interests while business units are more concerned with the timely and efficient delivery of services or products).
Differences between internally and externally-focused people (people with different stakeholders and protocols may not always see eye-to-eye).
Differences between people who are more sales-oriented as opposed to service-oriented (the tension between getting the sale and provide good service).
Differences [...]

According to the Harvard Business Review, women quit tech careers because of “antigens,” parts of the culture that actively offend women.
From an interview with the author in Computer World :
“They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don’t have what it takes—who see them as genetically inferior. It’s hard to take as a steady stream. It’s predatory and demeaning. It’s distressing to find this kind of data in 2008.”
Clearly the technology companies highlighted in this sector have not established codes of conduct highlighting which behaviours and attitudes will not be tolerated at work. Studies in the past at Cranfield have shown few differences between males and females who hold senior roles. These women shouldn’t feel the need to drop out of their jobs [...]

Yahoo has been hemorrhaging high-level employees since the Microsoft takeover bid fell through (handily, technology blog TechCrunch has been keeping track ). Clearly there’s a great deal of dissatisfaction in the company.
Two of the most recent departures were the founders of companies Yahoo purchased (Flickr and Del.icio.us). When this happens, one has to assume that the purchasing company was stifling innovation by not providing effective leadership. Leadership contexts can change depending on the size of the team, the team’s location, and the personalities on the team.
Sensitivity to when people will need to act in different roles can help keep employees happy and make them more productive.

This article in VentureBeat highlights an all too common scenario: CEOs dreading board meetings and not getting anything out of them. The author, Nick Sturiale, provides some useful rules for building trust with boards and running effective meetings. One is to use the board to help solve problems:
The best boards develop a common insight around the key dynamics driving the company’s business. Common understanding is achieved by providing a holistic view set of snapshots/test results on how the company is faring and not cherry-picking the easiest results to measure.
Having everyone share the same vision is key.

Here is an interesting (though be warned, a bit tongue-in-cheek) case study  of what happened when executives at General Motors in the 1970s were forced to really embrace their brand values by driving (or being chauffeured by) cars from the divisions they worked in. When they all couldn’t have Cadillacs any longer, “fake luxury” took over, and brand lines took on similar upscale features.
It’s very important for executives to know the key values of their company or division and indeed live them. If no effort has been made to recognize the nature of the more deeply held views concerning the organisation, it is common for people slowly to become unaware of the key values that determine their behavior, and, as In this case, you get something as undesirable as “fake luxury.”