Would you like to get better at something? How can we make sustainable changes to ourselves and our organizations?

Your new CEO knows everyone’s name – not just employees but also their extended families. Your new CEO sends cards on your birthday, and never books you in for work on your holiday schedule. Your new CEO is fluent in every language in the world. Your new CEO is a machine.

Many organizations have it all wrong. They don’t just need to motivate their people. They need to stop demotivating them.

The why of our behaviours is a more powerful story that the how. Both philosophy and empirical research suggest that the higher our level of interpretation or construal, the more we will stick with it when the going gets hard.

No one sets out to be the kind of manager whose employees do not feel alive at work. No one sets out to be a soul-sucking manager. So, how does it happen and why do so many of us feel – you might say – dead at work instead of alive at work?

Organizations can do a much better job at maintaining our engagement with their work and boosting the overall culture of their organization if they understand that employees’ lack of engagement at work isn’t really a motivational problem. It’s a biological one.

I don’t know the magic formulas that consulting firms use to define ‘disengagement’. Companies like Deloitte and Gallup tell us that 70% of employees are not engaged, but I don’t know whether we need to take it with a grain of salt. I can tell you that many, many of my friends would fail the test of engagement. So what is the test of engagement?

I spoke with Chris Rainey, founder and host of HR Leaders Podcast, about why so many people are not alive at work and what leaders can do to increase curiosity, innovation and enthusiasm.

At some point, every leader has dealt with a person – or, worse, a group of people – who has lost motivation. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? As much as we’ve been there ourselves, sometimes it’s hard to sympathise with others who are disengaged from work and unproductive as a result.

Want to know more about why so many companies have disengaged employees who don’t innovate or help your organisation adapt? Watch this video.

Growing up outside Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in the 1970s, we had a 1960s era Sears circular saw around the house. I discovered the saw in the workbench in the basement as a teenager. It ran so loud it was shocking. The spinning blade was menacing.

The digital revolution is deeply affecting the way we live, consume, work and interact with one another. Not only do companies have to revamp their operating models and adopt to a changing market environment; CIOs must also upgrade their arsenals and come up with new strategies.

Like many beautiful ideas, transparency is a little more complicated when it’s translated into reality. In an age when it’s normal for detailed information to be readily available to anyone who cares to look – through online customer reviews, public social media profiles, location-enabled apps – it’s easy to assume that sharing information can only be a good thing.

I once was at a thanksgiving dinner party where someone asked: “If you had 10 lives to live, in how many of them would you have kids?”

Our job titles say a lot about us. They are powerful symbols about who we are, what we can do, and what others can expect from us. In this sense, a job title is a brand that communicates expectations.

When accepting a new position or angling for a promotion, most people tend to focus on salary negotiation. But your job title should also be part of the equation.

Wondering how to get the most out of people? You are not alone. According to the pollsters at Gallup, more than 70% of American workers are not engaged at work. Worldwide, the number of disengaged workers balloons to 85%.

We found across three studies that the extent to which job candidates strive to self-verify is a critical factor in final job offer decisions, making top candidates more likely to convert interviews into job offers.

Competition between employees may be an inescapable part of many people’s work lives and can lead to improved performance. But if leaders want to ensure that competition unleashes creativity and not unethical behavior, they must resist the temptation to lead through fear.

Leaders need to get smarter about when to open up and when to withhold information so they can enjoy the benefits of organizational transparency while mitigating its unintended consequences.

Did you know that trees listen and speak to each other, across species? Turns out their roots are networks that allow them to share information and resources.

Ever felt like a doormat in your job?

If organizations want to inspire creativity, innovation and peak performance, leaders need to activate people’s positive emotions. But when employees get a whiff of bullying, or of being punished for experimenting, just the opposite happens.

The important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that’s toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game.

The more hours a day adults believe they use their strengths, the more likely they are to report having ample energy, feeling well-rested, being happy, smiling or laughing a lot, learning something interesting and being treated with respect.

Change is a fundamental part of business today. To be successful and stay successful, every organization has to know how to adapt, innovate and evolve. However, before implementing any grand change ambitions, you should first stop and ask seven important questions.

A terrific video, well worth watching.

Job titles don’t usually generate much excitement. They’re printed on business cards, emblazoned on LinkedIn pages, and used in formal introductions. Some organizations, however, see them as a chance to get creative.

For chief executives and other senior leaders, it is not unusual for 60-80% of their pay to be tied to performance – whether performance is measured by quarterly earnings, stock prices or something else. And yet from a review of the research on incentives and motivation, it is wholly unclear why such a large proportion of these executives’ compensation packages would need to be variable.

We don’t need Gaussian curves to get the best out of ourselves and others. Leaders need to encourage teams of people to bring their best to work as they compete in the external market, instead of forcing team members to compete internally with each other.