Articles
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How to Be a Good Guy
Janet Crawford and Lisa Marshall
As two executive coaches who’ve worked mostly in high tech and the entertainment industry, we’ve heard requests lately from male (mostly white) clients who’ve been exposed to the conversation about implicit bias and want to know “How do I do better? How do I not be part of the problem? How do I support the women or under-represented minorities who work for me in ways that help us all move past the boundaries of unconscious bias?” This is a short primer to get you started.
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But I’m Not Sexist, Am I?
Janet L. Crawford
Gender equity in business is in the spotlight, but is overt sexism the primary cause? What if instead, our fundamental brain design underlies this intractable issue?
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Forbes: Are Feminine Leadership Traits the Future of Business?
Janet Crawford with Victor Hwang, T2 Venture Creation
There’s an interesting gender paradox in innovation. When we think of product innovation, we tend to think of nerdy male engineers tinkering in a garage. It’s a stereotype that goes all the way back to the early days of Hewlett and Packard. When we think of strong innovation ecosystems, however, we think of communities with high levels of connectivity, communication, and collaborative sharing. Those are stereotypically feminine traits.
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GE Ideas Lab: The Neural Paradox of Innovation
Janet Crawford
Great innovations often seem stunningly obvious…after the fact. Innovation requires seeing past existing assumptions and viewing the world through fresh eyes. Collaboration and diverse perspectives provide the fuel, but working with those who “think different” poses its own set of neural challenges.
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Forbes Part One: What’s Better for Business: Logic or Emotion? Answers from Neuroscience
Janet Crawford with Victor Hwang, T2 Venture Creation
In this first installment of a three part Forbes online series, Janet explores the interplay between emotion, intuition, and logic. Could many of the decisions we think of as being the result of conscious reasoning have their roots in unconscious instinctual programming?
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Forbes Part Two: Can Neuroscience Explain Innovation?
Janet Crawford with Victor Hwang, T2 Venture Creation
In this second installment of a three part Forbes online series, Janet explores how our brain’s preference for conserving patterns impacts our ability to innovate.
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Forbes Part Three: Four Ways You Can Innovate Better, According to Neuroscience
Janet Crawford with Victor Hwang, T2 Venture Creation
In this final installment of a three part Forbes online series, Janet gives four simple steps, based on biology, that people can take to foster innovation.
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GE Ideas Lab: Where are the Women in Leadership
Janet Crawford
Despite legal advances worldwide and more women participating in the formal workforce than ever before, an astonishingly low percentage of world leaders and corporate executives are women. If women and their experience are so valuable, why has progress toward equity been so slow? Perhaps surprising is that overt sexism may not the prime culprit. Implicit bias, a normal byproduct of our neural design, leads well-intentioned men and women to reinforce the status quo, while constricting creativity and limiting the narratives we think to tell.
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The Brain-Friendly Organization: What Leaders Need to Know for Intelligence to Flourish
Janet Crawford
Advances in human neuroscience are giving us a window into why people behave as they do and how we can manage our environments and behaviors with others to maximize results. These new scientific findings challenge old assumptions of what it means to lead. While intelligence is our greatest strategic asset, our way of life has become profoundly out of sync with our neurology. We can fight biology or leverage it. As we understand more about human neuroscience, true leadership may become defined as the art of creating brain-friendly organizations.
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Instinct, Intellect, and Horses
Janet Crawford
This article explores the biological and neuroscientific basis for the effectiveness of using horses in the development of leadership skills. We’ll consider the history of our societal evolution away from awareness of our animal nature, examine the neural programming that produces behavior within human social groups and individuals, and look at how interactions with horses can illuminate those forgotten aspects of our being which most influence our daily interactions with others.
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The Language of Trust
Charles Feltman
This article explores the organizational value of high trust between individuals, and details the specific behaviors and actions that form the basis of trusting relationships in the workplace.
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The B-Team: The Role of Unconscious Bias in Corporate Diversity
Janet Crawford
As major technology companies release internal diversity statistics, we’ve learned that women typically occupy fewer than 20% of technical roles. Despite dismal numbers, many people remain disinterested in the issue. From their perspective, business is a meritocracy in which the most talented, educated and hardworking person prevails. At the center of this view is a critically flawed assumption: people act on rational, conscious and values-driven criteria.
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The Tyranny of Testosterone: A guide for women navigating the masculine workplace
Janet Crawford
There’s an epidemic of burnout in professional women. It’s not just working mothers and care-givers, nor tired senior executives. Even young women can suffer pernicious, soul-level exhaustion. Women have never had more opportunity than today. We’re educated, dedicated, and we have big dreams. We’re badass and yet…something feels profoundly off. The problem has its roots in a workplace designed around male biology. This article explores this phenomenon and what women can do to protect their energy to remain vibrant over time.
