The following article was first published on May 5, 2015. You and I are shockingly easy to manipulate. Decades of social science experiments show that we can be induced to donate or steal, stand for justice or proliferate racism, vote or stay home, torture or pity. It’s time we stopped reading social science for fascinating …
The following article was originally published on September 8, 2004. Dear Crucial Skills, My boss has started micromanaging me. She constantly asks me for updates. One morning, by 10 o’clock, I had already received ten e-mail messages from her and it took me an hour and a half just to reply to her requests for …
Dear Joseph, I have a great family that I love. Individually, I have rewarding relationships with my father, my mother, and my sister. But put the three of them together in a room and the results are explosive. Things seemed to come to a head this year when my sister spent the entirety of Mother’s …
Dear Joseph, I work as a consultant with churches. I recently had a participant in a group who kept pushing her agenda. Her pressure was impeding the group’s progress. I gently told her she seemed unwilling to move her stake. I acknowledged that we all go there from time to time, then asked her to …
Dear Joseph, I am a single parent with seventeen- and twenty-year-old sons. Over the years, I have, unintentionally and regrettably, shouted quite loudly at my children when they have misbehaved. My twenty-year-old hasn’t seemed to be bothered, but my seventeen-year-old has become emotionally very distant. He has hinted that it is because I always end …
Dear Joseph, I work at an electric utility company. I work with a group of team members who interact face-to-face with customers under very stressful conditions. When we see customers, we are either turning off their power or turning it back on. Recently, we’ve had issues with these customers turning violent: hitting, attempting to run …
Dear Joseph, I recently married a person who told me he is a recovering sex addict. I believe he is really trying to change his ways and is a good man. However, over the past couple of months, he has started to lie again, sent inappropriate text messages to women, and may have had an …
Dear Joseph, I work very closely with someone who I really like and respect. I have one concern about how he tends to rely on me to deal with all criticisms directed at our shared projects. I have tried bringing up the issue and holding the crucial conversation about it, but it didn’t go well. …
I used to share a poem at the beginning of some of my speeches. I won’t tell you what it was out of respect for its author. I loved the poem. I felt that my recitation of it was a big hit. I thought it was clever, funny, and relevant to my topic. Apparently, I …
Dear Joseph, I have an employee who has previous job experience as a manager but who took an entry level role to get into a full-time position with our company. This employee has been making progress learning our company’s policies and procedures and initially showed a great interest in learning as much as possible. More …
