Organizationally Speaking

Regulation feels dry until you realize it's really a story about who has power and who gets protected from it. This episode untangles public policy (the big societal goal) from regulation (the specific rule that gets us there), breaks down fiscal versus monetary policy and uses New Mexico's paid sick leave law as a real example of the gap between businesses that saw a regulation coming and those that got blindsided by it.

Your personal ethics shape the company you work for, but it works the other way too, and this episode is about that second, less obvious direction. We start by untangling culture ("the way we do things around here") from climate (the unspoken rules about what's actually acceptable), and why every organization has sub-cultures quietly running underneath the official one.

Most of us assume we already know our own ethics — until we're actually tested. This episode makes the case that ethics is a muscle most people never train, and offers a single reframe that changes almost everything: stop asking what you would do, and start asking what you should do. We dig into where ethics actually come from, what ethical relativism means in practice,and why legality is a floor, not a ceiling.
 

Corporate power is real, sometimes rivaling the GDP of entire nations. So what do we expect from companies in return? In this episode of the Business and Society series, Nicole digs into Corporate Social Responsibility: what it actually means, where it came from, and why compliance alone has never been enough. We cover the Iron Law of Responsibility, the four pillars of CSR (economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic), the triple bottom line, enlightened self-interest, and the honest debate about how far companies should actually go. Plus: the case for CSR, the case against it, and why the answer is almost always more complicated than either side admits.

Are leaders born or made? It's one of the oldest questions in leadership research, and the answer, as with most things, is more complicated than either side of the debate wants to admit. In this episode, Nicole walks through the two foundational approaches to understanding what makes someone an effective leader: the trait approach and the skills approach. We cover the Great Man theories, what decades of research actually say about which traits matter most, and why being too smart for the room is a real phenomenon. Plus the Big Five personality factors ranked by their connection to leadership, Nicole's confession about being a big-time introvert, and why the toolbox metaphor matters more than the fixed-trait one. Then we shift to skills — what the three-skill model says about technical, human, and conceptual abilities, why human skills show up as essential at every level of every organization, and what Mumford's Capability Model adds to the picture. The bottom line: you don't need to be a born leader to become an effective one. You need self-awareness and a plan.

What is leadership, really? Not the title, not the corner office, the actual process. In this first episode of the Leadership series, Nicole starts where every good leadership conversation should: with the argument that you're already leading whether you realize it or not. We work through a research-grounded definition, trace how leadership theory has evolved from command-and-control to something far more relational and ethical, and introduce the difference between assigned leadership, the title, and emergent leadership, the influence you actually build. Plus the six bases of power, why charisma without integrity is a risk, and whether bad leadership still counts as leadership.

What is a public issue, and why does it matter to your organization? In this episode of the Business and Society series, Nicole unpacks the difference between public issues and social issues, introduces the performance expectation gap, and walks through how organizations identify, prioritize, and respond to the issues that affect them. We cover environmental intelligence, stakeholder materiality, the issue management process, and the four stages of stakeholder engagement — from inactive to interactive. If episode one was about who stakeholders are, this episode is about how organizations actually deal with what they want.

What does it actually mean for a business to operate in society? In this first episode of the Business and Society series, Nicole lays the foundation for everything that follows: why businesses don't operate in a vacuum, the difference between shareholder theory and stakeholder theory, and why broadening our view of who a company is responsible to changes everything. We cover who stakeholders actually are, the difference between market and non-market stakeholders, how to do a stakeholder analysis, the five types of stakeholder power, and why underestimating smaller stakeholder groups is one of the most common and costly mistakes organizations make.

Conflict isn't a sign something has gone wrong, it's a sign people care. In this episode, Nicole unpacks the difference between functional and dysfunctional conflict, the three types of conflict and what the research actually says about each, and a five-stage model for understanding how conflict escalates. Plus the five conflict handling intentions and when to use them, how to tell the difference between distributive and integrative bargaining, what the research says about salary negotiation, and why your reputation matters as much as your tactics.

Everyone groans when they hear the word "teams," and honestly, the research backs up some of that frustration. In this episode, Nicole cuts through the idealism to give a clear-eyed look at when teams actually work, why they so often don't, and what separates a team that produces something genuinely better from a group of people just sharing a label. We cover the difference between work groups and work teams, the five types of teams you'll encounter, and the three categories of what the research says makes teams effective: context, composition, and process. Plus social loafing, mental models, task vs. relationship conflict, and why trust is where teams most often succeed or fall apart.