Curious Minds at Work
Want to get better at work? At managing others? Managing yourself? Gayle Allen interviews experts who take your performance to the next level. Each episode features a book with insights to help you achieve your goals.
Episodes
July 27, 2025 • 38 mins
Something happens at work – good or bad – and it brings on strong emotions. Instead of taking a moment to calm down, we’ve got to quickly shift gears and head into another meeting. We know we’ve got to manage our feelings, but the question is, how do we do that?
Ethan Kross is an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and writer who specializes in emotion regulation. He is a professor of psychology and management at the Univer...
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July 13, 2025 • 56 mins
A few years ago, we experienced a solar eclipse. Walking the streets of my neighborhood that day, looking through my solar eclipse glasses and sharing them with others, I felt a profound sense of awe.
And I saw that awe, that wonder, reflected in the faces of the people around me. For one or two hours, we were part of something bigger than ourselves. And that experience took us out of ourselves. It softened and connected us.
Expe...
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June 29, 2025 • 40 mins
If you think about it, your personality impacts how you approach your life. The choices you make, the risks you take, the relationships you have. Our personalities create a set of habits, automatic reactions that impact what we think, feel, and do.
When we take on new roles, like becoming a manger or a parent, we may find that certain aspects of our personality no longer work for us. As a leader, we may need to be more extroverte...
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June 15, 2025 • 40 mins
In those moments when we want to disagree, why do we often stay silent? At those times when we want to opt out, why do we often just go along?
A key reason is that it’s hard to defy. It’s hard to question the way something’s always been done. To challenge comments, behaviors, and systems. Yet it’s in those moments of defiance that we flex our values and craft an identity.
That’s why I wanted to talk to Sunita Sah, organizational ...
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June 1, 2025 • 46 mins
Making changes in our own lives is hard enough. It’s even more challenging when we need to lead our teams or organizations to do it.
That’s why I invited Dan Heath back to the podcast. Dan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Made to Stick, Switch, and The Power of Moments. This time he’s here to talk about his latest book, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working.
Dan shares powerful stories of leaders who’ve helped the...
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May 18, 2025 • 43 mins
Most of us dislike networking. At its best, it’s exhausting. At its worst, it can feel inauthentic, even manipulative.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if, instead, we could focus on helping others in ways that, in the long run, benefit us, as well?
Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s learned that when we use our status to sponsor other...
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May 4, 2025 • 50 mins
At some point in every leader’s career, they’ll experience a moment of crisis. And in these moments of enormous pressure and uncertainty, a leader’s actions can mean the difference between an organization’s survival or its demise.
Dan Dworkis is an emergency room physician and professor of emergency medicine who’s built his career on moments like this. He not only understands how to approach them, but also how to learn from them...
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April 20, 2025 • 46 mins
As you move up in leadership roles, you gain more power. Initially, you may take it in stride, thinking it’s something you earned and something you’d never let get in the way of being the manager you want to be.
But as the pressure to perform grows, the gap in power between you and your team creates blind spots that can erode these relationships.
Former Microsoft executive and Fortune 500 coach, Sabina Nawaz, experienced these c...
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April 6, 2025 • 52 mins
Managing up is crucial for your success. It’s about knowing your career goals and aligning them with your manager’s needs and priorities. Yet it’s a skill we’re rarely taught and one we rarely see done well.
For Melody Wilding, this gap in how to manage her career became clear when it caused her to lose her job. It’s what made her want to write her latest book, Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge.
In...
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March 23, 2025 • 47 mins
On the surface, trust seems simple. You either trust someone or you don’t. That’s why I was so intrigued by Charles Feltman’s book, The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work.
Charles is a leadership coach and trust expert. And where others view trust as binary, he sees it in four dimensions.
He describes what each dimension looks like and explains how to assess the gaps. Then he talks about how we c...
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March 9, 2025 • 46 mins
We’re all virtual communicators. Even if we don’t work remotely, we’re texting, using social media, and making phone calls. But the question is, are we good at it? Do we know the best practices that can set us apart?
Andrew Brodsky can teach us. He’s a management professor and virtual communication expert. In this episode, we discuss his book, Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. We talk about ways to build trust...
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February 23, 2025 • 48 mins
Most advice on power is about why we need it or how we can get it. And it's typically focused on things outside us, like titles or promotions.
While these external markers are important, they can leave us empty inside.
Advice that focuses solely on external power leaves out how to build and maintain the crucial internal power we need. That’s why Chris Lipp decided to mine the research on personal power and, ultimately, to write...
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February 9, 2025 • 53 mins
Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist and the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He believes leaders are made, not born, and he’s spent decades proving it.
In this interview, we talk about his findings and how they apply to today’s leaders. We also discuss his latest book, Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. In it, he shares three characteristics people repeatedly...
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January 26, 2025 • 64 mins
Conversations play a big role in our personal and professional lives. It’d be hard to build or maintain a relationship without them.
That’s why Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School Professor and conversation expert, has written the book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She’s found that if we improve our conversations, even a little, the results can be game changing.
In this interview, we...
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January 12, 2025 • 54 mins
With few exceptions, we have digital footprints. And each time we scroll social media, run a Google search, or use a smartphone to navigate, we’re adding data to that footprint. While we gain a lot from our ability to do all these things, we also feed companies the data they need to target us.
Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist and professor at Columbia Business School. Over the course of her career, she’s consulted w...
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December 29, 2024 • 45 mins
We go to the dentist, get our eyes checked, and get our cars inspected. These regularly scheduled health and safety audits let us know how we’re doing.
But we rarely audit how we spend our time.
Sure, most of us have a calendar. Yet few of us study how these calendar events impact our happiness. We rarely track the connection between what we spend our time doing and how well we’re flourishing.
As a result, we can find ourselves ...
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December 15, 2024 • 51 mins
If you’re a woman in the workplace, you know the deck is rarely stacked in your favor. For example, promotions are harder to come by. The gender wage gap is real. And power can feel elusive.
Psychology professor and researcher, Alison Fragale, has studied the power problem for decades. What she’s figured out is that the solution lies with status. But, as she argues in her book, Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deser...
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December 1, 2024 • 50 mins
There are many good reasons to look to others. For example, you might need expert advice or feedback to improve your performance. But there’s one reason not to, and, that is, to determine your self-worth.
When you look to someone else to define you or tell you how to live your life, you lose a lot. And if you find it hard to believe you’d ever let someone else influence you in those ways, you’d be surprised.
Michael Gervais is a ...
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November 17, 2024 • 42 mins
It’s tempting to believe that the self is a constant. That it’s a core component of who we are from the time we’re born.
But social psychologist and Stanford Professor Brian Lowery has a different view. He believes the self we are today is a product of our social relationships – our friends, our families, our communities, our technologies, even our geography. That as our circumstances change, so does the self we believe ourselves...
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November 3, 2024 • 35 mins
We need pleasure in our lives. We also need meaning. Pleasure gives us joy and delight. Meaning gives us purpose and a set of goals to work toward.
But have there ever been times in your life when you’ve experienced meaning and pleasure, yet felt something was missing? Turns out, you’re not alone.
What’s missing, according to recent research, is something called psychological richness. Think of it as mental stimulation. A combina...
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