Edition 790  of  4 November 2019

As another week slips by, here are 10 things which caught my attention and may have escaped yours. This newsletter is sent to 50,000+ subscribers each Monday. Please share on social media and forward to your colleagues and friends so they can subscribe, learn and engage. I'd be very grateful if you did.

1.  How to help your team through a crisis. Brexit, and the associated political game playing, is a national tragedy. A leader sets the emotional tone and the example both in good times and, more importantly, during challenging times. As a leader, how do you help your team deal with their feelings when the nation is split over Brexit and the impact of a third general election in four years..? MORE>>

2.  Leadership is (partly) about being liked. Effective managers won’t be liked by all, and certainly not all of the time. But recent research in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests positive sentiment can go a long way. The researchers found that a manager’s likeability had a marked effect on how employees ranked them on other qualities, including authentic, ethical and transformational leadership. The findings suggest that while likeability isn’t everything, it would be unwise for leaders to ignore it altogether. This will be explored in detail in our next 10/10 lesson covering leadership and resilience. MORE>>

3.  We could all use some alone time. Solitude suffers from a bad reputation, particularly in the West. But unlike loneliness, which is associated with conditions like anxiety and depression, alone time offers all kinds of benefits. Carving out time for ourselves can help us with emotional regulation, reduce burnout, boost our creativity and improve our relationships with others. The key to healthy alone time? Choosing when and how we’d like to be on our own. When we opt into solitude, doing activities we enjoy, we can relax and recharge. The New York Times

4.  Double trouble for Johnson as election campaign hots up. There is “double trouble” for Boris Johnson after new opinion poll showed Labour has enjoyed a bounce in support since the general election campaign kicked off and remain parties finalised an electoral pact to block him. A YouGov survey found that Labour had gained six points between Wednesday and Friday, though that still leaves them 12 points behind the Tories. The Sunday Times,

5.  Push for voter registration ahead of election. The Electoral Reform Society has warned against complacency, saying that 9.4 million voters are still missing from the electoral roll. It is urging the “biggest registration drive this country has seen” to ensure all sections of society go to the polls on 12 December. There has been a surge in people aged under 25 registering in recent days. Daily Mail

6.  Highest and lowest paid jobs in the past year. This year's list of the UK's highest-earning professionals features air traffic controllers, IT directors and dentists, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Meanwhile, those who earned the least included educational support assistants, bar staff and nursery nurses, with chief executives earning an average of 10 times as much as these workers. It was the lowest earners, however, who experienced the strongest pay rises in the past year. Looking more broadly, the ONS data also shows the average income for full-time employees increased 2.9% in the past year. Daily Mirror

7.  Britain’s worst, and best hotel chains. Britannia Hotels has been ranked the worst hotel chain in the country for the seventh consecutive year, with guests ten times more likely to award it a poor rating for cleanliness than any other hotel group. The consumer group Which? surveyed more than 8,000 of its members about their experiences of 40 hotel chains, asking them to rate everything from bed comfort to value for money and the quality of food and cleanliness. At the other end of the scale, Wetherspoon Hotels ranked top for the first time - sharing first place with Premier Inn, champion for the past four years. The Times

8.  England named second-best tourism destination. Travel guide Lonely Planet has named England the second-best country in the world to visit, with Bhutan in the top spot. The guide says that one constant amid all the Brexit chaos of recent years “has been the timeless treasures that England is famous for: the historic castles and cathedrals, the quaint villages and rolling countryside, and of course, the seaside”. The Independent

9.  We meet 80,000 people in the course of our lives. According to a TV advert for a famous coffee brand, all meaningful connections are rare, precious and worth saving, because they truly enrich our lives. The campaign aims to drive home the message that we'll each meet around 80,000 people in our lifetime but only a few will be really special to us. We don’t often get a chance to make that many truly meaningful connections, so the ones we do manage to establish are worth making and effort and holding onto. But how did the advertisers come up with the 80,000 figure…? Here’s how. On average we live for 78.3 years. Most of us remember people we meet after the age of five. Assume we interact with three new people daily, 365 days a year, with leap years added that’s 365.24. In total it will be (78.3 – 5) x 3 x 365.24 = 80,000 people. Editor

10. The bottom line. On average, the salaries of women in their 50s are £12,509 lower than those of men of the same age - a difference of 28%, according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics (ONS) data by jobs service Rest Less. Women’s earning power falls by an average 8% during this decade, compared with just 4% for men. The Guardian