Organizational Behavior

Small Changes, Big Results: Research-Backed Tips for Living a Good Life in 2025‌‌

We asked Yale SOM faculty for their best tips on living happily, healthily, and productively in the new year.‌

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Podcast

Learning Through Experience

We all want work—and life—to be better. So how do we make it happen? How can we learn from the experience we have to create a future that we want? This is the realm that much of Dr. Heidi Brooks’ work explores. As we navigate the everyday, she invites us to cultivate the capacity to learn through experience, and to apply the wisdom gained to co-create a future that is worth fighting for.

Almost all adults work and experience organizational life. Work is the common connector; it dominates where we engage with the world and where the world engages with us. And for Dr. Brooks, it’s a canvas for the great re-imagining of our humanity. So, what can we do every day to help create an experience of work that people want to be part of? This everyday leadership invitation goes beyond deliverables and tasks into thinking of work as a space that we co-create.

Season Three of the Learning Through Experience podcast echos Dr. Brooks’ course structure, centered on interpersonal and group dynamics. Even at Yale, there is a place for learning through experience—not just books. The answer you seek is not on page 4. Watch and listen as Dr. Brooks meets with colleagues and authorities in their fields about transformative experiences that shape and shift how we learn and listen, feel and connect, reinforcing that experience precedes thinking that challenges our paradigms and assumptions.

In order to challenge the status quo, we need to have experiences that open us up to learning. Are you ready? Join us for Season Three of Learning Through Experience.

All Episodes

  • To Be Happier at Work, Think Flexibly about Your Job—and Yourself

    Amy Wrzesniewski

    In a new paper, Yale SOM’s Amy Wrzesniewski and her co-authors find that well-being can be enhanced by pairing a shift in your job mindset with changes in how you think about your own strengths and weaknesses.

    An illustration of a person at a computer with trees growing out of their head and fingers

  • Making the ‘Business Case for Diversity’ Can Backfire with Underrepresented Groups

    Oriane A. M. Georgeac Aneeta Rattan

    Many companies say that they are committed to diversity because it boosts firm performance. In a new study, Oriane Georgeac at Yale SOM and Aneeta Rattan at London Business School find that this explanation can have detrimental consequences for the very applicants that companies seek to attract.

    An illustration showing a graph of profits and a group of people of different ethnic backgrounds

  • Religious Nursing Homes Have More Severe Violations of Care Standards than Secular Ones. Why?

    Amandine Ody-Brasier

    The homes’ strong internal identity means that wrongdoing is less likely to be flagged for an outside regulator’s involvement, allowing problems to worsen, suggests new research co-authored by Yale SOM’s Amandine Ody-Brasier.

    Paramedics outside the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, a nursing home that experienced an early outbreak of COVID-19, on February 29, 2020.

  • What Happens When Couples Disagree about the Meaning of Work?

    Amy Wrzesniewski

    In a new study, Prof. Amy Wrzesniewski and her co-author found that having a partner with a different orientation toward their career lowers a person’s chances of reemployment after leaving a job.

    An illustration of two men working at desks in a living room. One is imagining mountain biking; the other is picturing himself working

  • Beyond Resolutions: Research-Based Suggestions for 2022

    We asked faculty from the Yale School of Management for their advice—philosophical, professional, and personal—for our readers for the coming year.

    A colorful mosaic

  • What Activists Want from Allies

    Michael W. Kraus Jun Won Park

    In a new study, Yale SOM’s Michael Kraus and PhD graduate Jun Won Park found that activists working for social change value allies who are trustworthy and willing to defer to activists’ leadership.

    A White protester standing behind a Black protester, both with fists raised.

  • Video: Identifying with a Team Helps Prevent Stress and Burnout among Healthcare Workers

    Julia DiBenigno Marissa D. King Dr. Rohit Sangal Amy Wrzesniewski

    A Yale study conducted in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic found that feeling like part of a team reduced reported stress and burnout—an insight with implications for how any kind of organization can weather a crisis.

    A group of healthcare workers preparing for surgery

  • How Finding a Mentor—or Even Better, a Sponsor—Can Accelerate Your Career 

    Marissa D. King

    In an excerpt from her book Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection, Prof. Marissa King explains how a more experienced colleague can help propel your career.

    A young penguin with an adult penguin

  • Traditional Firms Get More Room to Innovate 

    Amandine Ody-Brasier

    A study of the Champagne market co-authored by Yale SOM’s Amandine Ody-Brasier suggests that other industry players are more likely to accept unconventional practices when they come from established firms.

    Champagne bottles on an automated assembly line

  • Mapping Our Social Worlds

    Marissa D. King

    Prof. Marissa King’s interdisciplinary approach to network science has produced new insights into how people interact and ideas spread. Her new book, Social Chemistry, explains how an understanding of social networks can help solve issues faced every day by individuals, organizations, and societies.

    Marissa King teaching in a classroom