From Habit Breaking To Googlers’ Brainstorming: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories

This week we learned how Googlers brainstorm, why breaking bad habits is so hard for our brains, and what it takes to end a work friendship gracefully.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of June 20:

1. How To Brainstorm Like A Googler

“Being able to describe an idea in less than six words helps you clarify it,” says Google’s Veronique Lafargue. That’s why writing fictional headlines for half-baked ideas is just one part of Google’s three-step brainstorming process, which Fast Company got an inside look at this week.

2. 7 Time-Saving Ways To Automate Your Everyday Tasks

We keep hearing about how robots are steadily taking over jobs from humans—and some of that’s already happening. But in the meantime, automation is also freeing us up from the tedium of some of life’s more time-consuming daily routines. Here are seven you should know about.

3. How To End A Work Friendship

Does Gene from finance keep inviting you to play volleyball, and you’re running out of excuses? We talked to the experts this week to find out how to set boundaries with a would-be work BFF, depending on whether one of you is the other’s boss or you’re just colleagues.

4. The Science Behind Why Breaking A Bad Habit Is So Hard

“We need to be able to make routine actions quickly and efficiently,” one University of California psychologist writes in a new study, “and habits serve this purpose.” But they can get in our way when we need to pursue less automatic, “goal-directed” behavior. Here’s a look inside the brain science that makes habit breaking so difficult.

5. The Unseen Consequences Of Hypocritical Leadership

“The words leaders use are the least important determinant of how well an organization functions,” psychologist Art Markman explains. But for every Trump tweet that gets endlessly analyzed on the Internet, people play closer attention to what leaders do. The trouble with diagnosing a hypocrite is that the consequences of those actions generally take longer to play out.