New Leadership Competencies

Being the boss means you are often privy to information that your team isn't. You may learn that a major client is unhappy with your service, or that senior leaders are considering outsourcing your team's work. At these moments, it's easy to feel stuck between your bosses and the people you manage. Do you share the information? Or do you protect your employees from it? Whatever the news, it's up to you to decide whether, when, and how to tell your team.

Apple on Tuesday named John Browett, CEO of British consumer electronics chain Dixons, as its senior vice president of retail.
Browett will begin his job in April and report to Apple CEO Tim Cook, according to an Apple press release. Browett, who held various executive positions at Tesco before joining Dixons in 2007, replaces Ron Johnson, who left Apple last June to become CEO of J.C. Penney.

When the FBI made front-page headlines recently with the arrest of a coterie of  financial traders and analysts charged with tens of millions dollars worth of securities fraud, it was only the most recent of dozens of similar cases over the past two years. Yet, such big-time rip-offs, spectacular though they are, represent only a tiny sliver of the nation's total business-related cheating, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which estimates that U.S. business lost close to a trillion dollars from employee fraud in one recent year.
Is such a massive amount of cheating indicative of  a work force that is hopelessly corrupt? Research in the new issue of the Academy of Management Journal suggests not. It finds that, confronted with clear choices between right and wrong, people are more than five times more likely to do the right thing when they have some time to think about the matter than they are when they have to make a snap decision.