When giving and receiving feedback is common, people learn faster and are more effective at work.

The lesson, and perhaps the irony, of Tsedal and Sebastian’s study is that executives who deferred to subordinates moved up the pecking order faster than those who refused to bend to their underlings’ will and wisdom: Leaders were granted more power because they gave it away. Yet deference and “flattening” the hierarchy aren’t always the right moves. The University of Michigan’s Lindy Greer shows that the best leaders are adept at “flexing” the hierarchy.

Simple Subtraction Rules: In Simple Rules, Don Sull and Kathy Eisenhardt document how many leaders and workplaces benefit from “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way that we process information.

Based on our prompts, some groups pick a practical idea (e.g., the CEO who vowed to keep his emails under five hundred words) and a crazy one (e.g., the engineers who proposed disbanding HR). Others select a target that is easy to remove (e.g., the managers who decided to get rid of the unused telephones in their offices) and a tough one (the top team that agreed their company would run better, and their mental health would improve, if they removed two micromanagers from their board of directors).

In forty-five years of work as a consultant with a large number of executives in a wide variety of organizations—large and small; businesses, government agencies, labor unions, hospitals, universities, community services; American, European, Latin American and Japanese—I have not come across a single “natural”: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones have had to learn to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became habit. But all the ones who worked on making themselves effective executives succeeded in doing so. Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned.