Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Daniel Goleman featured by LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

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People are often pressured in meetings to come up with incredible solutions on the spot. Some high-performing teams thrive in that environment. It’s also a good approach to stimulate new thinking.

However, a constant dose of pressure-cooker meetings can stifle creative, thoughtful employees from contributing valuable insights. Perhaps they’re reacting to the tension in the room, or are fearful their idea will get publicly – and aggressively – shot down too soon. Some of you might say, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” That attitude may apply to some, but why set up a potential star performer to fail? And burnout is a very real condition that can derail even the best employee.

How can a leader find the right balance in a high-stakes meeting – or when to call one? I spoke with my colleague, Teresa Amabile in my Leadership: A Master Class video series about ways managers can foster a creative team. Here’s what she had to say about generating the best ideas and solutions during meetings.

“Our research showed there’s only one very particular set of time pressured conditions that actually lead to high-level creativity. It’s called being on a mission. People have to feel that what they’re doing is truly important and is justifiably urgent. It’s not that somebody has placed an arbitrary deadline on us, it’s that we’re doing something that really matters. It’s either an urgent need that the company has to address before it can move forward on something important, or because a competitor is about to scoop us. Or because a customer desperately needs our help. It could also be because society has a serious need for a solution to a problem.”

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Here is a link to the complete article.

Daniel Goleman’s new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Harper 2013) and CD Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence are now available. Other recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings (More Than Sound). Leadership: A Master Class is Goleman’s comprehensive video series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives.