Here’s What Happens When You Focus on Employees to Better Serve Your Customers - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM SALESFORCE
Sponsor content from Salesforce.| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1007M Virtually all managers in consumer businesses recognize major social, economic, and technological trends. But many do not consider the profound ways in which trends—especially those that seem unrelated to their core markets—influence consumers’ aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors. As a result, companies may be ceding to rivals an opportunity to transform the industry. For instance, the impact of the digital revolution on consumers’ daily lives is hardly a revelation....| Harvard Business Review
What a behavioral scientist learned from 10 weeks of comedy classes.| Harvard Business Review
Seeking and giving advice are central to effective leadership and decision making, and they require emotional intelligence, self-awareness, restraint, diplomacy, and patience on both sides. But managers tend to view these competencies as “gifts” that one either has or lacks. The authors argue instead that they are practical skills you can learn and apply to great effect. They draw on a large body of research to identify the most common obstacles to effectively seeking and giving advice—...| Harvard Business Review
Personality research provides valuable lessons in predicting an individual’s ability to negotiate effectively. Some traits are clearly indicative of good negotiation potential, while others are more of a handicap. Among the traits that improve individuals’ negotiation abilities, emotional intelligence (EQ) is in a league of its own. People with higher EQ are more likely to induce positive mood states in their negotiation counterparts and leave them more satisfied with the outcome of the ...| Harvard Business Review
Talent management is one of the things CEOs worry about most, and yet companies often spend very little time onboarding their new employees. The most effective organizations onboard new hires for the duration of their first year — their most vulnerable period — and focus on three key dimensions: the organizational, the technical, and the social. By using this integrated approach, they enable their employees to stay, and to thrive.| Harvard Business Review
Every company faces a learning dilemma: the smartest people find it the hardest to learn.| Harvard Business Review
Although leaders might say they value inquisitive minds, in reality most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino elaborates on the benefits of and common barriers to curiosity in the workplace and offers five strategies for bolstering it. Leaders should hire for curiosity, model inquisitiveness, emphasize learning goals, let workers explore and broaden their interests, and have “Why?” “What if…?” and “How might w...| Harvard Business Review
Just because a strategy is formulated, doesn’t mean it’s ready for hand-off to the front-line for execution. Instead of reactively addressing failures during implementation, leaders need to examine whether the strategy was on solid footing in the first place. This requires stripping away assumptions to avoid four core errors, which often plague a strategy’s feasibility for being put in practice: 1) not understanding the problem; 2) not understanding the organization’s capabilities; 3)...| Harvard Business Review
When Andy Jassy succeeded Jeff Bezos as the CEO of Amazon, in 2021, he stepped into one of the most scrutinized leadership roles in business. But under Jassy’s leadership, Amazon has not only sustained its momentum but accelerated. In this wide-ranging conversation with HBR’s editor at large, Jassy reflects on what it takes to get a behemoth like Amazon to operate like a startup and how he pushes his team to take chances. “If you aren’t failing,” he says, “you’re either not inve...| Harvard Business Review
Effective Learning and Development (L&D) programs are critical for the success of both employees and their employers. But what does it take to develop initiatives that actually achieve substantial positive outcomes? Research suggests that an approach known as “learning in the flow of work” can help ensure that learners retain and apply new skills and concepts in their day-to-day workflows. In this piece, the author offers five tactical, research-backed strategies to help companies build p...| Harvard Business Review
An analysis of over 1,000 occupations and hundreds of skills—capturing 70 million job transitions—examined the importance of foundational skills (like reading comprehension, basic math, and the ability to work well in teams) to career progression. Those who had a broad base of foundational skills (as opposed to a few highly specialized skills, like coding) learned new things faster, earned more money, moved into more advanced positions, and proved more resilient amid market changes throug...| Harvard Business Review
More and more companies today are facing adaptive challenges: Changes in societies, markets, and technologies around the globe constantly force businesses to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways to operate. The most important task for leaders in the face of such challenges is mobilizing people throughout their organizations to do adaptive work. In this HBR article from 1997, the authors suggest that the prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision ...| Harvard Business Review
When business conditions change, the most successful companies are often the slowest to adapt. To avoid being left behind, executives must understand the true sources of corporate inertia.| Harvard Business Review
Continuous learning is the key to having lasting influence in your career, yet a heavy workload makes it hard to find the time. To ensure you’re creating opportunities even when you’re feeling depleted or overwhelmed, try these five strategies: 1) Challenge your beliefs about your capacity; 2) Start with topics that solve urgent problems; 3) Don’t limit yourself to formal programs; 4) Make an emotional connection to learning; and 5) Work with your brain, not against it.| Harvard Business Review
As remote work continues to grow in the U.S., employers are increasingly adopting new technologies to monitor how their employees spend their time. The research on the utility of these monitoring tools has been mixed: Some studies show that they boost performance whereas others suggest they increase deviant behavior and erode trust. In a new study, researchers explored the impact that different kinds of monitoring have on employees’ willingness to share new ideas. They found that “interac...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0311C Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Stu...| Harvard Business Review
More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like. Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2...| Harvard Business Review
And they fear giving feedback.| Harvard Business Review
Marketers often worry that performance marketing and its focus on short-term sales is crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer perceptions of their brand—and is sometimes working against brand strategy. Brand-building activities are typically measured using metrics that have no predictive or retrospective connection to financial returns. And performance marketing typically lacks measures that account for its impact on brand building, focusing only on sales, leads, ...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1301L The more uncertain your environment, the greater the opportunity—if you have the leadership skills to capitalize on it. Research at the Wharton School and at the authors’ consulting firm, involving more than 20,000 executives to date, has identified six skills that, when mastered and used in concert, allow leaders to think strategically and navigate the unknown effectively. They are the abilities to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align, and learn. This article d...| Harvard Business Review
E-mail and voice mail are efficient, but face-to-face contact is still essential to true communication.| Harvard Business Review
Strategies for dealing with their weaknesses.| Harvard Business Review
Every job involves non-promotable tasks. These are tasks that benefit the organization but likely don’t contribute to an employee’s performance reviews and career advancement. But research suggests that these tasks disproportionately fall on women. Across field and laboratory studies, researchers find that women volunteer for non-promotable tasks more than men; that women are more frequently asked to take such tasks on; and that when asked, women are more likely to say yes. This matter...| Harvard Business Review
The integration of generative AI into corporate workflows is highlighting the critical importance of human skills such as problem framing, collaboration, and creativity. A recent experiment by the BCG Henderson Institute demonstrated that gen AI-powered tutoring can effectively enhance these skills, offering personalized and engaging training at scale. As companies invest in gen AI, they must also focus on developing their employees’ human skills to fully leverage the technology’s potenti...| Harvard Business Review
The physical environment of the workplace has a significant effect on the way that we work. When our space is a mess, so are we. That is certainly true from a simple logistical perspective: we lose precious work minutes every time we go searching for a lost paper on a cluttered desk. The same is true for those of us have succeeded in becoming paperless at work: one international survey showed that information workers lose up to two hours a week fruitlessly searching for lost documents. But c...| Harvard Business Review
Making sure your employees regularly take time off is key to creating a more sustainable workplace. Research shows that taking time off benefits employees in three ways: 1) Mentally. Taking a vacation provides greater opportunity for rest and better sleep (both quantity and quality), which can help unclutter your mind to boost creativity. 2) Body. Relaxing on vacation can reduce the levels of your stress hormones and allow your immune system to recover, making you less prone to get sick. 3) S...| Harvard Business Review
When companies make mistakes, customers often write reviews about it online. Some companies have started responding to customer reviews, but do these responses affect the ratings that customers give them? According to a study of hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, yes: When hotels start responding, they receive 12% more reviews and their ratings increase by an average of 0.12 stars (on a 1-to-5 scale). These gains may seem small, but they can have a significant effect on the hotel’s rating, due...| Harvard Business Review
Eight ways to address the recognition deficit.| Harvard Business Review
This post was written with Karen Sumberg, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy. Erika Karp vividly remembers the secrecy and subterfuge that colored every workday before she told her colleagues that she was a lesbian. “You have to devote a huge amount of psychic energy to being closeted — changing pronouns, […]| Harvard Business Review
AI already is being used in some areas of process improvement, and the usage of this technology — including generative AI — promises to grow. That’s because it can perform tasks faster and much less expensively than humans alone. But it will never fully replace people — and that poses management challenges.| Harvard Business Review
What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers’ diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it’s a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. If the pers...| Harvard Business Review
Celebrities and athletes have increasingly been speaking out about their mental health over the last several years, but organizational leaders have only just started. To fully catalyze societal change and normalize mental health challenges and seeking support, workplaces must also play a part. When leaders of all levels share their personal stories, it reduces stigma and normalizes the ups and downs of being human — especially as a high-performing professional. This type of role-modeling po...| Harvard Business Review
View count alone is misleading.| Harvard Business Review
“Two heads are better than one.” It’s a familiar expression—and one that businesses might want to heed. The authors’ study of 87 companies led by co-CEOs showed that those firms tended to generate better returns than did peer companies with a sole CEO. Successful power sharing at the top depends on multiple factors: strong commitment to the partnership by both leaders, complementary skill sets, clear responsibilities and decision rights, mechanisms for conflict resolution, the proje...| Harvard Business Review
Managing talent isn’t just about new hires.| Harvard Business Review
What’s the best way to follow up after a job interview? First, write a thank-you note to the hiring manager no later than a day after. Keep it short and sweet, but mention one specific thing that you learned about their organization. If you don’t hear back by the date they said they’d make a decision, don’t panic. Wait a week, and if it’s still radio silence, follow up with a short note expressing your excitement about the role. Finally, if you don’t get the job, you can send one ...| Harvard Business Review
For many employees, the key motivator is a sense of purpose—and yet more than half of those surveyed say they’re not even “somewhat” passionate about their jobs. If organizations want to inspire their workers, they must clearly communicate why they’re in business and what value they provide. When employees understand and embrace those things, their companies thrive: Survey results show that more than 90% of companies with a well-defined purpose deliver growth and profits at or above...| Harvard Business Review
Boards often mistake collegiality for alignment, avoiding tough conversations and sidelining dissent. The result is delayed decisions, superficial consensus, unequal participation, and fragmented governance. This weakens their business strategy and diminishes shareholder value. Solutions include tackling sensitive issues early, formalizing recurring agenda items, assigning “chief skeptic” roles, structuring debates to surface dissent, and tracking follow-through. Chairs must actively soli...| Harvard Business Review
Today’s dynamic markets and technologies have called into question the sustainability of competitive advantage. Under pressure to improve productivity, quality, and speed, managers have embraced tools such as TQM, benchmarking, and re-engineering. Dramatic operational improvements have resulted, but rarely have these gains translated into sustainable profitability. And gradually, the tools have taken the place of strategy. In his five-part article, Michael Porter explores how that shift has...| Harvard Business Review
New research has uncovered a paradoxical relationship between AI literacy and receptivity: Individuals with lower AI literacy are more likely to embrace AI, despite perceiving it as less capable and more ethically concerning. This enthusiasm stems from a sense of “magic” associated with AI’s capabilities. Conversely, those with higher AI literacy, who understand the mechanics behind AI, tend to lose interest as the mystique fades. The findings challenge the assumption that increased edu...| Harvard Business Review
The potential upsides of effective succession planning are huge, and yet most companies are not realizing these benefits, even though many are spending countless hours on the effort. Although most succession planning processes no longer work for today’s business realities, companies can make a few key adjustments to derive far more value from this work. They should move from replacement planning to future proofing, from calibration to preparation, from exercise to execution, and from leader...| Harvard Business Review
The fastest and most effective way for a company to realize its maximum profit is to get its pricing right. The right price can boost profit faster than increasing volume will; the wrong price can shrink it just as quickly. Yet many otherwise tough-minded managers shy away from initiatives to improve price for fear that […]| Harvard Business Review
Until now, change in business has been an either-or proposition: either quickly create economic value for shareholders or patiently develop an open, trusting corporate culture long term. But new research indicates that combining these “hard” and “soft” approaches can radically transform the way businesses change.| Harvard Business Review
Firms spend millions of dollars annually on whistle-blower hotlines, training, and other efforts to ensure adherence to laws, regulations, and company policies. Yet malfeasance remains entrenched in the corporate world. Why? Too many firms treat compliance as a box-checking exercise, making employees sit through training and attest that they understand the rules, but failing to assess the effectiveness of their compliance programs, or doing so with faulty metrics. The authors explain how we r...| Harvard Business Review
When leaders have misconceptions of what empathy entails, they don’t know how to practice it—or they practice it badly. Many don’t bother to intentionally lead with empathy at all, and the stakes are high for those who don’t: low morale, poor retention, and burnout among employees, and failure to connect, inability to gather information, or being perceived as inaccessible for leaders. Empathy is a requisite to mobilize, connect with, and engage others. To better lead with this non-neg...| Harvard Business Review
Fundamentally, feedback is a good thing. For managers, it’s an important tool for shaping behaviors and fostering learning that will drive better performance. For their direct reports, it’s an opportunity for development and career growth. Why, then, is it so problematic? Most managers say they dislike giving feedback and don’t think it’s as effective as […]| Harvard Business Review
Failed deliveries cost companies billions of dollars each year, while impacting customer satisfaction and damaging retailers’ reputations. The author shares findings from original research based on transaction and delivery data from an e-commerce retailer in a Latin American megacity and a delivery company in Singapore. He and his colleagues also interviewed delivery drivers to understand the issues they encounter on the road. Based on these insights, the author offers three suggestions f...| Harvard Business Review
Scientific studies have long suggested that investing in the right people will maximize organizations’ returns. In a world of unlimited resources, organizations would surely invest in everyone.In the real world, however, limited budgets force organizations to be much more selective, which explains the growing interest in high potential (HiPo) identification. If we are going to invest in the right employees, how do we find them? What are the key indicators that signal star potential? Researc...| Harvard Business Review
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While this strategy can be effective, the author shares new research based on field experiments with over 14,000 customers that suggests it isn’t always the best way to maximize ROI on marketing spend. Instead, the author argues that...| Harvard Business Review
How do business executives make crucial decisions? Often by relying on their keen intuitive skills, otherwise known as their “gut.” But what exactly is gut instinct and how does it work? Scientists have recently uncovered some provocative clues that may change the way you work.| Harvard Business Review
Learning how to delegate well is a skill every first-time manager needs to learn from the very start. Many people are promoted into management for doing their previous job well. But once you’re promoted into a leadership role, you must accept that you can’t do everything on your own — nor should you. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the more senior you become in an organization, the less you’ll be involved in doing the day-to-day work. You’ll need to have a sense of what’s hap...| Harvard Business Review
Information technology is revolutionizing products, from appliances to cars to mining equipment. Products once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts have become complex systems combining hardware, sensors, electronics, and software that connect through the internet in myriad ways. These “smart, connected products” offer exponentially expanding opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, and capabilities that cut across and transcend traditional product bound...| Harvard Business Review
As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings—the body, emotions, mind, and spirit—and in each, it can be systematical...| Harvard Business Review
When people are stressed out and focus on the negative, they are more likely to treat their colleagues poorly. And many managers are at a loss when it comes to preventing uncivil and toxic behavior on their teams. New research on gratitude practices shows that encouraging colleagues to express thanks and focus on what they are grateful for can decrease mistreatment on a team. The authors’ recent study found that gratitude journaling decreased workplace rudeness by enhancing research partici...| Harvard Business Review
This post is the last in a three-part series. Most marketers think that the best way to hold onto customers is through “engagement” — interacting as much as possible with them and building relationships. It turns out that that’s rarely true. In a study involving more than 7000 consumers, we found that companies often have […]| Harvard Business Review
Find new ideas and classic advice on strategy, innovation and leadership, for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
When you’re working in sales, you need to master the art of persuasion and that involves being able to tell a compelling story that explains why your product or service will meet someone’s needs. It involves listening, making an emotional connection, and thinking from the customer’s point of view. The earlier you can learn how to communicate in this way, the faster you will likely grow in your role. But too often we tell the customer a story we believe sets our product or service apart ...| Harvard Business Review
In a recent analysis, analysts at Glassdoor asked: Can companies achieve great customer satisfaction without also investing in employees, assuring that workers who deliver service to customers are themselves satisfied with their jobs? Their answer was clear: There’s a strong statistical link between employee well-being reported on Glassdoor and customer satisfaction among a large sample of some of the biggest brands today. A more satisfied workforce is clearly associated with companies’ a...| Harvard Business Review
Companies are pouring millions into “digital transformation” initiatives — but a high percentage of those fail to pay off. That’s because companies put the cart before the horse, focusing on a specific technology (“we need a machine-learning strategy!”) rather than doing the hard work of fitting the change into the overall business strategy first. Not only should they align tech investments with business goals — they should also lean more on insider knowledge than outside consul...| Harvard Business Review
A shadow board is a group of nonexecutive employees who work with senior executives on strategic initiatives. It is designed to leverage insights from younger generations and to diversify the perspectives that executives are exposed to. These boards can be used to test and pilot novel initiatives that are important to younger employees, bridge generational gaps between workers, and create respect and understanding across the organizational hierarchy.| Harvard Business Review
Shadow boards can help companies with two pressing issues: Millennial workers’ dis-engagement and executive teams’ inability to keep up with changing market conditions. They can help with business model reinvention, cultural transformation, and process redesign. Best practices include not leaving these programs up to HR and not limiting them to previously identified “high potentials.”| Harvard Business Review
When tariffs are levied against a specific country, that country might attempt to circumvent the tariff by rerouting products through a third country to avoid the higher taxes. Research in the aftermath of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war examined this phenomenon, finding that, while tariff circumvention through Vietnam did happen, it wasn’t as widespread as many had initially thought. That said, there still was an increase in tariff circumvention more broadly, and specifically via Chinese-own...| Harvard Business Review
Private equity firms are increasingly recognizing the importance of talent management in driving value creation. The article outlines seven key behaviors that advanced firms are adopting, including integrating human capital into deal planning, improving talent assessments, and fostering leadership development. These practices mark a shift from traditional approaches, emphasizing the strategic role of talent at all organizational levels.| Harvard Business Review
People are among the most prized assets of many startup companies, so when employees leave after an acquisition, it can be a substantial loss for the acquiring company. Why do so many startup employees leave, and how do startup acquisitions impact their careers? Using U.S. Census Bureau data from 1990 to 2011 that encompasses 230,000 acquired startup workers, the author researched these questions and discovered significantly higher turnover rates among acquired workers compared to regular hir...| Harvard Business Review
Historically, the efforts of private equity firms to address leadership challenges have been limited primarily to replacing portfolio-company CEOs. Now, in an era of higher interest rates and more competition for limited acquisition targets, these firms are realizing that they need to make more-systematic investments in leadership development. The author offers a variety of prescriptions for PE firms, portfolio companies, and dealmakers, including hiring and empowering “chief human capital ...| Harvard Business Review
Social belonging is a fundamental human need, hardwired into our DNA. And yet, 40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, and the result has been lower organizational commitment and engagement. U.S. businesses spend nearly $8 billion each year on diversity and inclusion (D&I) trainings that miss the mark because they neglect our need to feel included. Recent research from Betterup shows that if workers feel like they belong, companies reap substantial bottom-line benefits: better job ...| Harvard Business Review
It’s time for leaders to double down on the idea that the employee experience (EX) is now the key driver of the customer experience (CX) and find smarter, strategic ways of connecting the two. According to PwC, companies that invest in and deliver superior experiences to both consumers and employees are able to charge a premium of as much as 16% for their products and services. So how do leaders design EX to better align with CX? First, identify where the biggest gaps exist. Second, find cr...| Harvard Business Review
Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. For example, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike have publicly announced that personalized and seamless omnichannel experiences are at the core of their corporate strategy. We are now at the point where competitive advantage will be based on the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and on how a company uses AI to understand, shape, custo...| Harvard Business Review
Despite the fact that 98% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs, only 37% of professionals actually benefit from them. This disconnect is exacerbating retention issues. So, why are mentoring programs failing to deliver on their promise? The issue lies not with mentoring itself but in the underutilization and ineffective reach of many mentoring programs. Programs are frequently confined to a small group of employees or lack the necessary communication and visibility to attract parti...| Harvard Business Review
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea. The author found six...| Harvard Business Review
Today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a small country. This certainly sounds alarming — but the reality is a little more complicated. The author discusses several common misconceptions surrounding the Bitcoin sustainability debate, and ultimately argues that it’s up to the crypto community to acknowledge and address environmental concerns, work in good faith to reduce Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, and ultimately demonstrate that the societal value that Bitcoin provides is worth the re...| Harvard Business Review
Your job may not go away, but it’s certainly going to change.| Harvard Business Review
Customers often need time to evaluate a product or think about their experience with it before they decide to post a review. If they’re asked to provide a review too early, they can feel pressured and rushed. But when is the right time to do it? The authors conducted experiments in an attempt to answer this question — and found, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that immediate review reminders (sent the next day) lower the likelihood that customers will post reviews, whereas delayed re...| Harvard Business Review
Getting an MBA (Master of Business Administration) takes a lot of time, money, and effort. So it’s important to really think about whether or not it is worth your while to pursue one. Here are some things to consider. The right reasons: To hone skills like influence, empathy, and building business strategies; to help you make a career pivot; to accelerate the pace of your professional development; to expand and diversify your professional network. The wrong reasons: You’re looking for a...| Harvard Business Review
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and col...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Salesforce.| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Salesforce.| Harvard Business Review
Workers spend a lot of time toggling between apps and websites to do their jobs. But how often do they really do this, and how much times does it really take up? The authors studied 20 teams, totaling 137 users, across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. They found workers toggled roughly 1,200 times each day, which adds up to just under four hours each week reorienting themselves after toggling — roughly 9% of their time at work. While many companies may write this off as the...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from upGrad.| Harvard Business Review
Effective leadership today relies more than ever on influencing others — impacting their ideas, opinions, and actions. While influence has always been a valuable managerial skill, today’s highly collaborative organizations make it essential. Consider how often you have to influence people who don’t even report to you in order to accomplish your objectives. Success depends […]| Harvard Business Review
While it might sound contradictory, the U.S. is experiencing higher unemployment numbers and a labor shortage. So how to attract talent in such a labor marketplace? For hourly workers and lower-salaried positions, accessibility is one of the biggest – and often underestimated – drivers of effective recruiting. Research has shown that minor geographic differences in available talent and open jobs, even in the same city, can lead to higher unemployment. look at ways of improving accessibi...| Harvard Business Review
Many executives assume that customer data can give you an unbeatable edge. The more customers you have, the more data you can gather, and that data, when analyzed, allows you to offer a better product that attracts more customers. You can then collect even more data, repeating the cycle until you eventually marginalize your competitors. But this thinking is usually wrong. Though the virtuous cycles of data-enabled learning may look similar to those of network effects—wherein an offering inc...| Harvard Business Review
If there’s one thing that’s certain about the future, it’s that change is here to stay. The ability to constantly transform has become a top priority for organizations. Therefore, change management is now an essential business priority that can’t be overlooked or set aside. Leaders need to urgently develop change and project management competencies across all levels of an organization, from employees and managers to senior executives. This article covers the two most important things ...| Harvard Business Review
Research has long shown that using friendly nicknames can be a great way to solidify personal relationships between peers or romantic partners. But what’s the impact of using nicknames in professional environments, in which power disparities are common? Through a series of studies with more than 1,100 U.S.-based adults, research finds that using nicknames in workplace relationships between supervisors and subordinates can sometimes have positive effects — but not always. Specifically, res...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: F0405E A study of more than 600 retail outlets finds that stock-outs are far more costly than most companies imagine.| Harvard Business Review
As AI becomes more powerful, it faces a major trust problem. Consider 12 leading concerns: disinformation, safety and security, the black box problem, ethical concerns, bias, instability, hallucinations in LLMs, unknown unknowns, potential job losses and social inequalities, environmental impact, industry concentration, and state overreach. Each of these issues is complex — and not easy to solve. But there is one consistent approach to addressing the trust gap: training, empowering, and inc...| Harvard Business Review
Thanks to the benefits for both employers and employees, hybrid work arrangements will likely persist beyond the pandemic. In order for them to work, though, leaders must understand the power differentials they create within teams and take steps to level the playing field. Where individuals (including the manager) on a team are located relative to others matters, as does each individual’s skills in relationship building. The authors offer four strategies managers can take to manage the stru...| Harvard Business Review
In the twenty-first century, human capital is the most valuable resource in our economy. And though much has been done (rightly) to promote diversity at work, there’s a giant hole when it comes to understanding how temperament and sentiment play into the trajectory of success. Mental illness is a challenge, but it is not a weakness. Understanding your psyche can be the key to unleashing your strengths — whether it’s using your sensitivity to empathize with clients, your anxiety to be a ...| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor Content from Deloitte Digital.| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Enboarder.| Harvard Business Review
Which ones are hurting your company?| Harvard Business Review
Find new ideas and classic advice on strategy, innovation and leadership, for global leaders from the world's best business and management experts.| hbr.org
The promise of staffing a team with diverse members is that the different perspectives, ideas, and opinions will result in greater performance. The reality is that diverse teams often underperform because people from dissimilar backgrounds often clash. A study of 62 drug-development teams suggests that the key to getting them to work better together and tap the potential of diversity is to create a psychologically safe environment. This article discusses ways to do that.| Harvard Business Review
Find people who disagree with you and cherish them.| Harvard Business Review
Research shows you need to tap into deep, unspoken needs.| Harvard Business Review
Strategic thinking is an essential component of leadership — and yet for many leaders, it can be nearly impossible to find time for. In this piece, the author argues that there are two main barriers that keep leaders from devoting more time to strategic thinking: First, companies often incentivize long hours, and tethering yourself to your desk is rarely a recipe for innovative, strategic thinking. Second, many leaders want people to think they’re busy, so they lean into the frenzy. To fi...| Harvard Business Review
From the early days of mechanical automatons to more recent conversational bots, scientists and engineers have dreamed of a future where AI systems can work and act intelligently and independently. Recent advances in agentic AI bring that autonomous future a step closer to reality. With their supercharged reasoning and execution capabilities, agentic AI systems promise to transform many aspects of human-machine collaboration. The agentic AI prize could be great, with the promise of greater pr...| Harvard Business Review
The burdens of subordinates always seem to end up on the manager’s back. Here’s how to get rid of them.| Harvard Business Review
Sorting out hybrid work arrangements will require managers to rethink and expand one of strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness: psychological safety. When it comes to psychological safety, managers have traditionally focused on enabling candor and dissent with respect to work content. The problem is, as the boundary between work and life becomes increasingly blurry, managers must make staffing, scheduling, and coordination decisions that take into account employees’ personal circ...| Harvard Business Review
Although most people believe that they are self-aware, true self-awareness is a rare quality. In this piece, the author describes a recent large-scale investigation that shed light on some of the biggest roadblocks, myths, and truths about what self-awareness really is — and what it takes to cultivate it. Specifically, the study found that there are actually two distinct types of self-awareness, that experience and power can hinder self-awareness, and that introspection doesn’t always mak...| Harvard Business Review
