Articles

You Need to Understand Your Employees' Caregiving Responsibilities

Employees regularly balance work with caregiving responsibilities, whether it is child care, eldercare, or caring for another family member. Yet many organizations lack visibility into who their...

How to Spot a Toxic Leader-Before Hiring Them

Leaders with toxic interpersonal behaviors often make excellent first impressions, which means they're surprisingly difficult to identify in traditional interviews. As a result, organizations can...

The Science of Developing Creative Talent

Companies often make consequential bets on talent based largely on instinct. Research on more than 4,200 musicians suggests a more systematic approach. Managers should assess three forms of capital:...

The Art of Profound Visioning: Leadership Lessons From the Sagrada Familia

This article explores leadership lessons from Antoni Gaudí?s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Drawing on the basilica?s century-long development, it highlights three interrelated...

Why Cash Rewards Don't Always Produce Better Ideas

Many companies try to encourage innovation by offering financial rewards for new inventions. The assumption is straightforward: If employees are paid for innovative output, they will produce more of...

What You Can Learn from a Competitor's Job Postings

Executives spend heavily trying to predict competitors' next moves, yet often overlook one of the clearest signals of strategic intent: job postings. Because companies must hire before they can...

Why Lateral Hires Rarely Become CEO

Internal CEO succession candidates are primarily judged on whether they can lead the enterprise. Lateral hires are judged on two dimensions: whether they can lead the enterprise and whether they have...

Research: Employees from Lower-Class Backgrounds Negotiate Less-and Face More Backlash

Negotiation is often treated as a neutral, meritocratic process: Employees ask, managers assess, and the strongest case wins. New research challenges that assumption, showing that individuals from...

The Case for Hiring Job Hoppers

Conventional wisdom tells leaders to avoid hiring “job hoppers,” assuming frequent movers are unreliable and unlikely to stay. In a new study, however, researchers analyzed the employment histories...

The Invisible Work Draining Your Best Employees

Most leaders assess workload through hours, deadlines, and output, but these measures overlook the mental load employees carry: the ongoing cognitive and emotional effort required to manage tasks,...

Are Your Job Postings Driving Away Creative Talent?

Many organizations say they want innovative talent but undermine themselves with the wrong recruitment language. An analysis of 10,000 creative job postings and experiments with 2,000 job seekers...

AI Has Broken Hiring. Here's How to Fix It.

Generative AI is rapidly undermining the reliability of traditional hiring signals, making it easier for candidates to manufacture polished résumés and perform convincingly in remote interviews with...

Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems

Frontline employees often know exactly what’s preventing organizations from performing at their best, yet traditional engagement surveys rarely uncover those insights or translate them into action...

Research: AI Is Changing What Employers Want from New Hires

Generative AI is transforming what employers expect from knowledge workers—not by replacing expertise but by raising the bar for it. A study of three sectors that recruit the largest proportion of...

Are You Biased Toward Job Candidates Who Reply Quickly?

Hiring managers believe they prioritize experience, credentials, and fit when they wade through job applications. But a new study found that how quickly candidates reply to messages powerfully...

Performance Management Needs New Metrics in the AI Era

Even as they adopt AI, companies are measuring employee performance with familiar metrics of success: productivity, goal completion, and efficiency. As such, employees who rely heavily on AI may...

The Strongest Teams of AI Agents Will Be Built Using Different Models

Agentic AI is so prevalent that some business leaders now count AI agents as part of their regular workforce. Yet, without attention to the diversity of this burgeoning agentic workforce, business...

The U.S. Research Talent Pipeline Is in Trouble

Policy shifts, funding instability, and visa uncertainty are causing a sharp decline in the willingness of young scientists trained in the United States to stay in academia-or even remain in the...

Gen AI Could Fix Performance Reviews-or Make Them Even Worse

Generative AI can greatly improve the value of performance reviews, but most companies are just using it to produce polished versions of traditional narrative reviews more quickly rather than improve...

Burnout Looks Different Across the Org Chart. Watch for These Signs.

Burnout isn't an individual problem-it's a systemic design issue that shows up differently across the organization chart. Early-career employees burn out from ambiguity and lack of control, managers...

Leaders Underestimate the Value of Employee Joy

Despite frequent claims that employees are a company’s greatest asset, many organizations still treat their workforce as mere operational inputs, leading to disengagement and low motivation. While...

Is Your Board Too Collegial?

Boards often mistake collegiality for alignment, avoiding tough conversations and sidelining dissent. The result is delayed decisions, superficial consensus, unequal participation, and fragmented...

Boards Often Misunderstand What Stock Buybacks Really Cost

Boards of directors frequently overlook the financial consequences of share buybacks used to counteract dilution from stock-based compensation. The typical cycle begins with equity grants to...

How to Turn Individual Talent into Organizational Excellence

Sustained organizational performance comes from systems that amplify the right things, not individual brilliance. Yes, hiring and rewards matter for performance, but leaders who want sustained elite...

Healthcare Uses Specialized Language. It Needs Specialized AI, Too.

The potential generative AI in healthcare is enormous. They can generate patient education materials or clinical notes in seconds, flag incomplete documentation to keep care on track, or even suggest...

How to Solve One of the Most Expensive Problems in Employer Healthcare

A small share of employees drives a disproportionate share of employer health-care spending: They are patients whose complex conditions go undiagnosed as they cycle through a fragmented care system...

When Feedback Crosses the Line

Many leaders believe candid negative feedback improves performance, but when criticism feels belittling or humiliating, it often produces the opposite effect. Research drawing on employees' firsthand...

The Upside of Opening Up DEI Programs to Everyone

In the wake of the Supreme Court's seismic 2023 decision ending affirmative action in higher education-and more than 100 lawsuits challenging organizational DEI efforts-many U.S. companies reexamined...

The Delicate Politics of Hiring Someone from Another Team

You have an opening, and you know exactly who you want: that person on another team who always seems to get it. But before you make a move, you need to navigate some complications. Due diligence is...

When Tipping Becomes a Customer Experience Problem

Tipping has evolved from a hospitality tradition into a widespread expectation across many service sectors, including airlines, medical offices, and self-checkout kiosks. Surveys show that a...

AI Has Made Hiring Worse-But It Can Still Help

While AI has the potential to transform hiring, its important to be realistic about what has actually happened so far. For all the talk about AI supercharging talent, the reality is that talent...

What to Do When Your Senior Role Feels Totally Unsustainable

Many senior leaders are quietly reaching the same conclusion: the top jobs theyve spent decades working toward no longer feel sustainable. In recent years, the go-to advice for addressing executive...

The Questions CEO Candidates Need to Ask

Talented executives too often accept CEO roles without fully interrogating whether the context-not just the title-sets them up to succeed, leading to costly failures for both leaders and...

When There's Nowhere to Promote a Star Employee

Your rising star expects a promotion. It feels inevitable: the rightful reward for their effort. The problem is you cant deliver it. Managing the gap between their expectations and reality is one of...

New Research on AI and Fairness in Hiring

AI promises to make hiring fairer by reducing human bias, yet it often reshapes what fairness means-and locks in one definition. A three-year study of a global consumer-goods firm found that their...

The New Tools That Can Improve Workforce Training

Companies are pouring money into AI but failing to translate that investment into workforce capability, largely because traditional training methods dont help employees retain or apply complex skills...

How to Stand Out to C‑Suite Recruiters

Professional recruiters are playing a larger role in C-suite hiring processes. Candidates vying for senior roles can prepare using five key strategies: (1) Adopt a development mindset-embracing the...

Leading After the Founder

Founder transitions are pivotal moments that can either propel a company into its next phase of growth or stall its momentum altogether. Research shows that founder-CEO handovers are significantly...

How U.S. Employers Can Meet the Healthcare Needs of Younger Workers

Employers and health systems can do a better job of serving the specific healthcare needs of Millennials and Gen Zers by embracing the following seven approaches: 1) Enlist AI in the design of...

When You've Stopped Growing with Your Executive Coach

What should you do if youve been working with an executive coach, but no longer feel like youre making meaningful progress? A coaching plateau can mean one of two things: Youve outgrown the...

Are You Interviewing a Candidate-or Their AI?

Candidates are starting to use AI tools to help them answer interview questions. It might be tempting to ask interviewees to share their screen to prove theyre not, but that can backfire because it...

Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading When You're Overwhelmed

Our Management Tip of the Day newsletter continues to be one of HBRs most popular newsletters. In this article, weve compiled eight of our favorite tips on leading when youre feeling overwhelmed,...

The Pitfalls That Undermine CEO Succession Planning

New research based on a survey of board directors, as well as in-depth interviews with directors, investors, and executive search consultants, reveals 10 pitfalls in CEO succession, from a hesitant...

How to Be a Great Coach-Even When You're Busy

Its easy to assume that good coaching requires hours dedicated to lengthy formal conversations. But the most powerful managerial coaching actually happens not in scheduled sessions, but in the...

The CEO of Advocate Health on Fostering Innovation Through Partnerships

Advocate Health, formed by the merger of two major health systems, aims to redefine patient care by leveraging its scale of 69 hospitals and 1,000 other sites to partner with academic institutions...

Should a CHRO Abandon Performance Improvement Plans? (HBR Case Study and Commentary)

At Barton Creek Technologies, Anna Chen, the chief human resources officer, faces a dilemma over the companys performance improvement plan (PIP). Introduced as a supportive tool to rehabilitate...

A Research-Backed Training Method That Improves Hiring Outcomes

While many organizations are doing away with their DEI programs amid political backlash, finding and hiring the best talent remains a top priority for companies. New research with two multinational...

4 Organizational Red Flags That Turn Off Job Candidates

A survey of hundreds of executives shows that the most common ed flagsthat deter qualified candidates from interviewing for or accepting jobs with organizations are a lack of clarity about the job...

6 Red Flags That Keep Good Candidates from Getting Hired

A survey of hundreds of executives point to six red flags that derail organizational hiring, sometimes preventing otherwise qualified candidates from securing roles to which they might be suited...

How AI Is Upending How Consulting Firms Hire Talent

AI is dismantling the traditional hiring model of professional services firms, which relied on large classes of junior associates to supply a handful of future partners. With entry-level roles...

A Smarter Way to Disagree

To foster constructive disagreements, organizations should encourage individuals to modify their observable behaviors during conflicts. More specifically, the authors research has shown that...