Hated by bosses and subordinates alike, traditional performance appraisals have been abandoned by more than a third of U.S. companies. The annual review’s biggest limitation, the authors argue, is its emphasis on holding employees accountable for what they did last year, at the expense of improving performance now and in the future. That’s why many organizations are moving to more-frequent, development-focused conversations between managers and employees.

The authors explain how performance management has evolved over the decades and why current thinking has shifted: (1) Today’s tight labor market creates pressure to keep employees happy and groom them for advancement. (2) The rapidly changing business environment requires agility, which argues for regular check-ins with employees. (3) Prioritizing improvement over accountability promotes teamwork.

Some companies worry that going numberless may make it harder to align individual and organizational...

More than 2,000 years ago Aristotle outlined a formula on how to become a master of persuasion in his work Rhetoric. To successfully sell your next idea, try using these five rhetorical devices that he identified in your next speech or presentation: The first is egos or “character.” In order for your audience to trust you, start your talk by establishing your credibility. Then, make a logical appeal to reason, or “logos.” Use data, evidence, and facts to support your pitch. The third device, and perhaps the most important, is “pathos,” or emotion. People are moved to action by how a speaker makes them feel. Aristotle believed the best way to transfer emotion from one person to another is through storytelling. The more personal your content is the more your audience will feel connected to you and your idea.

In the flurry of statistics that exist around personal productivity, there’s one I find especially alarming: The average person is distracted or interrupted every 40 seconds when working in front of their computer. When our attention is completely derailed, research shows, it can take 29 minutes to refocus. How can you gain back control? Start by creating a distraction-free ritual, setting three daily intentions, working on more-challenging projects, and setting artificial project deadlines.

“Whoa! What are you doing?” I asked aghast.

I had just walked into my daughter’s room as she was working on a science project. Normally, I would have been pleased at such a sight. But this time, her project involved sand. A lot of it. And, while she had put some plastic underneath her work area, it wasn’t nearly enough. The sand was spreading all over our newly renovated floors.

My daughter, who immediately felt my displeasure, began to defend herself. “I used plastic!” she responded angrily.

I responded more angrily, “But the sand is getting all over!”

“Where else am I supposed to do it?” she yelled.

Why won’t she admit when she’s done something wrong? I thought to myself. I felt my fear, projecting into the future: What would her life look like if she couldn’t own her mistakes?

My fear translated into more anger, this time about how important it was for her to admit mistakes, and we spiraled. She said something that felt...

You can’t throw a paper airplane in some offices without hitting a person who is training for a marathon, planning a 10-day silent meditation retreat, or intending on scaling Kilimanjaro. Workaholism is a badge of honor, and extremism is becoming the norm not only in our professional lives but increasingly in our personal lives as well. Extreme parents overinvest in building competitive kids. People take up sports to find some balance in their lives — and get caught up becoming triathletes. What if, instead, we embraced extreme moderation, extreme balance? What if instead of giving 110% to everything, we gave just 80%? So many of us say we want balance, but maybe we aren’t extreme enough in our devotion to this ideal.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School’s MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies. What their comprehensive survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women’s careers doesn’t always square with reality.

The survey showed, for instance, that:

Burnout hurts. When you burn out at work, you feel diminished, like a part of yourself has gone into hiding. Challenges that were formerly manageable feel insurmountable. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from engagement. The engaged employee is energized, involved, and high-performing; the burned-out employee is exhausted, cynical, and overwhelmed.

Research shows that burnout has three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. When you’re emotionally exhausted, you feel used up—not just emotionally, but often physically and cognitively as well. You can’t concentrate. You’re easily upset or angered, you get sick more often, and you have difficulty sleeping. Depersonalization shows up in feelings of alienation from and cynicism towards the people your job requires you to interact with. One of my coaching clients summed it up like this: “I feel like I’m watching myself in a play. I know my role, I can recite my...

Most companies run some kind of employee-recognition programs, but often they fall flat, wasting resources. Many become just another box for managers to check or are seen as elite opportunities for a favored few, leaving the rest of the workforce feeling left out. Meanwhile, a lot of individual managers also fail to adequately express appreciation, mistakenly assuming that reports know how they feel or struggling to balance gratitude with developmental feedback. In focus groups and interviews, however, employees reveal that making them feel valued and recognized isn’t all that complicated: It mostly comes down to a lot of small, commonsense practices.

Power clearly isn’t what it used to be. We see Goliaths being toppled by Davids all around us, from the networked drivers of Uber to the crowdfunded creatives of Kickstarter. But it’s difficult to understand what power actually is in this changed world, and how to gain more of it.

Two fresh voices to HBR—Jeremy Heimans, cofounder of Purpose and Avaaz, and Henry Timms, director of the 92nd Street Y in New York—offer a framework for organizations seeking to effectively use the two distinct forces of “old power” and “new power.” Old power, the authors argue, works like a currency. It is held by few and is zero-sum. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven.

New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is...

Authenticity has become the gold standard for leadership. But as INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra argues, a simplistic understanding of what authenticity means can limit leaders’ growth and impact.

All too often, we tend to latch on to authenticity as an excuse for sticking with what’s comfortable. But few jobs allow us to do that for long. In this article, Ibarra explains how leaders can develop an “adaptively authentic” style by experimenting with many different leadership approaches. It’s OK to change tactics from one day to the next, she says. That’s not being fake; it’s how we figure out what’s right for the challenges and circumstances we face.

Three strategies can help you break free from a self-concept that’s too rigid:

A lot of people assume that the skills you need to be a leader are more or less transferable. If you can inspire and motivate people in one arena, you should be able to apply those skills to do the same in another venue. But skills like the ability to motivate self and others, effective oral and written communication, and critical thinking are not enough. You also need domain expertise. Effective communication differs from one domain to another. Doctors talking to patients must communicate information differently than politicians reacting to a natural disaster or a CEO responding to a labor dispute. This way of thinking about leadership has two important implications. First, when we teach people about leadership, we need to be more explicit that domain expertise matters. Second, when we train people to take on leadership roles, we need to give them practice solving domain-specific problems so that they can prepare to integrate information in the arena in which they are...

Many of us struggle with the feeling that we’re wasting time. But to get a clear sense of how you’re actually spending your time — and where you’d like to make changes — the author suggests trying a simple time-tracking exercise. Logging exactly how you spend your time for an entire month can yield some surprising insights, and give you the tools you need to improve where needed. Based on her own experience with this exercise, the author offers four useful insights that helped her to improve productivity and reduce stress: First, she found that multitasking was often actually extremely positive and productive for her. Second, she found that there were benefits to combining personal and professional activities, such as networking/socializing. Third, she found that there were certain times of day that were more likely to be “wasted,” helping her to think more proactively about how exactly she wanted to spend those hours. Finally, she found that certain tasks carried...

Whether you are an associate manager or a senior executive, what you say, how you say it, when you say it, to whom you say it, and whether you say it within the proper context are critical components of your strategic leadership potential. This “executive voice” is less about your performance and more about your strategic instincts and your awareness of the signals you send in daily interactions and communications. Developing an executive voice can mean the difference between success and failure in your communication and leadership style. You can show up more strategically in meetings by doing your homework and by taking the lead in analyzing difficult situations. Bring solutions, not just problems. And stay calm in the pressure cooker. People with an effective executive voice aren’t easily rattled. They provide levelheaded leadership even when — in fact, particularly when — everyone around them is losing their composure. By making the necessary adjustments to your...

From leadership transitions and restructurings to mergers and acquisitions, there seems to be constant change in the workforce. But surveys show that many employees don’t understand why these changes are happening. This can be detrimental for any company trying to implement change. When employees don’t understand why changes are happening, it can be a barrier to driving ownership and commitment, and even result in resistance or push back. Executives and those responsible for leading change cannot assume that employees understand the reasoning behind them. It’s important to spend time explaining the changes and why they are important. There are four key aspects to helping employees understand change, to drive commitment, and to ultimately contribute to your success: 1) Inspire people by presenting a compelling vision for the future, 2) Keep employees informed by providing regular communications, 3) Empower leaders and managers to lead through change, and 4) Find creative...

If we want to ramp up our productivity and happiness at home and at work, we should actually be doing less. But that’s incredibly difficult as you’re balancing work, parenting, friendships, and more. When you stop doing the things that make you feel busy but aren’t getting you results, then you end up with more than enough time for what matters.

You can follow a simple exercise to help decide what activities on your to-do list brings you the most value, and which you can stop doing. Decide on an area of your life where you’d like to have better results and less stress. Write down the tasks you do in that area on one side of a piece of paper, and on the other, list successes you’ve had in that area. Then, identify which tasks directly contributed to those successes. Anything that didn’t directly contribute can be eliminated, greatly reduced, or delegated to someone else.

Many leaders tell themselves: “It’s so busy, I can’t afford to…(spend 7 hours sleeping, or stop to get lunch, or keep up my hobbies).” This framing, which casts investments in personal resilience as contrary to the best interests of an organization, is doing both you and your organization a great disservice. It’s time to take those hackneyed words, “our people are our greatest asset,” to heart. If you are an important asset, how could depriving, devaluing, and depreciating that asset by running it in harsh conditions, powering it with improper fuel, and neglecting routine maintenance possibly be good for your organization? Your resilience is a high-priority business issue if you’re leading a team through the stress of our fast-paced world. When you invest in proper sleep, nutrition, exercise, and play, you’ll have the self-control to manage your own reactions, the energy to be fully present for your team, the patience to listen and empathize, the wherewithal to...

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The first step to generating real growth is to understand where it comes from. It can be boiled down to six simple categories: new processes, new experiences, new features, new customers, new offerings, and new models. Deciding which ways to grow needs to be intentional — not driven by luck. Innovation budgets are finite, so allocations of your scarce resources should reduce risk and focus on the best bets. It needs to be balanced for maximum return the same way a retirement fund needs to be balanced among high and low risks and rewards.

As a leader, you want the people in your organization to trust you. And with good reason. In our coaching with leaders, we often see that trust is a leading indicator of whether others evaluate them positively or negatively. But how to create that trust, or perhaps more importantly, how reestablish it when you’ve lost it isn’t always that straightforward. By analyzing over 80,000 360-degree reviews, the authors found that there are three elements that predict whether a leader will be trusted by his direct reports, peers, and other colleagues. These are positive relationships, consistency, and good judgment/expertise. When a leader was above average on each of these elements, they were more likely to be trusted, and positive relationships appeared to be the most important element in that, without it, a leader’s trust rating fell most significantly. Trust is an important currency in organizations and any leader would be wise to invest time in building it by focusing on...

We all have times where we wonder, “Am I at the right company? Am I in the right job? And is this all there is?” These questions are especially agonizing for mid-career professionals who may be searching for fulfillment while juggling demands at home. One of the biggest culprits of middle-age malaise is boredom. To address it, you don’t necessarily need to switch jobs. Instead, consider making small changes to your routine. Seek out an immersive project, join an internal committee that will stretch you, or negotiate a different schedule. These small changes can have a big impact on your outlook and perspective. It’s also important to deliberately seek meaning. Make an effort to meet the people who directly benefit from your work, whether they’re customers, clients, or colleagues. Seeing the impact you have on others is a potent reminder of why you do what you do.

It’s normal to get a sinking feeling when one of your employees says, “I have something to tell you.” No manager wants to hear that someone on their team has another job offer in hand. But how should you actually respond to the news? Should you counteroffer? Or just accept that they’re moving on? And how can you tell if the employee is just bluffing to get a raise?

What the Experts Say The reality is people leave jobs — and not always on the schedule you’d prefer. Instead of panicking, make the most of the situation. “Whether or not the employee ends up taking the other offer, this is a rich opportunity,” says Dick Grote performance management consultant and author of the HBR Tools on Goal Setting and Performance Reviews. It should be a moment of self-reflection for you as a manager, adds Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by...

Even if you’re able to leave your projects and worries at the office, your spouse or partner may have difficulty doing so — and that stress can rub off on you. How can you help your partner cope? For starters, you need to listen. Show engagement and empathize. Figure out what they need from you. Sometimes they may just want to vent; other times they may need your advice. If you’re unsure of your role, ask, “Do you need my help? Or do you just want to be heard?” Play career coach — but do so judiciously. If you get a sense that your partner is misreading a situation at the office or is stuck in a rut, ask questions to broaden their perspective. Whatever you do, never compare your spouse’s stressful day to your own. Stress endurance is not a competition.

Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is chaotic, random, and unmanageable. But that view is flawed, the authors argue. Breakthroughs can be systematically generated using a process modeled on the principles that drive evolution in nature: variance generation, which creates a variety of life-forms; and selection pressure to select those that can best survive in a given environment.

Flagship Pioneering, the venture-creation firm behind Moderna Therapeutics and one of the most widely used Covid-19 vaccines in the United States, uses such an approach. It has successfully launched more than 100 life-sciences businesses. Its process, called emergent discovery, is a rigorous set of activities including prospecting for ideas in novel spaces; developing speculative conjectures; and relentlessly questioning hypotheses.