“I hate networking.” It’s a familiar refrain. But in today’s world, networking is a necessity—and fortunately, an aversion to it can be overcome. Drawing on laboratory experiments and on studies at a large law firm, the authors have identified four strategies that can help people become more excited about and effective at building relationships:

Being a CEO can be a lonely job–there is no obvious person in whom to confide. Keeping a journal can fill that void, by giving a new leader a chance for structured reflection of recent past events and decisions, and mental rehearsal for future ones. Despite the time and discipline it takes to keep a journal, it should be part of every new leader’s toolkit.

Why are so few women in management positions? The popular explanations range from women just aren’t capable of being leaders to women just don’t want to be leaders. According to the author, however, the absence of women in leadership roles has less to do with women themselves and more to do with how we interpret leadership traits. Confidence – a trait more associated with men – is often misinterpreted as competence. As a result, charismatic, but incompetent men have fewer barriers to reach the top than women. Individuals in positions to promote and hire managers should think more critically about what seems like a leadership trait versus what is an actual leadership trait. They will find that arrogance and overconfidence – the characteristics that get men into management positions – are also the characteristics that cause poor performance.

Turnbull/Getty Images There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain. If you’ve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article “Building Resilience.” Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with […]

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Emotional ambivalence is the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions about something. It’s what we think of as being “torn.” As organizations develop ways of working that better consider the collective needs of our society, it’s critical for leaders to adapt and evolve expectations, structures, and reward systems in ways that support employees’ increasingly complex emotional lives. Drawing on the collective insights from their previous and ongoing research, the authors offer six critical leadership lessons for building cultures and structures that encourage emotional ambivalence and harnessing its benefits as we establish a “new normal” in the second half of 2021.

There’s no question that working with a diverse group can be more challenging than contributing to a more homogenous one. There are more opportunities for misunderstanding and conflict, especially in times when personal, professional, and societal tensions are running high. However, these hurdles are easily overcome with intentional leadership and teamwork. Start by establishing team norms that set the stage for psychological safety before stressful events occur. Work to find deeper connections through which you share and learn. Talk through challenges rather than ignoring them. And, finally, work to spread the culture through your organization.

There have been surprisingly few studies that set out to quantify what makes for a successful corporate transformation. Using a meta-analysis that crunched data on financial performance as well as corporate reputation, the authors examined 128 global companies that had undergone transformation between 2016 and 2020 and found that: 1) Transformation is even harder than expected (only 22% of companies in their sample were successful), and 2) Successful companies shared a common focus on initiatives that prioritized employees, including DE&I programs and support for women managers’ careers, in addition to competitive pay and access to health care.

Companies around the world are experimenting with a four-day workweek, and participants are reporting feeling less burned out, more productive, and happier. Early in his career, author Joe Sanok was able to negotiate a four-day workweek himself. In this article, he suggests some tips around how you can do the same:

A plan for conquering collaborative overload to drive performance and innovation, reduce burnout, and enhance well-being.

Most organizations have created always-on work contexts that are burning people out and hurting performance rather than delivering productivity, innovation and engagement. Collaborative work consumes 85% of employees' time and is drifting earlier into the morning, later into the night, and deeper into the weekend.

The dilemma is that we all need to collaborate more to create effective organizations and vibrant careers for ourselves. But conventional wisdom on teamwork and collaboration has created too much of the wrong kind of collaboration, which hurts our performance, health and overall well-being.

In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Babson professor Rob Cross solves this paradox by showing how top performers who thrive at work collaborate in a more purposeful way that...

Both practically and morally, corporate leaders can no longer sit on the sidelines of major societal shifts or treat human and planetary issues as “someone else’s problem.” For their own good, they must play an active role in addressing our biggest shared challenges. The economy won’t thrive unless people and the planet are thriving.

In this bold manifesto, consultant and author Andrew Winston and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman describe their vision of a “net positive” company—one that grows by helping the world flourish. Drawing on examples from Unilever and other leading companies, they outline four critical paths businesses can take to prosper today and win in the future. They can operate first in service of multiple stakeholders—which then benefits investors (as opposed to putting shareholders above all others); take full ownership of all company impacts; embrace deep partnerships, even with critics; and tackle systemic challenges by rethinking...

While today’s working dads still want successful careers, they also want to be present and involved as parents and partners. But workplace policies and tradition are still holding them back more from a progressive vision of parenting and work. To counteract these cultures, fathers should build a network of parenting allies at work. Parenting allies can help fathers on two levels: support and advocacy. Supporters are the colleagues who provide direct and practical help. Advocates work together to improve company culture for parents. To build your network of parenting allies, simply start by talking about your life as a dad, in all its messy, wonderful glory. Normalize your parenting life and your colleagues will stop treating it as a taboo subject. Make fatherhood part of your virtual identity. Join existing conversations around working parents in your organization, and consider starting a dads’ network. The more people who take part in the discussion, the harder it...

After 18 months of leading organizations remotely, chief executives must learn to combine the best parts of what they’ve learned about virtual leadership with the most effective parts of managing face-to-face. The author, who studies how CEOs spend their time, suggests that leaders limit the negative consequences of video meetings, rethink assumptions about the reasons to travel, and protect their alone/personal time even more than before the pandemic.

The best way to increase your odds of getting into your dream business school is taking the time to submit a great application. And that means you need to start earlier, go deeper, and finish stronger. There’s a few ways to do that.

When people feel that their career progress is frustratingly slow or has sputtered out, they can become dangerously demoralized. Without a clear understanding of what constitutes a reasonable pace for advancement or why peers are outachieving them, they write off promising paths, downscale their ambitions, or quit altogether. But often these people are simply not giving themselves enough time to succeed. They need to cultivate “strategic patience.” What does that entail? Five things: doing research on what it realistically takes to achieve their goals; recognizing “raindrops,” or small wins that are early indicators of success; abandoning harmful social comparisons and instead leveraging their relationships in a positive way; appreciating how far they’ve come rather than continually moving the goalposts; and understanding that it’s OK for their career goals to shift as long as they keep moving in the right direction.

Nothing is more costly to an organization’s culture than a toxic employee. Research shows that rudeness is like the common cold — it’s contagious, spreads quickly, and anyone can be a carrier.

Dylan Minor, a visiting assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael Housman, chief analytics officer at Cornerstone OnDemand, studied just how costly toxic employees are using a large dataset of nearly 60,000 workers across 11 firms in various industries, including communications, consumer services, financial services, health care, insurance, and retail.

How does hiring a toxic employee compare to hiring a superstar? Minor and Housman found that one toxic employee wipes out the gains for more than two superstars. In fact, a superstar, defined as the top 1% of workers in terms of productivity, adds about $5,000 per year to the company’s profit, while a toxic worker costs about $12,000 per year. The real difference could even be...

If there were an Academy Awards show for business performance, Netflix would sweep this year’s categories — the corporate equivalent of “Titanic” or “Lord of the Rings.” Wealth creation? The company, which is barely 20 years old, has a stock-market value of $170 billion. Cultural sway? Netflix recently got 112 Emmy nominations. Management cred? Its reputation is so strong that a simple PowerPoint slideshow about its culture and HR policies has been viewed more than 18 million times. There’s no doubt that many leaders can see glimpses of the future of competition and innovation by looking at how the company does business.

For one, Netflix has shown that big data is powerful, but big data plus big ideas is transformational. Technology matters most when it is in the service of a compelling strategy. Netflix has also shown that if you aim to disrupt an industry, you must be willing to disrupt yourself. And finally, the company has...

Even before working from home became widespread, digital technology was transforming how and where work gets done and how many people are needed to do it.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, companies can rebuild a workforce that is better equipped for an economy in which routine and repeatable tasks are increasingly machine-enabled.

Drawing on research by Bain & Company involving more than 300 large firms worldwide in every facet of the global economy, the authors identify six practices for companies to follow as they regroup and reorganize for the inevitable recovery.

Not every top performer makes for a good manager. In this piece, the authors argue that the difference between a good individual contributor and a good manager hinges on six key abilities: being open to feedback and personal change, supporting others’ development, being open to innovation, communicating well, having good interpersonal skills, and supporting organizational changes. The problem for most organizations is that they hope their new managers will develop these skills after being promoted, but that’s exactly when overwhelmed new managers tend to fall back on their individual contributor skill sets. Instead, the authors suggest that organizations should start developing these skills in all of their employees early on — after all, they’re useful for individual contributors, too.

Work stress is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to get in the way of a good night’s sleep. To avoid thinking about work in the middle of the night, the author offers five strategies: 1) Make a to-do list. The act of writing down uncompleted tasks decreases cognitive arousal, rumination, and worry. 2) Keep a journal. Writing down your thoughts and feelings, rather than just thinking about them, has been shown to help process emotions and reduce stress and anxiety 3) Exercise self-compassion. Practicing self-compassion allows you to break the cycle of negative thoughts that come with rumination, which is linked to insomnia. 4) Engage in physical activity. Research shows that a single instance of moderately intense exercise can decrease rumination 5) Practice meditation. Researchers in the Netherlands found that even small amounts of mindful meditation (10 minutes before and after work for two work weeks) helped calm racing minds, improve sleep quality, and...

Research has shown that only about 8% of company leaders excel at both strategy and execution. But more and more, we need leaders who can do both. Leaders who master both strategy and execution start by building a bold but executable strategy, addressing the questions “What are we great at?” and “What are we able to achieve?” rather than coming up with lofty plans and asking functional and business-unit teams to do their best to execute. Next, leaders must ensure that the company is investing behind the change, which means linking the budget closely to the strategy. Finally, leaders need to make sure the entire organization is motivated to go the journey. Great leaders know that success stems from specific skills that come together in unique ways to do the challenging tasks in executing the strategy.