News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Life
Culture & Art
Hobbies
News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Culture & Art
Hobbies
5 Critical Skills Leaders Need in the Age of AI
To thrive in the rapidly evolving age of generative AI, senior leaders need to recognize that success hinges less on the technology itself than on leadership and organizational transformation. In particular, they’ll need to develop five key skills: 1) cultivating AI fluency by engaging with diverse networks and fostering cross-industry conversations; 2) redesigning organizational structures to unlock AI’s value; 3) orchestrating collaborative decision-making between people and AI; 4) empowering teams through coaching and psychological safety; and 5) modeling personal experimentation with AI to inspire broader adoption. Doing so will allow them to guide their organizations through the profound changes required to realize the technology’s full potential.
When Authentic Leadership Backfires
While authenticity is linked to higher self-esteem and well-being, it does not necessarily translate into perceptions of leadership competence or effectiveness. In fact, research shows that impression management—adjusting your behavior to meet situational demands and gratify others—can make you seem more authentic and trustworthy, whereas strict adherence to your “authentic self” can actually be perceived as inauthentic. This article outlines nine key tradeoffs leaders can make to ensure they are balancing their own sense of authenticity with how they come across in their organizations and on their teams.
When Shareholder Engagement Hurts More Than It Helps
As companies grow and ownership becomes more complex, leaders often assume the answer is to get everyone more involved. But too much participation can bog down decisions, fuel frustration, and weaken cohesion. The smarter move is to foster shareholder supportiveness—a culture of trust, fairness, and clear roles that values steady, behind-the-scenes backing just as much as vocal contributions, ensuring the organization stays united when it counts most.
4 Organizational Red Flags That Turn Off Job Candidates
A survey of hundreds of executives shows that the most common “red flags“ that deter qualified candidates from interviewing for or accepting jobs with organizations are a lack of clarity about the job or organization, bad recruitment practices, unpleasant or disengaged employees, and a poor corporate reputation. To address these issues, leaders and hiring teams must demonstrate greater clarity, courtesy, and coherence throughout the process, proactively communicating expectations, supporting hiring managers, and addressing organizational concerns transparently.
How to Drive Digital Innovation Without Wasting Resources
Companies are under pressure to pause digital innovation as costs rise and uncertainty grows—but holding back risks falling further behind in the age of AI and data-driven change. Research shows the most effective organizations avoid waste by funding projects incrementally based on evidence, pairing autonomous teams with shared resources, and continually reallocating talent and capital to initiatives with the greatest strategic impact. By adopting these habits, firms can double down on digital innovation while ensuring that every investment advances long-term business value.
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. They include poor self-awareness, lack of preparation, poor manners or professionalism, excessive self-interest, problematic relationships with past or present employers, and a history of unexplained job-hopping. Both candidates and hiring teams can prevent these factors from derailing the process by focusing on the “three Cs”—clarity, courtesy, and coherence.
When Managing Your Team Becomes Too Much
Your team needs you, but you’re exhausted. You need to focus on the big picture, but you can’t move past the daily firefight. This is the classic trap of leadership: The more indispensable you become, the less time and capacity you have to lead. Meanwhile, the strategic work that needs your attention gets pushed aside. So how do you break this cycle? Here are strategies from five different experts on how to step back without everything falling apart.
Mental Health in the C-Suite
Lew Frankfort, former CEO of Coach, has been to the top of the corporate world—and endured emotional and physical maladies along the way. In this edition of the HBR Executive Agenda, editor at large Adi Ignatius shares Frankfort’s strategies for coping with and opening up about these challenges with your team. Plus, executive leadership consultant Ann Hiatt looks to the growing trend of CEOs quietly reshaping their executive leadership teams—not in response to crisis, but to accelerate strategy, transformation, and energy.
Make Better Strategic Decisions Amid Uncertainty
Big-bet strategic decisions can define an organization’s success. But when so much is changing and ambiguous and the amount of information available is overwhelming, leaders are often tempted to just make the call based on instinct. How can you make a decision without being distracted by the wrong data or slowing down the process? This HBR Executive Playbook will help you ask the right questions to keep the process focused so you can make the best decision possible.
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 shrinking, firms must shift from hiring for grunt work to hiring for leadership potential, redesign workflows around technology, and rethink pricing and talent strategies. Those that adapt quickly will build stronger pipelines of future partners and gain a competitive edge in an AI-driven market.
Senior Leaders Still Need Learning and Development
While mid-level leaders are often offered structured onboarding programs, frequent manager engagement, 1:1s, skip-level 1:1s, and formal mentorship, senior leaders often enter a new role or organization to…silence. They transition from being nurtured and assessed to operating largely on their own, expected to execute flawlessly in unfamiliar terrain. They’re expected to set the vision, guide others, and deliver results early and often. HR leadership and the most senior leaders can set their newest executives—and their organizations—up for success by 1) Normalizing executive onboarding; 2) building peer-coaching opportunities; 3) facilitating reflection early and often; 4) introducing focused 360s at key intervals; and 5) formalizing upstream mentoring and coaching.
New Research on How the Best Managers Shape Employees’ Careers
New research reveals that a manager’s true value—for both individuals and their firms—lies not in being a great motivator or monitor, but in their ability to strategically place talent. Analyzing 20 years of data from 200,000 employees and 30,000 managers across 100 countries, the study finds that high-performing managers—those promoted early—boost their employees’ productivity and wages by matching workers to roles where they thrive. Additionally, these benefits last long after the manager has moved on, or their employees have rotated to new teams with less-high performing managers. The takeaway is clear: good managers make a lasting impact.
What Happens When AI Sets Wages
Generative AI is no longer just automating text; with AI-based wage-setting, it’s shaping paychecks, livelihoods, and access to opportunity. Left unchecked, these systems risk reinforcing, or even widening, global inequalities. New research shows that AI-based wage-setting can be fairer, but only if it’s designed and governed that way.
To Set Your Brand Apart, Create Moments of Shareable Joy
In today’s competitive market, brands seeking to accelerate their growth should focus on creating emotional resonance through unexpected joy. Brands that deliver memorable, shareable moments of joy can differentiate themselves from their competition and build lasting connections with their customers. To strategically create joy, organizations should focus on translating everyday indulgences into aspirational experiences, embrace nostalgia and escapism, create sharable moments that spark viral joy, and foster connection through purposeful content and community.
How to Coach Yourself Through Complex Problems
Leaders today are facing more complexity, faster change, and higher expectations than ever. But budget cuts, approval bottlenecks, and cultural barriers can put the executive coaching that could help them navigate all this uncertainty out of reach. This is where self-coaching can come in. Not as a like-for-like replacement for executive coaching, but as a critical skillset that enables leaders to support themselves, especially in high-stakes, high-pressure moments. The SOLVE framework presents a simple but effective way for leaders to move through complex problems—one that encourages them to take a step back, work out what’s going on, and then move forward confidently but cautiously in a way that fits their specific situation.
When Two Leaders Are Better Than One
As business complexity increases, more organizations will experiment with co-leadership models that allow pairs of CEOs or other executives to divide the cognitive and operational loads of their roles. The benefits of such arrangements include leveraging different leaders’ complementary expertise, enhancing organizational resilience, improving real-time decision quality, and smoothing succession planning. But co-leadership can fail due to decision ambiguity, stakeholder confusion, and internal fragmentation. To thrive in a shared role, ensure you adhere to seven principles: create a clear leadership charter, divide responsibilities by expertise, establish unity on external interfaces, build structure to drive alignment, design conflict resolution mechanisms, plan for evolution, and invest in the partnership.
New Research Shows How an “Idea Marketplace” Can Boost Innovation
Many companies already have the ideas they need to innovate but lack effective systems to surface and connect them. Research shows most employee ideas go unreviewed, leaving major value untapped. Strengthening “idea marketplaces” by streamlining processes, flattening structures, and fostering a culture of idea-sharing can unlock hidden insights, reduce duplication, and turn overlooked ideas into lasting competitive advantage.
Is Your Brand Optimized for AI Search?
AI-driven large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview are increasingly chipping away at traditional search. This new internet landscape has left brands struggling to figure out how to optimize their content. While there isn’t yet a clear playbook to navigating this new reality, there are steps you can take to understand how you’re appearing on LLMs and how to improve your presence.
Costco’s Jim Sinegal on Building a Company That Will Endure
Many companies falter after a great early leader departs. An outstanding exception is Costco. Since Jim Sinegal retired as Costco’s CEO, in January 2012, the membership warehouse retailer has continued to thrive even as many other retailers have struggled or died. Its success is a testament to the Code of Ethics and five deeply held convictions that Sinegal embedded in the company’s DNA. They emphasize that taking care of customers and employees and treating suppliers with respect will lead to extraordinary customer and employee loyalty and shareholder value. How Sinegal ingrained his approach to business into Costco’s culture and operating model hold lessons for leaders of companies of all sizes.
How to Reinvent a Legacy Brand—and Win
In this HBR Executive Live, editor at large Adi Ignatius talks to former CEO of Coach Lew Frankfort about his professional and personal journey building a customer-centric brand while learning the act of self-care. This session offers a sneak peek at the content of Frankfort’s upcoming book, Bag Man: The Story Behind the Improbable Rise of Coach .
When Your CEO’s Leadership Creates Chaos
CEO effectiveness is a critical driver of company performance. As a senior leader, how do you lead effectively when the CEO is difficult to work with? You can’t change a CEO’s personality, but you can shape how you engage, align others, and create the conditions for performance. To do it, you must 1) manage up with intention; 2) build agreements on communication and roles; 3) amplify external voices; 4) form a coalition with peers; and 5) practice strategic patience.
Building a Customer-Centric Organization
Customer centricity isn’t just a metric—it’s a leadership philosophy that strengthens culture while securing long-term enterprise value. This HBR Executive Playbook provides practical steps to help leaders ask the right questions and build an organization where customer success is the foundation of long-term growth.
The Importance of Trust and Transparency in Retail Media Networks
Retail media networks (RMNs) are transforming how suppliers reach shoppers by combining advertising with transaction data to deliver personalized messages and measurable results at the point of purchase. This model is supposed to be precise, profitable, and full of promise, benefiting suppliers, retailers, and consumers alike. However, many RMNs are starting to stall, leading to growing frustration among suppliers. They face high prices, limited transparency, inconsistent results, and shrinking patience. Some suppliers now view RMNs as a fee they are forced to pay rather than a strategic investment. To understand the issues, researchers asked 28 executives from various retail media ecosystems about their experiences. The findings revealed that the problem is relational rather than technical or strategic. The dynamics between retailers and suppliers are being tested by new incentives, mismatched expectations, and a lack of trust.
Don’t Overthink Your Use of Exclamation Points!
Do you ever hesitate before sending an email, weighing whether you should sign off your thanks with an exclamation point (friendly, eager) or a comma (cold, analytical)? You’re not alone. A new study explored how exclamation points were actually received—and whether some people spend an overly long time pondering them. The research found that women are more likely to use exclamations and also spend more time worrying about their implications, fearing they may seem less competent. Yet, findings show exclamations boost perceptions of warmth and enthusiasm without harming perceived competence—for both men and women. Go ahead and use them!
How SMEs Can Prepare for the EU’s AI Regulations
The EU AI Act, which will take effect fully in August 2026, is transforming how companies of all sizes build and deploy AI systems. Applications of AI labeled as high risk—including common tools like CV screeners—will soon face strict compliance requirements including documentation, bias mitigation, and human oversight. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the stakes are even higher: limited resources make compliance harder, and delays could mean falling behind on AI. But SMEs can turn regulation into advantage. By acting with strategic partnerships and adopting compliance-by-design, they can build trust and stand out. Early movers won’t just meet the rules—they’ll shape them, gaining credibility and momentum as global standards evolve.
The Art of the Executive Exit
Even seasoned leaders and boards struggle with CEO exits. Every transition is shaped by a unique mix of people, politics, and circumstances, but all have an emotional undercurrent. In an ideal exit, all parties create a virtuous cycle of candor and trust. Organizational stability is maintained, the chair and departing leader reflect and learn, and the business moves forward smoothly. Unfortunately, such exits are rare. Winning CEO transitions require structure, intent, and shared ownership. Departing CEOs should do the emotional work of leaving early, hand over their role with grace, and reinforce culture on the way out. Boards should reinforce identity, continuity, and respect during the transition.
Are Companies Actually Scaling Back Their Climate Commitments?
Despite headlines declaring the collapse of corporate ESG, a new study of 75 firms across the world found that only 13% have retreated from sustainability, while 85% have held steady or accelerated efforts—often under the radar. Political scrutiny has made public sustainability commitments risky, prompting many firms to engage in “greenhushing,” where they continue climate-aligned strategies but mute their messaging. This strategic silence protects firms from backlash but threatens collective progress by weakening coalitions. However, the study found that companies with deep operational integration, value-creation alignment, and stable leadership have proven the most resilient despite shifting political environments. For executives, the imperative is clear—understand the shifting landscape, resist performative retreat, and recommit to visible, collaborative sustainability. Silence may be safe today, but only integrated action will create a competitive advantage.
Should Your Company License Content to AI?
This year, licensing deals with AI developers will amount to approximately $20 billion. Next year, this could double. This rapidly expanding market need for AI model growth and training presents countless opportunities for companies with libraries of compelling content. So how do you know if your data is robust enough to license? HBR’s editor at large Adi Ignatius talks to Dan Neely, cofounder and CEO of AI rights management platform Vermillio, for this week’s HBR Executive Agenda.
Our Favorite Management Tips on Motivating Your Team
Our Management Tip of the Day newsletter continues to be one of HBR’s most popular newsletters. Here are seven of our favorite tips on motivating people, covering topics like resetting a team that’s lost its spark, weaving kindness into the fabric of your team, helping employees feel seen, and more.
How Gen AI Could Transform Learning and Development
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 potential—and ironically, the technology can help drive that process.