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Don’t Lose Your Star New Hire
When you’ve landed a star employee , it’s tempting to think they’ll solve all your problems from day one. But even the most capable hire needs time to deliver their best work. More importantly, they need reasons to stick around. So, what can you do to keep them from getting poached? What do they need to stay motivated? And how do you give them what they need without creating resentment on your existing team? Here are eight strategies to try.
The Best CEOs Can Spot Where Their Organization Is Under the Greatest Pressure
Great CEOs don’t just lead; they build systems that turn the noise of internal and external tension into signal, discomfort into direction, and pressure into strategic posture. That requires them to operate across three simultaneous leadership fronts, each demanding distinct skills, awareness, and energy. On the internal front, CEOs are responsible for running the company well. The pressure on this front typically shows up as friction within teams, unexpected departures, stalled projects, dips in morale, and retention risks. On the external front, the CEO is responsible for positioning the company for the market. The pressure usually appears in the form of competitive threats, customer churn, media skepticism, or declining stock prices. On the internal–external front, the CEO must align powerful insiders who behave like outsiders. Pressure can manifest in delayed responses, pointed questions, or in extreme cases, public letters. The difference between a good CEO and a great one isn’t effort—it’s knowing which of the three fronts is on fire today and which will be tomorrow.
Why the Second Year as CEO Is the Hardest
The second year of a CEO’s tenure is a crucible. It’s when early promises are tested, scrutiny intensifies, and the margin for error narrows. But it’s also the year that determines whether a leader will simply survive in the role or earn the right to truly perform. CEOs who treat the end of year one as a deliberate reset position themselves to turn the most dangerous period into the foundation for long-term success. The first year is about surviving the transition. The second is about proving the bets you made were right. And those who succeed at this stage do more than survive—they create the conditions for sustained performance and legacy.
The Right Way to Interview Senior Talent, According to the Former CEO of Coach
During former CEO Lew Frankfort’s tenure at Coach, he emphasized that the leadership team needed to be “investment-grade,” comprising seasoned professionals with diverse experiences, especially those who could grow brands through adversity. The goal was to build a collaborative team with domain expertise that complemented the CEO’s knowledge and aligned with Coach’s culture. Past hiring mistakes motivated the refinement of a more interactive and thorough interviewing process to better assess candidates’ full potential beyond technical skills, focusing on values and capabilities essential for success and growth within the company. Effective senior leadership hiring requires a deep understanding of candidates beyond their resumes. The result was immersive interviewing, a three-phased technique focused on evaluating both values and capabilities to ensure candidates fit the company culture and possessed the skills needed to thrive.
How to Lead When the Conditions for Success Suddenly Disappear
In today’s volatile environment, the conditions for success rarely stay static. Sponsors move on. Budgets shrink. Regulations change. The leaders who endure aren’t those who cling to the original design. They’re the ones who broaden their coalitions, build resiliency into their systems, and reset expectations as realities shift.
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 firms found an intervention that can help overcome some of the unconscious biases that can block great candidates: short, targeted, videos—delivered just before hiring decisions—that affirm company values and encourage managers to focus on finding candidates with broad experiences and talents. These behavioral nudges led to measurable increases in the hiring of underrepresented candidates, including non-nationals and gender minorities. This evidence-based intervention can help companies align hiring practices with their organizational values, finding the best candidates for open positions.
The Importance of Correctly Timing Acquisitions for Growth
Many high-growth firms treat acquisitions as a race, pursuing rapid dealmaking to stay ahead of competitors. But new research examining more than 5,100 acquisitions finds that timing matters as much as scale or frequency. Firms that gradually expand the spacing between deals—learning quickly at first, then pausing to absorb lessons—create substantially more market value per acquirer. The reason: Longer intervals allow for better integration, stronger governance, and sharper strategic pivots. Leaders who manage the rhythm of growth, not just its speed, build organizations that execute more effectively and adapt more intelligently over time.
Research: How Old Companies Can Ignite New Growth
Most companies slow down as they mature, but stagnation is not inevitable. In a global study of 848 firms, BCG identified 99 that reignited their momentum, delivering breakout growth—sustained performance that far outpaced peers while also improving profitability. These companies succeeded by aligning growth strategies with their circumstances—whether scaling up, reallocating toward faster-growing segments, refreshing their business models, or seizing opportunities in crisis.
Is Your Executive Team Really a Team?
New Gartner research reveals that only 31% of executives identified the C-suite as their primary team, meaning they’re actually operating as independent leaders rather than as a unified team. What does this mean for company performance? And how should executives actually be thinking about their team?
The Power of Metaphors When Introducing Change Initiatives
Change can be scary, which can activate the brain’s fight or flight response. So how can senior leaders help calm that threat response when introducing change initiatives? Research has shown that storytelling can help. However, busy executives often lack the time, skills, and runway needed to craft full-fledged storylines, transformation heroes, and relatable characters. This is where strategic metaphors can be a powerful alternative. A metaphor is a lightning flash—it illuminates the landscape in an instant, helping to calm the brain, coordinate energy, and clarify direction. For leaders navigating ambiguity, time pressure, and resistance, the right metaphor doesn’t just describe the journey—it defines it. It quickly signals what matters, who we are becoming, and how we will get there—together. As you plan your next transformation, don’t just ask, “What’s our strategy?” Ask, “What metaphor will make people want to carry our strategy forward?”
When You’re the Executive Everyone Relies On—and You’re Burning Out
Many senior leaders are finding themselves overwhelmed as organizations cut budgets and staff while maintaining ambitious goals. In these conditions, bosses often assign extra projects to their most dependable performers, stretching them thin and leading to burnout. To avoid this cycle, executives who keep receiving extra work should clarify priorities before accepting new assignments, delegate or share ownership across teams, and align expectations with their bosses—shifting from doing everything themselves to ensuring the right work gets done by the right people.
How to Spark—and Steer—Disruptive Innovation
Too many leaders wait until disruption becomes obvious. By then, it’s too late. In this HBR Executive Masterclass, Scott Anthony reveals how great innovators create transformative change by acting early, experimenting fast, and persevering through failure. He shares five learnable skills that leaders can practice to help them prepare for disruption—and use it to their advantage.
How to Coach Hyperenergetic Executives
Many high-performing executives operate like caffeinated squirrels—hyper-driven, fast-moving, and constantly generating ideas—but their unchecked energy can create chaos, dilute strategy, and exhaust teams. While this intensity often looks like leadership, it can become a liability without structure. The most effective leaders don’t suppress this energy—they channel it, using intentional pauses, clarity standards, and energy-aware practices to ensure that speed serves strategy, not sabotages it.
Use Design Thinking to Navigate Ambiguity
It’s safe to assume that accelerated change is here to stay. At the core of today’s frequent disruptions is ambiguity: situations where the available information is incomplete, contradictory, or constantly shifting, and clear answers are impossible. Navigating ambiguity requires a new skillset—one that leans into our humanity rather than bypasses it. Unlike machines, we bring a biological response to change. And that response, if understood and harnessed, can become a powerful advantage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.