HBR On Leadership

HBR On Leadership

Leadership isn’t a trait, it’s a set of skills. Whether you’re managing up or motivating a team, HBR On Leadership is your destination for insights and inspiration from the world’s top leadership practitioners and experts. Every Wednesday, the editors at the Harvard Business Review hand-picked conversations and case studies with global business leaders, management experts, academics, from across HBR to unlock the best in those around you.

Episodes

Is the C-Suite Right for You?

July 16, 2025 • 50 mins
Lots of people’s career timelines go something like this: graduate, get a job, get promoted, and keep climbing until you reach the top. Somewhere along the way, they go on autopilot—accepting each new role as it comes, without much thought. And before they know it, they’re positioned for the C-suite.


This is exactly what happened to Sarah, a woman who’s on the cusp of a C-level role. But like many leaders, she’s reached...

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How to Succeed in Your Career When Change Is a Constant

July 9, 2025 • 29 mins
Disruption and transformation are the new normal in nearly every industry. So how do you stay ahead of the curve? Over the past four decades, Bonnie Hammer successfully adapted to massive changes in the media industry, rising from production assistant to leadership roles in broadcast, cable, and streaming. As the former vice chair of NBCUniversal, she has advice on how to get noticed, acquire the right skillsets, make smar...

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The Right Way to Step Down as CEO

July 2, 2025 • 28 mins
When news breaks of a CEO succession, much of the attention is given to the new leader and how they will change the company. But new research shows that the leave-taking process of the outgoing chief executive is often mishandled, with negative impacts on succession and the organization. Rebecca Slan Jerusalim, an executive director at Russell Reynolds Associates, and Navio Kwok, a leadership advisor at RRA, say that board...

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Why Profits Follow Purpose

June 25, 2025 • 30 mins
This month, we're highlighting some of the best conversations from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit held in April. In today’s episode, Anish Shah, CEO of Mahindra Group, one of India's largest and most prominent conglomerates, discusses the importance of purpose in driving profit. Shah provides examples of Mahindra's positive impact on communities. And he shares his thoughts on navigating the current political and business environmen...
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How Nonprofits Can Navigate Uncertainty

June 18, 2025 • 32 mins
This month, we're highlighting some of the best conversations from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit held in April. In this episode, Janti Soeripto, CEO of Save the Children US, shares how the organization navigates overlapping global crises—from pandemics to war—while staying focused on its core mission: ensuring children survive and thrive. With 24,000 staff members working across 115 countries, Save the Children provides health, ed...
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Customer-Obsessed Innovation

June 11, 2025 • 34 mins
This month, we're highlighting some of the best conversations from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit held in April. In this episode, David Risher, CEO of Lyft, shares how he’s driving a turnaround at the rideshare company by anchoring everything in customer obsession. Since Risher took the wheel in 2023, Lyft reached record bookings and a 31% increase in annual revenue and its first full year of profitability. Risher shares how his ow...
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Building an AI-Powered, Talent-Friendly Organization

June 4, 2025 • 28 mins
Over the next four weeks, we're highlighting some of the best conversations from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit held in April. In this episode, Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group, shares her leadership approach to scaling one of the world’s largest online travel companies. From pioneering the use of AI in customer experience and internal operations to reimagining hybrid work and gender diversity, she shares how she's steering a global...
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Don’t Just Coach Your Employees—Teach Them

May 28, 2025 • 19 mins
Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, encourages leaders to approach their direct reports like teachers. As Finkelstein explains, being a teacher-leader means continually meeting face to face with employees to communicate lessons about professionalism, points of craft, and life. He says it’s easy to try and that teaching is one of the best ways to motivate people and impr...
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How to Resolve Team Conflict

May 21, 2025 • 41 mins
People management consists of a fair amount of mediation and diplomacy, and you can’t expect to get the hang of it right away. You’re in the middle of a lot now. Initiating difficult conversations, and then getting all the way through them, takes planning and practice (and sometimes even a breather). Holding tension takes restraint.

Amy Bernstein and Kelsey Alpaio interview Amy Gallo about the types of conflict that new ma...

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The Best Leaders Ask the Right Questions

May 14, 2025 • 27 mins
Few leaders have been trained to ask great questions. That might explain why they tend to be good at certain kinds of questions, and less effective at other kinds. Unfortunately, that hurts their ability to pursue strategic priorities. Arnaud Chevallier, strategy professor at IMD Business School, explains how leaders can break out of that rut and systematically ask five kinds of questions: investigative, speculative, produ...

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How to Fix Dysfunctional Team Dynamics

May 7, 2025 • 31 mins
Is your teamwork not working? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. They talk through what to do when your team isn’t communicating, doesn’t respect its ...

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How to Bring Out the Best in Your Team

April 30, 2025 • 27 mins
Frances Frei, professor at Harvard Business School, says that trust, empathy—and even a bit of tough love—are all essential ingredients to strong leadership in today’s world. Successful managers focus on the effect they have on others, not themselves. They also define a strategy and create a culture that drives employee behavior in their absence. Frei is the coauthor, along with Anne Morriss, of the book Unleashed: The Una...

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When Over-Collaboration Leads to Indecision

April 23, 2025 • 23 mins
Being too collaborative can actually hold you back at work, argues leadership coach Rebecca Shambaugh. Instead of showing how well you build consensus and work with others, it can look like indecision or failure to prioritize. She explains what to do if you over-collaborate, how to manage someone who does, and offers some advice for women—whose bosses are more likely to see them as overly consensus-driven. Shambaugh is the...

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How—and When—to Adapt Your Leadership Style

April 16, 2025 • 12 mins
In the past, executives were usually taught to practice command-and-control leadership. Today they’re often advised to be nimbler, more adaptive, and less controlling. The truth is that most executives need to be able to move back and forth between those two leadership styles. IMD leadership professor and social psychologist Jennifer Jordan offers tactics for navigating these tensions.

Key episode topics include: leadershi...

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When One of Your Employees Is Working Against You

April 9, 2025 • 33 mins
Do you have an employee working against you? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Adrian Gostick, an executive coach and the coauthor of Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results. They talk through what to do when your direct report is creating problems only to fix them, one team member is h...

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Why Your Frontline Employee Turnover Is High

April 2, 2025 • 26 mins
Many people blame the shortage of low-wage workers on the enduring impact of the pandemic. But management professor Joseph Fuller and senior researcher Manjari Raman of Harvard Business School say that the real reason has been long in the making. Their studies show that companies view low-wage workers as people who will be in the job only for a short time. Instead, the researchers find that these employees are loyal and wa...

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How to Prepare For—and Lead Through—a Crisis

March 26, 2025 • 25 mins
Over her career, Simmons University President Lynn Perry Wooten has studied crisis leadership and managing uncertainty. Her most recent book, The Prepared Leader, breaks down successful strategies for navigating crises—whether it’s a pandemic or a viral customer complaint. She taught leaders how to deal with these predicaments during a master class at HBR’s Future of Business C...

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How to Earn Respect as a First-Time Manager

March 19, 2025 • 38 mins
Getting taken seriously as a new manager is challenging for anyone. You can go from being friends with your peers to suddenly being their boss. It’s easy to make missteps, like playing the part too much—acting the way you think a manager is supposed to act. On the other hand, you may feel you have nothing to offer your direct reports, some of whom may have more experience than you. You may even fall back too much on what y...

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Helena Rubinstein: A Pioneer of the Modern Beauty Industry

March 12, 2025 • 23 mins
In the early 20th century, Helena Rubinstein defied gender, class, and cultural expectations to become one of the first pioneers of the modern beauty industry. Today, her namesake luxury cosmetics brand is worth more than one billion dollars. Harvard Business School professor Geoff Jones wrote a case study about the visionary leader. He explored her journey—and the lasting impact she made on global beauty standards—on Cold...

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How CEOs Make or Break Sales

March 5, 2025 • 26 mins
A CEO's involvement in B2B sales deals, while often well-intentioned, can sometimes backfire.

INSEAD marketing professor Christoph Senn has spent years studying the role top leaders play in B2B relationships. In this episode, he shares the five archetypes of CEO behavior when it comes to sales, which ones are the most effective in closing a deal, and where they fall short.

You’ll learn what to do if your CEO is either ove...

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