HBR Staff/AI
Leaders sometimes inherit an underperforming employee they cannot remove, leaving them responsible for results without the authority to address the problem. They can limit the damage by testing
Some of the most damaging performance problems have nothing to do with who you hired. They’re about members of your team you’re not allowed to remove.
Stress management|Research: Work Stress Isn’t Always About Workload
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When employees seem stressed, leaders typically blame workload and respond with the usual remedies: task redistribution, time off, time management training. But a meta-analysis of 515 studies
Amid layoffs, corporate restructuring, and role expansion (as employees try to keep up with AI outputs), your workforce is feeling stressed out. In Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report, 40% of employees worldwide said they had experienced “a lot of stress” the previous day, and 56% said they were struggling.
Read more on Stress management or related topics Organizational culture, Leadership and managing people, Risk management, Burnout and Wellness
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Thirty years ago, Ralph Larsen, then the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, was interviewed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, who quoted him in their 1996 HBR article, “Building Your Company’s Vision,” which would become the defining playbook on organizational values. “The core values embodied in our credo might be a competitive advantage,” Larsen said, “but that is not why we have them. We have them because they define for us what we stand for, and we would hold them even if they became a competitive disadvantage in certain situations.”
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When my coaching client, Chris* became chief legal counsel at a financial services firm, he didn’t anticipate how fast the workload would escalate. Within his first year, the company closed three major acquisitions back-to-back, producing an avalanche of contract reviews, compliance filings, and regulatory matters. Every time Chris tried to hand something off, his team would say, “we’re doing our best, but we’re at capacity.” He understood, but since the work still had to get done, Chris absorbed it himself. Working nights and weekends to keep up soon compromised Chris’s ability to drive the very high-level strategy he’d been tapped to lead.