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The traditional way companies think about regulatory penalties is almost entirely financial. Analysts model the balance-sheet impact. Legal teams assess appeal options. Communications drafts a statement. The penalty gets absorbed, the stock recovers, and the organization moves on. The implicit assumption is that the workforce will do the same.
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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.
Illustration by Nathan St. John
Marcus had been building the case for six months. The proposed regional expansion made strategic sense, the market data supported it, and leadership had given the green light. He called the team together and laid out the plan. Two days later, an anonymous email arrived with a forwarded document and no explanation. Three pages. Someone had asked an AI tool to make the strongest case for the expansion and the strongest case against it.
Colin Anderson/Stocksy
Linus Arauz operates 10 points of sale across two large airports and has responsibilities that extend to nearly 100 food and non-food retail locations across several airport programs. Some of those locations have no staff at all. Travelers simply walk up and take whatever they want off the shelf—a sandwich, a bottle of water. They’re supposed to pay, but no one is there to ensure that they do.
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
Illustration by Alex Robbins
Imagine a photographer reviewing a concept image for an advertising campaign that the client has already approved. He notices a problem: The man in the image is wearing a baseball cap that casts his face in shadow, but his eyes are clearly lit, showing his intense stare into the camera. The photographer’s trained eye tells him immediately that that lighting is impossible. No real-world set up could produce it. The image had been created by a senior creative using gen AI, and the client had loved it. Now the production team has been tasked with recreating—with cameras and human actors—something that reality can’t match.
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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.
In the September 14th edition of The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett explores how leaders can calibrate their strategic ambition, finding the right balance between goals
Crafting and executing strategy is both the most routine part of running a business and one of the hardest things to get right. Among the many ways strategic decision-making can trip up leaders is a question raised by a new article: