Harvard Business Review

Many managers only begin advocating for their employees when they’re afraid of losing them or when promotion cycles roll around. It’s a reactive approach, and it often comes too late, with managers scrambling to highlight their team members’ strengths only to compete with dozens of others doing the same. The role of a manager as an advocate goes far beyond checking boxes at promotion time. Advocacy is about continuously championing your team’s growth by recognizing their contributions, ensuring their efforts are relevant to the organization’s goals, and making their value visible to key stakeholders. Make advocacy an ongoing priority, and you’ll see the ripple effects: stronger engagement, higher performance, and a team ready to take on new challenges. In the process, you’ll elevate your own leadership brand, setting yourself apart as a manager who builds careers and drives results.

Who doesn’t appreciate the acknowledgment of their efforts and wins, or like to impress others occasionally? It’s equally important to cultivate internal validation: a deeper sense of self-worth that is free from the wavering opinions of others and the momentary dopamine hit of a gold star. Developing internal validation isn’t about cultivating baseless confidence or inflating your ego. Rather, it’s about counterbalancing common workplace features that, left unchecked, can inadvertently undermine your confidence, self-esteem, and well-being. In this article, the author shares four strategies to balance your perspective and stay self-assured despite external pressures and challenging work environments.

As the demands of work and personal life blur in an era of hyperconnectivity and hustle culture, hurry sickness — characterized by behaviors and emotions like impatience, chronic rushing, and a constant sense of time scarcity — is more insidious than ever, quietly sabotaging productivity, relationships, and health. If you find yourself with an urgent need to slow down, your health, your teams, the people you serve through your work, and your loved ones will thank you for taking steps to free yourself from hurry sickness. It’s not about how fast you go; it’s about how well you use the time you have.

A conversation with Cornell’s Dr. Sunita Sah on pushing back effectively.

Having clear and consistent communication with your manager is essential to delivering strong results. You need to know their expectations, and they need to have insight into your work to give useful feedback and help you grow. That’s why working with a manager who is too hands-off can be challenging, especially for people in remote environments. If you find yourself in this situation, the first way to improve the relationship is to get clear on your and your manager’s work styles. Once you each understand how the other prefers to communicate and solve problems, you can set up a system that works for you both. You should also advocate for a weekly one-on-one meeting with your boss to make sure you’re aligned on goals. Lastly, it’s in your benefit to network with your manager’s peers. Being connected to other leaders in the company will give you access to cross-departmental opportunities, and make your work more visible throughout the organization.

Business leaders often see collective bargaining agreements as the be-all and end-all of management’s relationship with unions. But frontline workers are closer to day-to-day operations than management, and know where to solve common problems. Leaders should instead focus on fostering ongoing partnerships with workers and union members through a formal labor-management partnership, which can lead to significant improvements in organizational performance and worker engagement. Drawing from the documented improved outcomes and proven best practices from a labor-management partnership created at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, organizations can create effective labor-management partnerships with the following steps: Introduce the idea collaboratively. Build understanding and trust. Set up infrastructure and choose initial projects. Identify and invest in skills and leadership. When bad things happen, look at the systemic issues. Pace for a marathon, not a sprint.

Research shows that disengaging from our jobs can impact our mental health, motivation, stress levels, responsiveness, and even cognitive function. Worse, withdrawal is self-perpetuating, triggering a troubling cycle that can be difficult to break. If you’re looking to re-engage at work in the new year, incorporating more purposeful interactions into your workday can help. These can interrupt the withdrawal spiral, decreasing loneliness and bringing back your energy, creativity, and sense of purpose. Five small actions can help you build meaningful connections throughout your day: 1) Initiate or join a collaborative project; 2) Host a small brainstorming session; 3) Seek out peer input; 4) Step away from your desk; and 5) Seek out community.

If you’re an aspiring leader, this episode is for you.

Confronting direct reports about performance issues can feel overwhelming, especially for first-time managers, who may worry that sharing critical feedback could damage their relationship with the employee. But performance conversations, especially where you need to give critical feedback, don’t have to be scary. There are a few common mistakes to avoid when giving critical feedback. One of the biggest mistakes is avoiding the conversation or waiting too long to have it. Many new managers also fail to properly prepare before their performance discussions. If there are tasks, projects, or skills at which your employee is falling short, you should also be able to give them a clear explanation of why or where they haven’t met your expectations. Some also end up making the issue about the person instead of focusing on the work itself. Being a great people manager is not about being a friend or being liked by everyone all the time — it’s about being a manager who cares about their employees and helps them get their job done.

When a coworker isn’t pulling their weight — or is flat-out unreliable — it can feel frustrating and like you’re not in control. But even though it isn’t ideal, there are ways to work around an unreliable colleague and protect yourself by focusing on what you can control and letting go of what you can’t. Early-career employees in this position can try five tips: Document your work; ask how can you leverage this person’s strengths; don’t complain or gossip, but enlist help; ask what you can learn; and review past experiences to find a way forward.

New research finds that employers overestimate how informed employees feel when they agree to policies, contracts, and even extra tasks at work. This miscalculation can have direct costs for organizations in terms of employee disengagement and turnover. The researchers argue that obtaining true informed consent requires more than simply locking in a signature on a form or a verbal agreement, and that organizations willing to prioritize transparency and clarity over mere compliance will cultivate a workforce that feels respected, trusted, and engaged.

Employees with children have to make calculated decisions about who they interact with, and when, in order to both produce high-quality work and make time for caregiving. Research shows they tend to do this by avoiding interactions, like turning down invites to lunch; hiding from coworkers by working at home or even sneaking off to the bathroom at a time when everyone else is in a work meeting; organizing interactions strategically by booking meetings back-to-back so that they can promptly end an earlier meeting; and focusing interactions by coming to meetings with set agendas and redirecting conversation from talk of non-work activities. These strategies work, but they can come at a cost: some parents do not feel they have many close friends at work, do not feel a sense of belonging, and are out of the loop on workplace gossip. This can have professional and team ramifications, which both managers and parents can remedy in different ways.

Each yeah, HBR produces dozens of videos that cover a wide array of business and work topics, ranging from research-based business theory, to wisdom from top performers in their fields, to nitty-gritty tactics for surviving another day in an imperfect world of work. We took a look at our 10 most popular videos made in 2024, and noticed a couple themes emerging. Number one was that viewers were seeking ways to be happy, or at least happier, at work. The other was around how to be a better communicator. Here’s a wrap-up of our best and most popular videos that covered these two themes.

The top 10 most-read articles from HBR in 2024 range in topics, including answering a tricky interview question, A/B testing hybrid work arrangements, the new rules of executive presence, and … leadership lessons from retired quarterback Tom Brady.

Traditional approaches to contract negotiation, heavily focused on risk mitigation, are increasingly misaligned with business needs. New research shows that while companies spend considerable time haggling over legal protections, the most common sources of disagreement during contract execution are practical issues like pricing, scope, and delivery. The path forward requires a fundamental shift in how we approach negotiations. This isn’t about abandoning risk management — it’s about recognizing that the best risk management strategy is often creating clear, practical agreements focused on mutual success. Organizations that make this shift are seeing tangible benefits: faster negotiations, better acceptance rates, and most importantly, more successful business relationships.