The Hidden Driver of Workforce Polarization

Amy Bernstein

November 30, 2025

We recently published an article that’s really stuck with me. Partly because the piece examines the surprising role that moral philosophy plays in the workplace and partly because I keep seeing its surprising premise borne out.

Titled “The Hidden Driver of Workforce Polarization”, the article argues that polarization over such issues as migration, climate, reproductive rights is not actually an expression of the disagreements between the political left and right. Rather, say Namrata Goyal of Esade Business School and Krishna Savani of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, polarization is rooted deeply in the differences between moral absolutists and moral relativists. Moral absolutists come down hard against any practice they deem immoral, while moral relativists are open to exceptions to practices they deem immoral. Critically, note the authors, both absolutists and relativists sit all along the political spectrum.

Because the differences that arise from this division over such questions as sustainability policies, return-to-office rules, and corporate activism are often treated as left-versus-right problems, the corporate responses are usually ineffective. The authors encourage us use the moral lens to diagnose the trouble, shift the conversation from “who’s right” to “how we decide,” and to build decision processes that give both absolutists and relativists a fair hearing.

They also caution against three common practices when devising the response:

• Over-relying on facts and data. Absolutists rarely shift their stance when core values are at stake, and “data dumps” can backfire.
• Labeling employees politically. This short-circuits deeper understanding and can alienate both sides.
• Forcing premature compromise. Pushing for middle-ground solutions before acknowledging absolutists’ non-negotiable values often erodes trust.

Goyal and Savani argue that this approach should be a relief to leaders who’ve struggled in the past with workplace polarization. “The good news is that recognizing this divide frees leaders from a false choice,” they write. “Collaboration does not require changing people’s politics. It requires navigating the rigidity-flexibility spectrum in moral reasoning.”

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Thanks for reading,

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Are You Managing—or Teaching?

Amy Bernstein

October 31, 2025

This month I want to consider the issue of micromanagement. As leaders, we’re told not to get too involved in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day operations. If we’re too controlling, if we monitor too closely, we run the risk of destroying trust with our teams and crushing their motivation.

This all rings true to me. One the hardest things about becoming a leader was learning to pull myself out of the everyday details so that I could focus on the big-picture stuff—vision, strategy, resource allocation, and so forth. Let others think about process—right?

Maybe not.

Scott Cook, cofounder of Intuit, and Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, studied four of the world’s top-performing companies—Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota—and made a discovery. At these companies, they write in “The Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders,” the most senior leaders “spend an inordinate amount of time…architecting the day-to-day methods of execution in ways that set the standard and teach others to do work well.”

They’re not micromanaging. These leaders are teaching and modeling behaviors, Cook and Nohria write, with the goal of building “a system that performs reliably even when they’re not in the room.”

That’s a worthy goal, by any definition of leadership.

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Thanks for reading,

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The Leader’s Guide to Strategic Thinking

Amy Bernstein

September 30, 2025

We recently asked you what topics you’d like us to cover in The Leader’s Agenda, and among the answers was the request for guidance on becoming a better strategic thinker. Given that many organizations are dealing with profound challenges to their strategies right now, I can’t imagine a timelier topic. Here are a few thoughts that I hope you’ll find valuable.

First, understand what strategy really is—and what it’s not. There’re are countless explanations out there (we’ve published many of them), but the one I return to comes from Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School. He says, “Strategy is a plan to create value.” Important note: A strategy is not the same as a plan, as former Rotman dean Roger Martin has noted.

Knowing what strategy is doesn’t make you a strategic thinker, however. Strategic thinkers are characterized by their ability to take a future-focused view of their organization and the shifting context in which it operates, and they make decisions proactively to strengthen their organization’s competitive advantage. They tend to be comfortable with uncertainty and they ask smart questions.

The most successful strategic thinkers excel at certain skills and behaviors, says Rich Horwath, the founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute. In “How to Become a Better Strategic Thinker,” he lays out the areas that you should focus on developing:

1. Acumen, or how you think. This has three core components: context awareness, insight and innovation.
2. Allocation, or how you plan. This area includes how you focus resources, make decisions, and work to achieve competitive advantage.
3. Action, or what you do. The three components are collaboration, execution, and personal performance.

The bigger point here is that we can all learn to become better strategic thinkers. That’s good news for anyone working to drive a strategic transformation.

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We want to make The Leader’s Agenda as useful to you as possible, so any feedback you may have will be invaluable to us. What are your top concerns? What sort of insight would be most helpful to you? Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks for reading,

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Why Courage Is the Leadership Quality We Need Now

Amy Bernstein

August 29, 2025

This month, we’ll discuss a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: courage. In a moment as convulsive as this one, it’s tempting to proceed with caution—especially if you’re a leader whose every decision is freighted with consequence. With geopolitics, the economy, and society in a constant state of upheaval, risk aversion seems like a perfectly sensible response.

As Ranjay Gulati notes in “Now Is the Time for Courage,” under such volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions “most people feel a loss of control, triggering fear, which often leads to paralysis (the so-called freeze response) or retreat (flight).” But you can’t simply trim costs and maintain a holding pattern until the crisis passes—not if you want your organization to thrive.

In fact, crises demand audacious action. When Gulati and colleagues looked at how 4,700 public companies had navigated three recessions leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, they found that just 9% of the firms emerged from each downturn stronger than before. Why? It’s “not just because they thoughtfully cut costs,” says Gulati, “but also because they simultaneously took calculated risks to invest in growth.”

Making the decision to invest in the future at a time like this takes courage. Gulati defines courage as “a willingness to take bold, risky action to serve a purpose that you perceive to be worthy, usually in the face of an abiding fear.” That sounds daunting, especially if you believe—as Plato and Aristotle did—that bravery is an innate virtue. Gulati thinks the philosophers are wrong—and that courage is teachable. He argues that every one of us can cultivate the courage needed to lead through pandemonium and make the kinds of hard decisions that build stronger, healthier organizations—and he offers a playbook for doing so. Bravery, he writes, is a choice.

Now it’s up to us.

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We want to make The Leader’s Agenda as useful to you as possible, so any feedback you may have will be invaluable to us. What are your top concerns? What sort of insight would be most helpful to you? Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks for reading,

The post Why Courage Is the Leadership Quality We Need Now appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Leadership Attunement

Amy Bernstein

July 31, 2025

This month, we’ll look at the emerging need for leadership attunement. In a moment like this, when many of us are feeling overwhelmed—by shocks to the business, by the need to transform how we work, by the heightened anxiety of our times—it’s vital that we remember one thing: We are the ones responsible for holding the organization together.

That means that while we have to drive change, we can’t always be hard-driving. Sometimes the best leadership shows up as quiet and attentive. As coaches Lisa Zigarmi and Stella Grizont note, leaders tend to want to solve problems. When dealing with people who come to you because they’re overwhelmed or stressed out, the best approach is simply to listen. They call this response “attunement.”

“Attunement is the art of full-body, non-judgmental presence,” they write. “It’s when a leader deeply notices, actively listens, and signals to an employee: I see you. I understand you. You are safe here. Leaders who attune don’t try to change emotions—they acknowledge them.”

Attunement is particularly important now. As the authors note, Gallup finds that 52% of U.S. workers report feeling a lot of stress, 44% report feeling a lot of worry, 24% report feeling a lot of sadness, and 22% report feeling a lot of anger. They really need their leaders to see them and care. And research shows that when employees feel cared-about, they are happier, more engaged, and perform at a higher level.

That’s why attunement has become an essential leadership skill. And as with many of the other skills you’d classify under “emotional intelligence,” it’s a soft-but-powerful force for organizational cohesion and resilience.

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We want to make The Leader’s Agenda as useful to you as possible, so any feedback you may have will be invaluable to us. What are your top concerns? What sort of insight would be most helpful to you? Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks for reading,

The post Leadership Attunement appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Lead with Strength: Build Your Conflict Intelligence

Amy Bernstein

June 26, 2025

You Can’t Lead from a Defensive Crouch

Conflict may be a fact of life, but few of us really want to deal with it. It’s upsetting and stressful. It’s also inevitable in any workplace, especially now, with social and political tensions on the rise along with a generally high level of workplace exhaustion. In a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, 76% of employees said they had witnessed acts of incivility in the past month, and 13% had encountered it daily. Discord on the job costs businesses an estimated $2 billion a day in lost productivity and absenteeism. This thorny situation calls for leaders to develop a new competency: conflict intelligence, the ability to manage and resolve all types of disagreements.

Conflict intelligence can provide an antidote to today’s low levels of employee engagement and its consequences. As Peter T. Coleman, the director of Columbia’s Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, explains in HBR’s new cover story leaders with high conflict intelligence not only excel at dispute resolution but also “create workplace environments where employees feel a greater sense of satisfaction, empowerment, and well-being.” They shape organizations for the better in other ways too, fostering creative and constructive cultures where people navigate uncertainty and stress better. In other words, conflict intelligence is a critical driver of resilience and innovation, and Coleman describes seven ways that you can improve yours.

With all the strife roiling our day-to-day lives, who doesn’t feel like shutting down emotionally? But that’s not an option. To thrive, we all have to confront conflict head-on and learn how to turn it to our organizations’ advantage.

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We want to make The Leader’s Agenda as useful to you as possible, so any feedback you may have will be invaluable to us. What are your top concerns? What sort of insight would be most helpful to you? Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks for reading,

The post Lead with Strength: Build Your Conflict Intelligence appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Truth About Psychological Safety

Amy Bernstein

May 21, 2025

This month we’ll take a look at psychological safety—the concept that people can air their ideas, questions and concerns without fear of humiliation or retribution. It has long been viewed as the key to collaboration, innovation, and performance. It’s also widely misunderstood.

If you’ve ever pushed back on an idea, only to have your response labeled psychologically unsafe, then you’ve seen how misconstruing the idea can undermine its purpose. And that probably drives you a little nuts.

In the latest issue of the magazine, Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey, of Harvard Business School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health respectively, write that “as the popularity of psychological safety has grown, so too have misconceptions about it. As a result, many executives and consultants, even those who are ardent supporters of psychological safety, have become frustrated by distorted or incorrect ideas and expectations surrounding it that get in the way of progress.”

In an effort to return the concept to its original idea, the authors lay out common fallacies about psychological safety. Here are three that struck me as particularly useful:

1. Psychological safety means being nice. The authors define psychological safety as “a shared sense of permission for candor.” It’s not about avoiding argument. In fact, “when psychological safety exists, people believe that sharing hard truths is expected. It allows good debates to happen when they’re needed.”
2. Psychological safety means getting your way. Just because you’re encouraged to air your views doesn’t mean they should always prevail. Psychological safety  is about “making sure leaders or teams hear what people think. It’s not about forcing them to agree with what they hear.”
3. Psychological safety requires a trade-off with performance. As the authors write, “psychological safety and accountability are distinct dimensions. To decide which is more important is to impose a false dichotomy.”

In a moment like this, when leaders are struggling to mobilize their organizations to take on the challenges of breakneck technological change, geopolitical turbulence, social and political polarization, and so much else, a truer understanding of psychological safety is essential. It’s not about making everyone on your team feel good. It’s about creating an environment where everyone contributes their best thinking so that leaders can make the smartest decisions possible.

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We want to make The Leader’s Agenda as useful to you as possible, so any feedback you may have will be invaluable to us. What are your top concerns? What sort of insight would be most helpful to you? Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks for reading,

The post The Truth About Psychological Safety appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Navigating the Tariff Turbulence

Amy Bernstein

April 22, 2025

The issue on everyone’s mind right now is U.S.’s evolving tariff policy and its convulsive effect on trade and the markets. This month we’ll look not at the policy itself, but at the challenge of navigating its sudden shifts and reversals. How do you, as a leader, actually move your organization forward in a moment like this?

According to a recent article by Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Paul Swartz, and Martin Reeves of BCG, you start by developing a deeper understanding of the primary and secondary macroeconomic effects of tariffs, along with their plausible long-term consequences, so that you can continuously assess the impact on their markets and businesses. As they note, you have to first distinguish between the supply-side and demand-side shocks, both for the US and its trade partners.

Then consider the secondary shocks of what they call a “360° trade war.” These include:

1. Confidence: Tariffs may reduce consumer and firm confidence, leading to hesitancy in spending and investment.
2. Wealth Effects: Equity market declines post-tariff announcements could reduce wealth and consumption.
3. Monetary Policy Errors: Increased inflation and reduced growth complicate Federal Reserve decision-making, raising risks of policy missteps.
4. Competitiveness: Higher costs for imported production inputs may harm U.S. business competitiveness.
5. Additional Shocks: Financial market instability or external events (e.g., wars, pandemics) could exacerbate economic weakness.

Then think about the possible long-term impacts. For example, the tariff policy aims to reshore production to the U.S., but tariffs targeting all products risk lowering productivity if resources are diverted from high-value sectors (such as semiconductors) to lower-value ones (such as toys). Tight labor markets may limit the ability to expand domestic production without negative consequences. 

What are you supposed to do with all this? Clearly, “planning” as such is an exercise in frustration. The authors offer three recommendations: 

1. Build analytical capabilities: Develop tools to monitor and respond to evolving tariff policies rather than relying on static masterplans.
2. Revisit assumptions regularly: Adapt strategies as trade dynamics evolve.
3. Think in multiple timescales: Balance short-term tactical responses with long-term strategic planning. 

Given that the radical instability we’re seeing now could last for quite a which, it’s essential to learn how to manage it and balance near-term urgency with long-term health. As the authors write, “The next few quarters shouldn’t matter more than the next decade.”

Thanks for reading,

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The AI Imperative: Strategy, Adoption, and Upskilling for the Future

Amy Bernstein

March 18, 2025

This month, we’ll look at one of the most urgent challenges facing senior leaders: transforming their operations and organizations to compete in the age of artificial intelligence. Even as new tools continue to emerge (agentic AI being the latest), it’s absolutely essential to move now on AI. The sense of urgency here is real: Nearly three quarters of the executives responding to a recent PWC survey say they’re already looking at how generative AI will reshape their business models.

As with any daunting challenge, the way to handle this one is to break it down into its component questions. How should you think about strategy? How do you win over skeptical employees? And how do you ensure that the workforce has the proper skills to tap into AI’s power? Let’s take them one by one.

Thinking about strategy: To understand how AI can transform the organization, it’s helpful to take a crawl-walk-run approach. Microsoft exec Christopher Young recommends starting by experimenting—deploying for productivity, then transforming experiences, and then trying to build new things. Throughout this process, the organization should prioritize security and responsible use. (Here’s a good checklist.)

Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the possibilities and the challenges they present to your organization, it’s time to consider your business and operating models—how you create, capture, and deliver value. Chris Young and Harvard Business School professor Andy Wu lay out the strategic tradeoffs that organizations of all stripes need to confront as they seek to compete now and in the future.

One last note on strategy—Jay Barney of the University of Utah and Martin Reeves of BCG make a compelling argument that AI won’t give you a new sustainable competitive advantage; rather, using it can amplify the ones you already have.

Winning over skeptics: “The effective deployment of generative AI will depend less on technological capability than on human adaptability,” notes Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of University College London and Columbia. His recommendations begin with understanding the reasons for resistance, being honest about how adopting AI will really affect employees, and selling your workforce on the individual and strategic benefits of AI.

In reshaping your organization’s culture to embrace AI, it’s important to make AI tools and processes available to all your employees. David De Cremer of Northeastern University offers an approach that starts with helping managers build their own confidence with AI so that they can communicate its potential to their teams and reduce the intimidation they may feel. He also recommends plenty of collaboration between tech and non-tech teams to bring everyone along, and open communication about the process, which may include venting and other expressions of frustration or fear. Finally, as your org’s implementation starts to transform your business, reward employees for their efforts. As De Cremer says, “If they don’t feel valued and respected, your transformation attempt will certainly fail.”

Upskilling and reskilling: Tech skills need regular updating, and that’s truer now than ever. “The average half-life of skills is now less than five years, and in some tech fields it’s as low as two and a half years,” say experts from HBS and BCG. They looked at 40 organizations across the globe that are investing heavily in reskilling programs to understand how the best of them work. The researchers identified five paradigm shifts in organizational approach that are proving critical to the program’s success: (1) Reskilling is a strategic imperative. (2) It is the responsibility of every leader and manager. (3) It is a change-management initiative. (4) Employees want to reskill—when it makes sense. (5) It takes a village, meaning that the most effective programs reach across organizations, industries, and sectors. 

But technical skills alone won’t guarantee success. To achieve real and lasting benefits, we all need to develop the skills to use them effectively. H. James Wilson and Paul Daugherty of Accenture point to three kinds of “fusion skills” that are absolutely essential: 1. Intelligent interrogation, or the art and science of prompting large language models to get the best, most useful results; 2. Judgment integration, or the ability to bring in expertise and ethics to make AI’s output more reliable and trustworthy; and 3. reciprocal apprenticing, the know-how to train your gen AI on your organization’s specific business needs and context to equip it to tackle ever more sophisticated challenges.

To win with AI—and to be clear, you really won’t be able to win without it—you have to move forward now. As with every monumental transformation, you must have a solid strategy, you have to gain buy-in from your team, and you have to equip them to bring your strategy to life.

Thanks for reading,

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Navigating Uncertainty: Thriving in the Most VUCA of VUCA Environments

Amy Bernstein

February 11, 2025

It’s never been harder to lead an organization. The level of turbulence and uncertainty across every arena of business is downright daunting—and this was true before the blizzard of Executive Orders issuing from the White House. The question for corporate leaders is how to keep the organization on track today and ensure that it continues to innovate and transform itself to compete in the future.

We can take some cues from the U.S. military, which knows a thing or two about operating in the fog of war (and which gave us the term VUCA more than 30 years ago). Three researchers, including two with decades of experience training military leaders, offer a well-evidenced set of techniques that will build your capacity to make solid decisions when you have little visibility into future.

It all starts by accepting that decision-making doesn’t always improve with more data. “When life is stable and transparent, more data leads to better decisions,” the authors write. “But when life turns choppy or murky, data gets fragile and elusive. More data is not an option—and to seek it produces passivity, mission creep, and hesitation.” To manage all that, they urge leaders to rethink the way they ask questions; to move beyond “Plan B” thinking, which is almost always rooted in the same assumptions as “Plan A”; and to pay attention to their own emotions in order to gauge true urgency. (Check out their article for more detail on how to do all this.)

Business decisions are only part of the challenge though. How do you keep your employees engaged and motivated? Leadership consultant Timothy Clark notes that “while the leader has little to no control over the external competitive environment, they have astonishing influence over the internal performance environment, including employee engagement, morale, and productivity.” He advises leaders to:

1. Focus on building trust by countering “the extreme uncertainty of the environment with the extreme predictability of their own behavior.” Your commitment to your own character and competence will inspire people to make the extra effort.

2. Articulate an inspiring vision of the future. “In times of extreme uncertainty, a vision gives people lasting motivation beyond the survival instinct to perform work and absorb stress.”

3. Use honesty and transparency as a counterweight to uncertainty. “There is nothing worse than a leader attempting to create false certainty with rhetoric that doesn’t match reality.”

4. Frame uncertainty as an opportunity. Doing this well can “decouple fear from uncertainty and replaced it with confidence, curiosity, and anticipation.”

These tactics and approaches can help keep your organization focused on its strategic goals now and in the future. More to the point, we’re operating in a world of continuous shock and disruption; the ability not only to cope with change but to thrive in it has become a vitally important skill—one that we all need to cultivate for ourselves and our teams as we seek to futureproof our organizations.

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We want to make The Leader’s Agenda as useful to you as possible, so any feedback you may have will be invaluable to us. What are your top concerns? What sort of insight would be most helpful to you? Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks for reading,

The post Navigating Uncertainty: Thriving in the Most VUCA of VUCA Environments appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.