HBR On Leadership

Most of us think of mentoring a colleague as a one-way street—a gift of professional guidance and advice. But Sylvia Ann Hewlett says sponsorship needs to be a reciprocal relationship.

“[T]he younger person has to display a great deal of value. And oftentimes the senior person is looking for a value add, a skill or an experience in the younger person that they don’t have themselves,” she explains...

When Rosalind Fox took over as manager of John Deere’s largest factory in Des Moines, Iowa, the plant employed 1,600 workers and included four major product lines. It was far bigger and more complex than the factory she’d been managing in North Carolina before her promotion. She had to shift from being a more operational, tactical manager to a more strategic role.

But Fox was also the first Black female manager at the Iowa factory, and her employees there were mostly white men...

Management decisions almost always involve uncertainty. But what if you just can’t get the facts you need—or if your colleagues disagree about what you should decide?

Harvard Business School professor Joseph Badaracco calls these “gray area problems.” He offers a framework for addressing these problems in his book, Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work.

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Delegating is an essential part of leadership. Without it, how can you rise above the tactical grind and focus on strategic thinking?

But leadership coach Deborah Grayson Riegel says delegating effectively is harder than it may seem.

“People delegate poorly defined tasks to other people where they’re not clear of the expectation. They’re not clear on the goal. They’re not clear on what success would look like, and they pass that on,” she explains...

Some managers give meaningless positive feedback. Others are unreasonably critical. But Kim Scott, cofounder of the executive coaching firm Radical Candor, says good leaders can give honest feedback in the moment—as long as it’s rooted in a strong relationship.

“You want to show that you care personally,” she tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch. “Your job as a leader is to paint a picture of what success looks like...

Captain Michael Davidson, of the container ship SS El Faro, was determined to make his trip on time. But a hurricane was approaching, and Davidson and his fellow officers had to plot a new course to avoid the storm, in the face of conflicting weather reports from multiple sources and differing opinions among the officers about what to do. Over the 36-hour voyage, tensions rose as the ship got closer and closer to the storm.

And there were other factors compounding the challenge...

How do you define authenticity, as a leader? If you associate it with what feels comfortable, you may be holding yourself back.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, says that if you want to grow as a leader, you must leave your comfort zone and try new behaviors. Eventually, she says, you’ll arrive at a more authentic version of yourself...

Are you struggling to give and receive feedback at work? Executive coach and organizational consultant Ben Dattner says giving good feedback is really about how you deliver it.

“I think what good bosses do is they let their employees know…the reason I’m giving you this feedback is to help you be more successful,” he tells Dear HBR hosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn. “This is not adversarial...

Generational differences may get laughs online. (Remember “OK boomer”?) But in the workplace, productivity can suffer when older and younger workers struggle to communicate and find common ground.

Mimi Nicklin, a business coach and advertising executive, argues that older managers should spend less time forcing their Millennial and Gen Z employees to conform to company culture and more time listening.

But Nicklin says listening isn’t enough...

Fabricio Bloisi was just 21 years old when he founded Movile as a small start-up in a garage, in the late 1990s. At the time, the company specialized in building text messaging apps and selling them to telecom providers in Brazil.

The company is now a global technology player, serving more than more than 150 million mobile customers worldwide...