Harvard Business Review September/October 2022

I BEGAN MY CAREER in newsrooms, which tend to be distrustful places. Journalists are trained to view leaders skeptically and to ask hard questions. In recent years that attitude has become the norm in many organizations across society. In the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, just 42% of respondents expressed trust in government leaders and 49% in CEOs—with 63% contending that business leaders “are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false.” When workers don’t trust leaders or colleagues, bad things happen in companies. It doesn’t have to be this way. In his article “Don’t Let Cynicism Undermine Your Workplace,” the Stanford professor Jamil Zaki describes the factors (including misguided management practices) that cause cynicism to grow and offers specific steps leaders can take to quell it. The…

Tina Opie, an associate professor at Babson College, focuses her research on dismantling systemic inequities by challenging people’s assumptions around race, gender, and power. An article in this issue by Opie and Beth Livingston, based on their book Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), demonstrates how collective action toward equity benefits people from both power-dominant and historically marginalized groups. “We must move beyond performative allyship and join together in Shared Sisterhood,” Opie says. 80 Dig, Bridge, Collectively Act Since stepping down as dean of the Wharton School, in 2014, marketing professor Tom Robertson has headed its Baker Retailing Center. “Retail has been a passion of mine since my early days working in supermarkets and men’s clothing stores,” he says.…

MORE THAN 70% of the Fortune 500 companies offer some form of mentoring to their employees, hoping to boost performance and bolster retention, among other things. However, hard evidence of firms’ accruing those benefits has been scarce. New research finds that mentorship programs can indeed produce valuable gains—for employees and their firms—but only when they are mandatory. That’s because if mentoring is optional, the people most in need of it tend to decline the opportunity. The two-pronged experiment involved 603 newly hired sales reps at a U.S. inbound call center. In the first part of the study, 110 randomly selected reps were assigned to a mandatory fourweek mentorship program consisting of structured discussions with their mentors in which they shared their responses to standardized questions and obtained feedback. During their first…

With more than 180,000 employees globally, Microsoft onboards thousands of people every year. As the general manager of global talent management, Priya Priyadarshini oversees the company’s mentoring programs, including one for new hires. She recently spoke with HBR about the keys to successful mentoring. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow. How does Microsoft think about mentoring? It is deeply rooted in our growth mindset. We encourage it because it leads to mutual development for the mentor and the mentee. How does it help new hires? A few years back we conducted a study called the buddy program, in which 600 new hires were assigned a more experienced employee to help with their transition. The results were so promising that we rolled it out across the company. Having a buddy boosted productivity: Of new hires…

Professor Servátka, DEFEND YOUR RESEARCH SERVÁTKA: Deadlines motivate us to do things we might otherwise put off, but the relationship isn’t always clear-cut. For example, although a long deadline theoretically gives us more time to finish a task, it often means that we postpone it over and over until eventually we forget all about it. Indeed, only 5.5% of the people who were given a monthlong deadline returned our survey, compared with 6.6% of those who were given just a week. But people who were given no deadline had the highest response rate of all: 8.3%. And they were more likely than the others to return the survey within three days. HBR: I can see why people under a tight deadline would respond better than those with the luxury of a month.…

I WILL NEVER forget seeing my father cry. We were on the campus of Stanford University, meeting with the renowned economist W. Brian Arthur to learn more about his theory of increasing returns. I didn’t expect it to be an emotional conversation. But when my father, Ernesto, started to describe our family business, illycaffè; our industry, coffee; and his desire to see more of its returns distributed to the developing-world farmers who supplied its beans, his voice cracked and tears filled his eyes. He described his deep frustration over vast disparities in the living conditions enjoyed by the world’s consumers of coffee and those endured by its producers. He explained that our goal was to spearhead a change. At the time (this was in the 1990s), most coffee beans were still…