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In 1965, Harvard Business Review published an article with a title that was meant to provoke: "Are Women Executives People?" It's a jarring headline six decades later, and the good news is that the outright hostility it captured has largely faded. The bad news, according to new research published this month, is more complicated — and more useful for leaders trying to actually fix things. Researchers Dwayne Whitten, Wendy R. Boswell, and Susan Oldroyd revisited the same questi

Michael Scott thought he was the world's best boss. He had the mug to prove it. Meanwhile, the staff at Dunder Mifflin spent nine seasons counting the minutes until they could leave. The joke landed because it was recognizable: nearly every viewer had worked for someone who believed they were leading well, while the people they led experienced something entirely different. That gap isn't just a sitcom premise anymore. As The Conversation recently reported, a recent Gallup sur

(What a new HBR survey gets right about the talent question underneath the AI question) A CEO and her head of people asked me to sit in on a planning session last quarter. The company's about 140 employees, growing fast, and AI had landed on the agenda the way it does at every company that size — somewhere between exciting and faintly threatening. The CEO opened with the question she'd clearly been carrying for weeks:"Do we need to go hire AI people? Everyone keeps telling me

A CEO and I were on a call with her HR director last fall. The HR director is excellent — she'd built the company's whole compliance and benefits operation from scratch, and the company had doubled in size on her watch. About thirty minutes in, the CEO said something I hear more often than you might think: "I love working with you. And I keep asking you to fix things that don't have HR answers. I don't even know what to call them. I just know they aren't getting better." The