HBR On Leadership

Hosted by Harvard Business Review

Business Management Education

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Episodes

165

Latest episode

Jun 2026

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About the show

Leadership isn’t just a personality trait, it’s a set of skills that you can build. Whether you’re managing up or motivating a team, HBR On Leadership is your destination for insights and inspiration from the world’s top leadership practitioners and experts. Every Wednesday, the editors at the Harvard Business Review hand-picked case studies and conversations with global business leaders, management experts, academics, from across HBR to help you unlock the best in those around you.

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60 recent

June 11, 2026Episode 16525 min

How to Actually Finish What You Need to Get Done

There are many productivity tools and tactics that promise to help you make the most of your workday. But there is one simple practice that’s consistently been shown to be effective: timeboxing. Timeboxing is about merging your to-do list with your calendar, reserving time each day for each task you want to get done, and then truly focusing on that one thing at a time. The return on merging your to-do list with your calendar is higher productivity, better collaboration, and less distraction, explains entrepreneur and author Marc Zao-Sanders. He shares how to try the method yourself and how your team and organization can also benefit from it. Zao-Sanders is the author of the book Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time.

June 3, 2026Episode 16425 min

How to Cultivate Your “Personal Power” as a Leader

We all know the stereotypes of leaders who use charisma, manipulation, domineering behavior, or their status in the hierarchy to exert control. But there is another type of leader whose power isn’t necessarily related to their position on the org chart. Chris Lipp has spent years studying people who’ve developed this “personal power” that is rooted in their internal values. Lipp is a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, an executive coach, and the author of the book The Science of Personal Power. He’s investigated where this second type of power comes from and how to tap into it using some simple strategies and tools.

May 27, 2026Episode 16329 min

How Shake Shack Balanced Digitalization with Its Hospitality Ethos

Shake Shack started in 2001 as a hot dog cart in New York City’s Madison Square Park. It’s now a global fast-casual restaurant chain renowned for both quality and hospitality. In 2024, following a rapid rollout of digital tools like kiosks and mobile ordering, Chief Growth Officer Steph So found herself asking, had Shake Shack built a model that could truly scale, or one that still needed work? Harvard Business School professor Chris Stanton joins So and host Brian Kenny to discuss the case “Shake Shack’s Playbook for the Digital Era.” Together, they explore what it means to scale hospitality in a tech-driven industry and how Shake Shack is balancing brand values, digital adoption, and the evolving role of its frontline team.

May 20, 2026Episode 16229 min

Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea

Leaders are often called upon to pitch ideas to senior management about how to change the way their company does business. Perhaps you have proposed an improvement to an existing process, a new product, a technological tool, or a way to break into a different market entirely—with mixed results. In this conversation, Sue Ashford, professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and Ellen Bailey, former vice president of business and culture transformation at Harvard Business Publishing, give suggestions for framing those ideas so that executives buy into them, including the research findings they keep in mind, questions they ask themselves and others when vetting an idea, and what they learned from the times they fell short.

May 13, 2026Episode 16129 min

Redefining What Efficiency Means in the Age of AI

What is the real definition of efficiency in a world powered by AI? What if it was quality, not quantity? Neuroscientist Mithu Storoni has researched how and when our brains are the most creative and truly productive at knowledge work. In this conversation, she shares how we can train our brains to be more effective at doing work that really matters. She explains how our brains tackle different kinds of work, how we can better schedule our days to align with those states of mind, and what this all means for leaders and organizations. Storoni is the author of the book "Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work".

May 7, 2026Episode 16034 min

Communicating with Confidence When You’re Under Pressure

Communicating clearly sets you up to have the leadership impact and influence you need to drive change. But what if you’re running on empty? Expressing your ideas and giving direction when you’re sleep-deprived, burned out, or simply overwhelmed can feel nearly impossible. So, what helps? Leadership development coach Muriel Wilkins, author of Leadership Unblocked and host of the podcast Coaching Real Leaders, talks us through communication techniques that meet you where you’re at mentally and emotionally so that you can rise to the moment (even when you’re worried you can’t).

April 29, 2026Episode 15925 min

Build Your Resilience in the Face of Tough Change

Difficult change is inevitable, but few of us have the skills to it navigate well. Dr. Maya Shankar, cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, shares ideas that can leaders understand, react, reframe, and better adapt to change in life or work. She offers evidence-based strategies for how leaders can build resilience in the face of personal, organizational, and technological upheaval while also finding paths to growth and learning. Shankar is author of the book The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.

April 22, 2026Episode 15838 min

Making the Shift from Individual Contributor to Leader

Once you’ve committed to a leadership role—whether formally or informally—getting everyone else at work to buy in requires relationship management. The steps to transition from individual contributor to leader can seem daunting, especially when so many aspects of work and the world are in a constant state of flux. How do you successfully shift the role you’re playing on your team? What sorts of conversations help clear the way? Is this transformation harder to make if you work remotely? To address these questions and more, we revisit a 2019 Women at Work interview with leadership development experts Amy Jen Su and Muriel M. Wilkins.

April 15, 2026Episode 15731 min

Scaling a Business Beyond the Family Playbook

Johnson Security Bureau is one of the oldest Black-owned security firms in the United States, providing services to New York-area banks, public works, hospitals, transportation facilities, and other industries. In order to grow the business, CEO Jessica Johnson-Cope considered partnering with security firms in other states, something that threatened to put some of the company’s founding priorities on the back burner. In this conversation with host Brian Kenny, Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Henry McGee and CEO Jessica Johnson-Cope discuss the leadership dilemmas the heart of the case “Johnson Security Bureau: Building Multigenerational Success.”

April 8, 2026Episode 15623 min

Is Your Company Suffering from Initiative Overload?

Most organizations struggle to kill initiatives, even those that no longer support their strategy. Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins, consultants at Genesis Advisers, explore the problem of initiative overload and how it can trickle down to employeeds who are already dealing with more projects than they can handle or do well. They offer practical tips on how to truly prioritize your company’s most important initiatives—or risk losing top talent. Hollister and Watkins are the authors of the 2018 HBR article “Too Many Projects.”