Organizations with a culture of “niceness” can undermine performance when leaders prioritize harmony and comfort over candor, accountability, and results. Shifting toward a more rigorous culture requires senior leaders to model and reward candid feedback, create measurable successes that demonstrate that tougher choices improve performance, and redesign operating processes like review meetings and governance routines so that they encourage substantive debate rather than polite approval.

Every strategy, decision, and transformation begins as a conversation. Yet leaders rarely think intentionally about how those conversations unfold. The highest-performing teams steward conversation through three elements—goals, roles, and soul—creating greater clarity, stronger trust, and better decisions.

AI alignment requires more than safer models. See why people leaders must bring clear objectives, context, and governance to how AI is deployed at work.

Do you feel as if you’re in the middle of too-frequent change? I do. Even though I only have manageable and relatively small projects, I can’t quite see around the various corners to predict what I need to do and when. Because we have frequent change, I often need to adapt to the current circumstances.

Google’s own data on AI at work shows usage stays shallow, with gains concentrated among experienced workers rather than juniors.

AI lets engineers ship solo now, so staff+ engineers must deliberately rebuild the collaboration and culture that used to happen automatically.

Tokenmaxxing promised a shortcut to measuring AI productivity, but firms quickly killed their leaderboards once more tokens didn’t mean better work.