Harvard Business Review: Recommended Articles for People Managers and Leaders

I’ve read >500 Harvard Business Review articles in my lifetime. While I strongly recommend subscribing to the site, it would be unrealistic to expect every reader would want to do so, or that you would want to read all of my >75 article recommendations. I am therefore curating my recommendations into 10-20 articles for different employee groups. This final HBR post is for People Managers and Leaders.

Important: I strongly recommend that you also read the post for HR Employees here (since I have removed most overlapping recommendations).

How did I choose these articles? 

I reviewed the 80ish HBR articles that I’ve read that actually inspired real improvements in my own work, and then I filtered for those that specifically impacted People Management and Leadership Development programming. I then loosely organized them into 5 topic areas.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about how to translate an article into concrete leadership/management strategy or programming guidance. Please enjoy.

Topics: Self-Management and Leadership Style

1. How Managers Become Leaders

2. As Your Team Gets Bigger, Your Leadership Style Has to Adapt

3. The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy

Topics: Leading Culture and Change

1. Don’t Let Your Company’s Culture Stifle Leadership Development

2. The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture

3. Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing

4. Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

Topics: Optimizing for Employee Hiring and Retention

1. The 3 Essential Jobs that Most Retention Programs Ignore

2. Does Your Definition of Leadership Exclude Women of Color

3. Why Capable People Are Reluctant to Lead

Topics: Building Relationships and High-Performing Teams

1. You’re Delegating. It’s Not Working. Here’s Why.

2. Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?

3. The Eight Archetypes of Leadership

4. Research: How to Build Trust with Business Partners from Other Cultures 

5. Do You Really Trust Your Team? (And Do They Trust You?)

Business Growth and Innovation

1. The 6 Ways to Grow A Company

2. What Big Companies Get Wrong About Innovation Metrics

3. Good Leadership Is About Asking Good Questions

4. The Dangers of Delegating Discovery

5. How to Push Your Team to Take Risks and Experiment

P.S. If you run out of free HBR articles, you could theoretically open a new incognito window to read additional ones.