Writing in Harvard Business Review, Ron Ashkenas (coauthor of the Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook and a Partner Emeritus at Schaffer Consulting) and Gali Cooks (President & CEO, Leading Edge) take their earlier argument about individual leaders and apply it to the organizations they lead.

When a culture is organized around comfort and consensus, it tends to avoid the things that actually drive results: honest feedback, real accountability, and hard tradeoffs. Fixing this, the authors argue, isn't a matter of one tough conversation. It requires senior leaders to consistently model and reward candor, to show early proof that difficult choices lead to better outcomes, and to rebuild the routine structures of organizational life, like review meetings and governance processes, so they actually surface disagreement instead of smoothing it over.

Read the entire article at HBR →