Unifying Leadership in a Divided Time

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Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard. For the past decade or so, it seems like our debates over social, political, and economic issues have dramatically intensified. Around the world, people are at each other's throats over everything from COVID restrictions to climate change to campus protests. We see anger expressed on the streets and across social media. And increasingly it's spilling over into the business world, in the form of consumer boycotts, employee strikes, and colleagues who struggle to collaborate. In this highly polarized time, it's harder than ever to separate what goes on outside an organization from the work that needs to happen inside it. So what are leaders and managers to do?

Our guest today says there's a way to break out of this constant crisis management mode. It involves strategies to take the temperature down. Analyze the outrage, shape and bound the response. Understand your power and build resilience. Karthik Romana is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford's Blavotnik School of Government. He wrote the book The Age of Outrage, How to Lead in a Polarized World, and the HBR article, Managing in the Age of Outrage. Karthik, welcome.

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