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If you want to be a successful leader in 2025, you might want to put the two C’s at the top of your list: communication and culture. Indeed, looking back at MIT SMR’s most popular articles in recent months, it’s striking how many of them focus on communication and culture. These two strengths are inseparable: An organization can’t have a strong culture without strong communication skills, and vice versa. And the related challenges are among the hardest we face as leaders.

How do I spell out what’s most important to me as a leader — and live by it? How do I encourage people on my team to tell me the truth? How do I set boundaries with people? How do I encourage more continuous learning? How do I stop “overly busy” from being a measure of success?

These are tough questions for both newer leaders and longtime executives. Our job here at MIT Sloan Management Review is to continually deliver fresh, evidence-based answers that you can apply in your own organization. So to help you start the new year strong, we tackled those questions and related ones as we curated this list of leadership tips from MIT SMR’s expert authors. Which of these strategies will help you build your leadership skill set in 2025?

1. Articulate your leadership values and hold yourself accountable.

“Imagine you are about to take a six-month sabbatical during which you will have no contact with your work team. You must create a one-page memo to let them know the principles and metrics that you believe should guide their decisions and actions in your absence. What values will you prioritize? List them in rank order. How will your team know if their work is consistent with these values? Identify specific metrics. Detail all of these things for your team to resolve the inevitable conflicts and issues that could arise during your absence. Afterward, if you feel so inclined, you can share the outcome of this exercise with your actual team and encourage them to do the same task to build a sense of shared values.”

Read the full article, “Effective Leaders Articulate Values — and Live by Them,” by Morela Hernandez and Catherine Summers.

2. Delegate better: Consider the level of trust in the process.

“Trust in people is nothing new to conversations on effective delegation; however, trust in organizational processes is an equally important but underappreciated consideration in delegation decisions.

“In our work with leaders, we’ve seen that no matter how reliable an individual employee may be, if the underlying organizational process that is central to the delegation is erratic or underdeveloped, delegation tends to break down. So our framework advises leaders to consider two key questions when entertaining the delegation scenarios: ‘To what extent do I trust the people?’ and ‘To what extent do I trust the process?’ … It is the nexus of trust in people and trust in process that should drive the form of delegation that a leader chooses.”

Read the full article, “How to Delegate More Effectively: Four Approaches,” by Beth K. Humberd and Scott F. Latham.

3. Get honest input: Empower people to stop self-censoring.

“Convene a group of people within the organization with whom you have an established relationship and tell them that to engage in some out-of-the-box thinking, you’d like them to answer this question: What undiscussables would we discuss if we decided to discuss our undiscussables?

“You might ask this generically, or you might attach it to a specific issue by adding ‘about …’ to the end of the question.

“This question, which I learned from Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris, lands well because it interjects a bit of lightheartedness, essentially acknowledging that you know you’re asking people to say what has seemed unsayable.”

Read the full article, “What You Still Can’t Say at Work,” by Jim Detert.

4. Tap middle managers’ power to strengthen culture.

“Middle managers can be empowered to effectively enrich company culture when they adopt the belief that companies have both big-C and small-c cultures. Big-C culture refers to the company’s official set of stated values, while small-c culture describes the qualitative experience of day-to-day patterns of interaction — this is where someone might find the culture to be supportive, rigid, confrontational, dog-eat-dog, and so forth. …

“Small-c culture is experienced not as slogans on a wall or annual surveys but in exchanges that reinforce how to most effectively accomplish work tasks within teams. …

Because values are brought to life by actions, and because actions will vary according to how work managers and their teams perform, variants of small-c variations will inevitably grow. And when teams are successful, those variations of the values will spread.”

Read the full article, “Building Culture From the Middle Out,” by Spencer Harrison and Kristie Rogers.

5. Develop more continuous learners in your organization.

“The ability to reflect on one’s own learning process goes beyond learning techniques like mind mapping or heuristics; it’s about refining the way we approach growth. Meta-learning is the ability to stand back and think about what we want to learn, how to learn, the strengths and gaps in our learning process, and how to improve our learning.

“For example, Lyn, a task-oriented managing director, wanted to scale her impact as a leader. She wanted her team to solve their own problems rather than solve problems for them. Shifting from her well-developed strength as a super problem solver, she learned coaching skills and how to ask questions instead of offering solutions.”

Read the full article, “How to Develop Continuous Learners,” by Wendy Tan and Joo-Seng Tan.

6. Set better boundaries with your team.

“Most people think they know when it is acceptable (or not) to interrupt other people based on their own personal standards. Yet, managers need to make the implicit explicit to better align people’s boundaries. You should have a boundary dialogue — a bidirectional discourse with members of your team — to better understand where the line is for each employee. …

“When you have conversations with employees about boundaries, consider your role as both someone who can be interrupted and be the interrupter. Get curious. Ask your team members about their working hours and when, if at all, they consider it appropriate, necessary, or reasonable for you to contact them outside of that period. Likewise, explicitly set expectations for gaining access to your personal time and attention.”

Read the full article, “Manage Boundaries Better With Your Team,” by Angela R. Grotto, Maura J. Mills, and Erin M. Eatough.

7. Energize team meetings: Make everyone feel heard.

“People want to know that their opinions matter. If meeting attendees don’t feel this way, managers may notice silence or frequent interruptions, nonverbal cues like sighing and eye-rolling, or minimal responses to questions. Designing an inclusive meeting agenda ensures that participants feel valued and have an opportunity to contribute.

“Managers can create inclusive meetings by using tactics like asking participants to write their views on Post-it notes before starting a discussion on a topic, or having someone summarize the previous speaker’s point before adding their input. This gives participants time to reflect and articulate their thoughts clearly and equalizes participation. True listening goes beyond waiting for your turn to speak — it involves empathizing, understanding the speaker’s perspective, and managing personal and group biases.”

Read the full article, “Four Ways to Energize Your Dull Team Meetings,” by Alexander Loudon.

8. Stop exalting busyness.

“Your company may have challenging cultural elements around needing to appear busy, and that’s hard to unilaterally shift. But — whether you’re a manager or not — you can influence how your own team talks about, experiences, and handles work intensity. Simply put: Stop talking about how busy you are. Start talking about what you’re achieving. Conversations about results have a nice way of going viral, and you create space for others to focus on impact, not activity.”

Read the full article, “Banish the Harmful Creatures of COVID-Era Work,” by Melissa Swift.

9. Be a manager — not a mouthpiece for higher-ups.

“How often do you find yourself voicing someone else’s ideas, thoughts, or demands at work? Whether you are conveying your CEO’s wishes to a colleague or explaining to your team that “sales needs an update,” speaking for others — what researchers call managerial ventriloquism — is a common practice in organizations. It can be valuable, and even essential, to fulfilling the role of a manager. But when done badly, it can harm managers’ credibility, damage company culture, and hurt their organizations’ reputation and profits.”

Read the full article, “Own Your Words to Gain Authority,” by David Hollis and Alex Wright.

10. Communicate more effectively about change.

“One of the items leaders most frequently overlook is how a decision was made. Routinely discussing this issue, for any type of change, helps educate employees about the decision-making process and suggests how they can influence future decisions.”

Read the full article, “Hard Truths About the Meeting After the Meeting,” by Phillip G. Clampitt.

The post "10 Essential Leadership Tips for 2025" appeared first on MIT Sloan Management Review