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We combed through MIT SMR’s columns from the past year and culled five tips for leaders who want to recharge their organizations. These insights home in on how to inspire the best from employees and managers and help people embrace the challenges around artificial intelligence, disruption, and burnout — challenges that all flared hot in 2024. This isn’t a definitive list; check out the full collection of MIT SMR columns for more ideas. But we think you’ll find at least one strategy that can help you tackle your leadership challenges. Here’s to finding new routes to success in 2025.

Here at MIT Sloan Management Review, we’re lucky to have a growing number of columnists — true experts who write on their topics regularly — to share the latest lessons and trends that they’re seeing in their fields. Our columnists are constantly looking under the hoods of organizations to see how they work, what they’re struggling with, and what kinds of experiments they’re doing. Like Formula One race car designers, these writers are always trying to learn from the newest innovations and crystallize how other leaders can apply the latest lessons.

Sometimes companies generate solid data that’s meant to help employees do their jobs better, only to have them refuse to use it. Maybe the data is difficult to trust. Or perhaps its recommendations are counterintuitive, pointing employees in one direction when their instincts tell them to go in another.

This is not unusual. The graveyard of data science initiatives is filled with solutions that are advanced, accurate, and well-meaning yet unused.

To build a culture that can truly be data driven, leaders can do three things. First, they can identify the true pain point — a team’s real burning challenge — and identify someone to lead an initiative to determine how to fix it and influence user involvement. Second, leaders can drive adoption with executive storytelling and gamification. And third, they can identify success metrics early and work to rally teams around them.

Read the full article, “Building a Data-Driven Culture: Three Mistakes to Avoid,” by Ganes Kesari, cofounder and chief decision scientist at Gramener.

2. Encourage people to experiment with reshaping their job roles.

When employees “job craft” their day-to-day responsibilities, workplaces see increased engagement and better team dynamics. This idea goes beyond conventional job design, offering individuals the opportunity to tailor their roles, tasks, and interactions to align with their personal strengths and, in turn, reduce the likelihood of burnout.

There are three elements: task crafting, where employees are given opportunities to take on additional responsibilities, alter the way current tasks are performed, or drop tasks that don’t play to their strengths or interests; relational crafting, where employees enhance their job effectiveness by increasing collaboration with specific colleagues; and cognitive crafting, where employees focus on the aspects of their jobs that best align with their passions.

This isn’t just a nice-to-do endeavor. In dynamic sectors like technology, where rapid change is the norm, employees who are accustomed to reshaping their job roles can adjust to new technologies and market demands more quickly.

Read the full article, “The Unexpected Upsides of Letting Employees Define Their Jobs,” by Benjamin Laker, a professor of leadership at the University of Reading’s Henley Business School and a coauthor of Job Crafting (MIT Press, 2024), and Stefania Mariano, an associate professor of management at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.

3. Ask people what skills they want to master, and help them do it.

Mastery is the capacity to create a deep body of knowledge, and its foundation is rooted in micro skills — those proficiencies each of us builds up over the course of a working life. Together, they add up to a capability in a combination that is valuable and unique.

Skills are mastered through observation, repetition, and feedback. This is how artisans such as glassblowers and musicians have traditionally learned their crafts, and it’s the same in companies today: Fifty-two percent of attendees of a recent webinar said their primary way of becoming a master is “practice and repetition.” Only 4% said “attending a training program,” and just 1% said “watching online classes.” Workers are hungry for organizational support in skill development, and they need clearer ways to demonstrate new mastery.

Read the full article, “Building Mastery: What Leaders Do That Helps — or Impedes,” by Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at London Business School, founder of HSM Advisory, and author of Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone (MIT Press, 2022).

4. Get people back in practice with playing at work.

In good old-fashioned play, the goal isn’t to win or lose. It isn’t to achieve against an objective standard. It’s to have fun.

Contrast the intentions behind performing, practicing, and playing. When you’re performing, you’re trying to achieve excellence against a given standard. Your goal is to do as well as you possibly can. When you are practicing, you’re trying to improve your skills so that you can deliver against a given standard in the future. Your goal is to get better. But when you’re playing, there’s no judge or coach. You can engage in low-risk experimentation, capability development, and innovation. It can be awkward, but it can also be the scenario in which we learn the most.

In the early stages of dealing with disruptive change, such as figuring out how to incorporate artificial intelligence in an organization, it’s critical to let employees simply play with tools like generative AI. It’s play that leads to learning.

Read the full article, “Tackling Disruption Playfully,” by Scott D. Anthony, a clinical professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, a senior adviser and managing partner emeritus at growth strategy consultancy Innosight, and a coauthor of Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

5. Talk about whatever’s undiscussable at your organization.

Take a deep breath, because this is a hard leadership truth: Most people know that there are certain things that can’t be said at their company. “I’m not motivated to work harder when the bosses get most of the credit and all the bonus money.” “Employee engagement is low because key leaders aren’t respected.” “I can’t make good decisions unless you become more transparent with financial details.” These kinds of comments violate the deep rules operating in most organizations — the unwritten understanding of what can’t be said, even in places that have surface-level psychological safety.

However, there are tools to break through the unwritten rules that make people self-censor. Leaders can convene a group of people within the organization with whom they have an established relationship, or they can develop an anonymous survey. They can ask, “What undiscussables would we discuss if we decided to discuss our undiscussables?” They can ask what the organization’s biggest follies are — things the organization says it wants or values, only to do or reward the opposite.

Another hard truth: Once leaders ask these questions, they need to do something meaningful in response.

Read the full article, “What You Still Can’t Say at Work,” by Jim Detert, the John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the author of Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

We’ll leave you with a bonus tip: Mind the weight you carry in your own vehicle.

That is, as you work to empower employees and make your organization stronger overall, don’t ignore your own “check engine” light and skip over your needs. Recognize that, as MIT SMR columnist Melissa Swift wrote just a few weeks ago, “four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: hyping up their teams, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane themselves.”

Swift — the leader of Capgemini Invent’s Workforce & Organization practice for North America and author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace (Wiley, 2023) — notes that understanding how and why each of these leadership weights has become more difficult to carry has value. Understanding can help you move from feeling like you’re barely keeping order to getting back where you want to be: leading employees on an inspiring journey.

Read Swift’s full column, “Four Leadership Loads That Keep Getting Heavier.”

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