Why Many Leaders Ignore Criticism

Famous Mentors Can Be a Blessing and a Curse

By Daniel Butcher

Students and young professionals who get well-respected, or even famous, mentors gain can gain skills that help put their careers on promising trajectories. But mentees’ identities and reputations becoming connected with prominent mentors can provide both benefits and challenges.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College said that, on the positive side, relationships and connections with prominent mentors can improve mentees’ opportunities. On the negative side, the entanglement of an individual’s career with a prominent mentor can also lead to being taken for granted, having their contributions underappreciated, and feeling overshadowed. She and her coauthors of an Academy of Management Review article refer to this as the “paradox of promise” that complicates mentees’ building meaningful career narratives.

“We were looking at mentorship in a creative context, and all of us were able to draw from our experiences as well, but our research findings apply to any place where there is a strong mentor figure where you learn by doing and being around somebody who is experienced and renowned in their field,” Rouse said. “This paradox of promise can happen—we know that working with very prominent people in the field is useful; it can help you get connections, and you learn a lot.

“This person is well-known, because they are very skilled at what they do, and so you can see that happening, where you’re learning very easily from this person, because they have a lot of knowledge to give you, but at the same time, you have the shadow over you when you go out and try to make a name for yourself,” she said. “You’ll often be referred to in context with your mentor, and so it’s very hard to break out and establish your own identity, because people assume—maybe rightly, maybe wrongly—that basically you are just the output of this other person and haven’t really established a voice on your own.

“And so that can be very challenging for people, especially if you are driven, as some of our informants were, to really make a name for themselves and separate themselves from their mentor.”

It can be difficult to craft your own career narrative in the way that you’d like if most people know you based on the work that you’ve done in the shadow of a successful, celebrated mentor. That said, some mentees embrace their association with such a figure.

“There are other people in our study that were much more comfortable to build on the legacy of that mentor and feel that they were the next stage of that—helping that legacy to live on, contributing to that legacy was really important to them, and they were able to find meaning from that,” Rouse said. “This is really about what you are trying to get out of your own creative career as a protege and thinking about the different ways to find career success.

“An interesting thing about our study is we found that all people found a way to craft a career narrative and find meaningfulness,” she said. “They just took different paths for doing that.”

Why Mentees Should Highlight Similarities with Mentors

By Daniel Butcher

While high-quality mentorship boosts protégés’ careers, a mentor who is disinterested or unmotivated doesn’t provide value to mentees. To maximize mentors’ networking help and advice, mentees should highlight similarities with their mentor to strengthen mutual identification.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article with Beth Humberd of the University of Massachusetts Lowell on this topic, said that the effectiveness of mentoring depends on the mentor identifying with a mentee to form a close relationship.

“It has been interesting to watch the shift of people understanding more about this network structure and broader constellation of developmental relationships,” Rouse said. “One of the big pieces of advice that a lot of people would give is don’t look for the be-all and end-all of a mentor that’s going to do all of these different functions for you.

“It’s really diversifying networking and career-development efforts and understanding that different people have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to professional relationships,” she said.“Some people are much better at psychosocial support, the trust and friendship part of a mentoring relationship, whereas some people are much better at the career side of it and giving sponsorship opportunities or challenging you or reading your work.

“Those benefits of mentorship can come from a range of different people.”

Talking about pastimes cultivates identification

People enjoy talking about their pastimes and things they have in common with each other. Mentors are no exception.

“Think about not only how we are similar in terms of our work experience or where we want to go, but also commonalities as simple as like hobbies—if you find somebody who plays tennis and you play tennis, use that as a conversation-starter,” Rouse said. “Think about how you can develop an easygoing relationship that then can build into a mentoring relationship.

“You shouldn’t underestimate those various forms of connection that you might use for networking and relationship-building, and think about doing those in small doses, rather than thinking, ‘I’m going to find my mentor today’—it’s establishing a good rapport with potential mentors,” she said. “There’s a whole body of literature on positive work relationships and high-quality connections—ask yourself how you can build smaller connections into bigger relationships.

“Especially as an introvert, thinking about having those particular strong, high-quality connections is what ends up building into those valuable mentoring relationships.”

Taming Toxic Workplaces

By Daniel Butcher

If you work for a bad boss at a dysfunctional or toxic organization, you can either find a new job or learn to cope with stressful conditions. But if you can get middle managers on your side, then you might even be able to start changing the toxic culture.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College, who coauthored an Academy of Management Journal article with William Kahn of Boston University on this topic, said that toxicity appears in organizations as intolerance, bullying, narcissism, and other forms of destructiveness that demoralize employees and undermine organizational success. Senior leaders often perpetrate toxicity or fail to stem destructive behaviors.

“How do the people working underneath these intolerant, narcissistic, or destructive leaders respond in these toxic situations?” Rouse said. “It isn’t uncommon for me to talk to somebody who feels like they have one of these toxic leaders that they’re working under, but they don’t always have an idea of how to handle it.

“One option is to just leave, but we don’t always have that option to just leave, so then we think about, ‘How do we want to be? What kind of middle manager, if we’re in that position, do we want to be?” she said. “Do we want to be somebody who protects ourselves and has that toxicity cascade down the organization, or do we want to be somebody who buffers our employees and makes them feel protected?

“There are different ways of thinking about coping with a toxic workplace; we talk about this as workarounds for how you think about responding to those toxic leaders.”

Toxic organizations drain workers’ personal agency, undermining their capacity to act independently and make choices.

“Leaders’ toxic behaviors such as intolerance, bullying, narcissism, and destructiveness are all red flags, and we can be good leaders without having those behaviors,” Rouse said. “What we saw in that study was that these weren’t bad people—they were driven by anxiety about a lot of external challenges that were happening in the organization, and they just managed that anxiety by belittling other people and diminishing them.

“Obviously it wasn’t the most effective way, but that was their way of dealing with that pressure, and then we also found that that stayed in place because the senior team colluded around that, essentially, and no one stepped up and said, ‘We can’t keep behaving this way,’” she said. “It was actually the middle managers, those people who were better at shifting from absorption to differentiating among team members, which ended up challenging that structure in that type of toxic organization.

“Especially when that that top leadership team has become very insular and supporting of one another in a way that there are no new voices coming into that senior team, then the middle managers are left to have to do that that work of changing the toxic organizational culture.”

Your Skills, Not Your Jobs, Are Part of Your Identity

By Daniel Butcher

Rather than focusing on job titles or specific industries during a job search, candidates who imagine how their skills and experience could translate to a variety of roles are better able to bounce back after career setbacks and transition from one professional identity to another.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research he conducted on disabled veterans found that some of them did well in transitioning to new careers after leaving the military, while others did poorly.

“The ones who did poorly looked at superficial links between their previous jobs in the military and the civilian jobs they were considering: ‘I was a sniper in the army; we don’t need anyone to be a sniper in in civilian life but the police use weapons’ or ‘I used to drive a tank. What can I do in civilian life? I can drive a bus,’” Shepherd said.

“But other people—the ones who did well—looked at it more structurally and said, ‘In the military, I learned discipline; I learned to be able to attend to important responsibilities for an extended period of time; I learned how to follow orders and execute those things at a structural level, which means that in entrepreneurship, I can do X and Y,’” he said.

For example, the newspaper, magazine, and publishing industries have been disrupted by the transition from print to digital advertising, the availability of free content, the rise of social media and AI, and other factors, which has lead to a structural decline in the number of jobs in those areas.

“This concept relates to the media landscape; if you lose a career in journalism, you could say, ‘Okay, I could find something that superficially matches my professional identity, such as PR [public relations] or media relations, or maybe journalism means other things: ‘I’m an investigator’ or ‘I’m a writer who’s a subject-matter expert on these things—what could that lead to?’” Shepherd said.

“And it might lead to something that on the surface looks like something very different but that structurally uses the same skills that you used in your previous career,” he said.

“The advice is to try and look at things not just superficially but rather at a deeper level and consider how your skills can transfer to a different career and professional identity.”

Want to Bounce Back from a Setback? Try Identity Play

By Daniel Butcher

People who can approach job searches with a flexible mindset about their professional identity are better able to bounce back after devastating job losses or even injuries that affect the types of jobs they’re able to do.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that if people get fired or laid off, butt heir job is not a critical part of their identity, then they can often recover relatively quickly. But many people’s self-image is intertwined with their career.

“If you can find a job that’s kind of related to that identity, then you’re probably going to be fine, but if it was a strong part of your identity and you’re unable to capture a job that represents that identity, then you can fall a long way,” Shepherd said.

“But the interesting aspect is that when you hit rock bottom, it’s actually quite freeing—it’s like freedom when you hit the bottom, because you say, ‘It can’t get any worse,’ and suddenly, when you hit the bottom, you actually start to think more freely and can engage in this identity play,” he said.

Research on musicians and dancers who have experienced traumatic events uncovered surprising findings about self-reinvention and reimagining one’s professional identity to achieve growth in a new career.

“Professional musicians and dancers who have an injury and can no longer perform those roles that they’ve been performing their whole life and was a strong part of their identity, and also people who get injured and have become paraplegics or even quadriplegics, after a while, they can actually perform well in a different career, and they look back and say, ‘The best thing that ever happened to me was getting that injury,’ Shepherd said. “It wasn’t at that time, of course; it was devastating, but it allowed them to go and pursue something else, and that something else became what they felt was actually something better than what they were before.

“In some ways, maybe it’s better, or maybe they’re just telling themselves it was better, but either way, that’s a good thing that happened or at least a silver lining,” he said. “So I suppose that’s the advantage—when we hit rock bottom, then we can start to really pursue something else—we can play with these different identities and find something that may actually lead to an outcome that’s better than what would have happened if we had never lost that original career in the first place.”

Of course, for some, there’s a sad side to that kind of story.

“Some people engage in chronic dysfunctional behavior and take drugs and remove themselves from society and their own way of thinking after suffering a professional setback or injury,” Shepherd said. “But if you can engage in this identity play, then you can maybe find a better version of yourself.”

How the GOP Won the 2024 U.S. Election

By Daniel Butcher

The Republican Party took advantage of the headwinds facing the Democratic Party during the cycle leading up to the 2024 U.S. election, including switching presidential candidates at a late stage and persistently high inflation, for which voters blame incumbents. Regardless of the potential effectiveness of their policy proposals, winning GOP candidates spoke to American voters’ concerns about jobs and the high cost of living as many Democrats instead painted a rosy picture of the economy.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that, in contrast with Democrats, who focused on touting the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris Administration, more Republicans were willing to talk about voters’ concerns, anxieties, worries, grievances, and other negative feelings.

“Republican candidates were willing to say, ‘Yeah, we hear you. We are going to deal with this. We’re going to bring inflation down,’ even though inflation was already coming down, and even though many of the factors across the supply chain that might have been responsible for inflation are not actually under government control,” Pollock said. “Whatever the actual reasons are, they said, ‘We hear you, and we’re going to do something about it.’ And the Dems are citing data and saying, ‘No, things are great—unemployment is low, and the stock markets are hitting record highs.’

“But if I’m living paycheck to paycheck, I don’t care what the S&P 500 is doing,” he said. “I care about the prices of eggs, meat, and gas.”

In an ironic twist, many economists are skeptical that the Republicans’ policy proposals—sparking a global trade war with high tariffs and deporting illegal immigrants—will actually improve the economy, create jobs, or bring down inflation.

“Every economist I’ve seen, heard, or read says that they’ll do the opposite—those policies would increase inflation,” Pollock said. “Increasing tariffs would only increase costs, because they’re going to get passed on to U.S. consumers, and cracking down in immigration will cause labor shortages, etc.

“But on the campaign trail, they were saying, ‘I’m going to solve the problem,’ and people are thinking, ‘Great, because nobody else is listening to what my concerns are; nobody else says they want to fix this, and they hear me and understand what I care about,’” he said.

A sample of Pollock’s AOM research findings:

• After an IPO, Celebrity and Status May Be Too Much
• How Influencers Can Gain Followers and Boost Engagement
• Six Things to Expect from Narcissistic CEOs
• Misconduct Trends Increase the Likelihood of Media Scrutiny
• How CEOs Become A-List Stars
• Celebrity CEOs Often Get Typecast into One of Four Roles

Effective Persuasion Calls for Appealing to Emotions Over Logic

By Daniel Butcher

In persuasion, whether it’s gaining support for a business plan, selling a product or service, or seeking forgiveness after a misstep, it’s crucial to pay attention to emotions and respond in kind. Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said it’s most effective to show people that you’ve actually listened to them and tried to understand how they’re feeling, rather than argue with them based on logic or data.

Pollock said many organization leaders face challenges responding to emotional problems or reactions with rational analyses and logical arguments.

“You can’t have an emotional impact by relying solely on logical reasoning, and it isn’t going to have the effect that you hope for,” Pollock said. “If we’re having a rational discussion, we’re being analytical and saying, ‘Okay, let’s look at the data. Let’s figure out what’s going on.’

“That can work really well in some cases, but when I’m reacting emotionally, trying to explain to me why I’m wrong or why things aren’t as bad as I feel they are, or providing me with data is not going to be an effective strategy,” he said. “Parents know this; think about if you’ve tried to have a rational argument with your kid when they’re in the middle of a meltdown—it doesn’t work very well, and so it’s the same principle.

“You have to read of the situation, understand where the emotions are coming from, and address the source of the emotions, not try to provide an analytical assessment—you can’t answer emotions with analysis.”

A related communications pitfall to avoid is making a crisis-management statement that deflects responsibility, comes off as insincere, or doesn’t contain an actual apology.

“In the face of misconduct, they’ll try to rationalize stuff, as opposed to just saying ‘You’re right; I’m sorry’ or to go back to Bill Clinton, ‘I feel your pain,’” Pollock said. “If you say that and apologize and mean it, it’s more effective at diffusing the situation.

“Do not give the performative non-apology or deflection of blame and accountability,” he said. “‘We’re very sorry, but it isn’t really our fault, but we’re still sorry this happened to you,’ as opposed to, ‘We’re sorry we did something,’ and a lot of their apologies sound more like ‘We’re sorry we got caught,’ as opposed to, ‘We’re sorry for what we did.’”

A sample of Pollock’s AOM research findings:

• After an IPO, Celebrity and Status May Be Too Much
• How Influencers Can Gain Followers and Boost Engagement
• Six Things to Expect from Narcissistic CEOs
• Misconduct Trends Increase the Likelihood of Media Scrutiny
• How CEOs Become A-List Stars
• Celebrity CEOs Often Get Typecast into One of Four Roles

The Secrets to Success for “Metacognitive” Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

Despite being dyslexic, Richard Branson co-founded Virgin Group in 1970 and eventually became a billionaire, British knight, and celebrity. He has speculated that his dyslexia was actually an asset by forcing him to think in less conventional ways when brainstorming, as well as launching and running businesses.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research by him and his colleagues shows that more “metacognitive” entrepreneurs are, the more adaptable they are and the more likely they are to pivot, ultimately achieving better results. Metacognition is about understanding how your own brain makes sense of the world, how your learn, and how you solve problems.

“Branson, who founded the Virgin Group, has dyslexia, and in an interview he was saying it was because of that dyslexia that he had to learn how to think in a different, more deliberative way, rather than rely on intuition,” Shepherd said. “He attributes his success as an entrepreneur to his dyslexia, because he engages in metacognition, thinking about the way that we think about things—we often just make decisions based on intuition.

“We don’t think about things; we just make an automatic decision, and sometimes our intuition is right, but sometimes it can be wrong, and if we’re not thinking about it, we don’t question it,” he said. “And with dyslexia, he learned these learning skills, which made him more metacognitive, so he thought more about the way that he thinks about things.”

Research on primary schools found that children who are taught metacognitive skills perform significantly better in reading and mathematics. Those metacognitive skills can be applied to entrepreneurship and leadership as well.

“Rather than just assuming that they’ll figure it out intuitively, practitioners of metacognition ask themselves four questions: ‘What is the problem really asking? What are we really facing here? How is this similar to something that we’ve faced in the past? And how is it different from what we’ve faced in the past?’” Shepherd said. “It stops us from doing this automatic thinking, then we say, ‘What’s the best way to approach this problem? What are the different ways that we can approach this situation?’ and choose one.

“As we’re engaged in that, we stop ourselves to reflect and we say, ‘How am I doing? Am I heading in the right direction?’” he said. “When you use metacognition, you interrupt your intuition at different periods just to remind yourself to be a little bit more deliberative in the way that you think now.”

Intuition is important, Shepherd stressed. It’s an effective way to make quick decisions that is especially effective when it’s based on expertise. But problems arise for those who never question that intuitive decision-making process.

“There are some people who rarely question those assumptions based on intuition, but as we engage in metacognition, we start to question them,” Shepherd said. “And when you have dyslexia, it forces you to have that sort of thinking discipline in order to be more deliberative in the way that you think.

“That’s my that was my interpretation of Branson’s statement,” he said. “While I’m not sure if he would necessarily agree with all of that, he did say that it forced him to be more disciplined in the way he thinks.”

Media Magnify Scandals of Big-Name Companies

By Daniel Butcher

Companies that dominate their industries also have to deal with increased scrutiny. Any negative news, from layoffs and unethical conduct to data breaches, get amplified and can easily become scandals, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Media attention is drawn by the accused or guilty party’s prestige, he said.

“If the perpetrator is high-reputation, they may get the benefit of the doubt for less severe misconduct as some kind of one-off thing, and the media may be less likely to cover it,” Pollock said. “But if the misconduct is severe, then the media is even more likely to scandalize the high-reputation firm’s misconduct, because we don’t expect that from high-reputation firms; it violates our expectations.

“When we have high expectations about a firm’s behavior, whether because we expect them to be more competent or act with more integrity, it’s a bigger deal and more disturbing when they violate that expectation,” he said. “That makes the incident more newsworthy to the media, increasing their coverage of the misconduct.

“These are sorts of things that we’re looking at and trying to understand: What are misconduct aspects and firm characteristics lead the misconduct to become a scandal?”

Pollock and colleagues compared the reactions to data breaches at two different companies of vastly different levels of prestige and name recognition: Facebook and Chegg, a U.S. education technology company that provides homework help, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.

“Facebook had a data breach of 50 million accounts; it was covered widely in the media and got lots of attention—thousands of articles were written about their data breach and the problems with it,” Pollock said. “And literally on the same day, Chegg, which is an academic software company, had a similar data breach—40 million accounts were breached, but it was barely covered outside of the the specialist media on data security, and a little bit in the in the education sector.

“So why Facebook and not Chegg? Facebook is better known,” he said. “More people use Facebook and have given them their data, so the expectancy violation is greater and possibly more personal.

“Journalists recognize this, and thus are more likely to scandalize the incident, because it attracts more readers.”

The Disconnect Between Leaders and Patients on Healthcare

By Daniel Butcher

Many people hurt by the high costs and insurance denials plaguing the U.S. healthcare industry might have been hoping that the response to the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson would lead to reforms. However, most industry executives have tried to go back to business as usual, except with heightened security for senior executives, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In response to the waves of criticism directed at U.S. health insurance and benefits-administration executives in the wake of Thompson’s killing, most industry leaders followed a typical crisis-management playbook, including a predictable public-relations script, he said.

“They’ve been saying all the things that they always say: that they’re beholden to achieving financial goals and medical providers’ increasing costs—‘medical costs go up, and so the insurance premiums have to go up’—and that they’re doing their best to provide coverage, and all these sorts of things, the usual platitudes that they roll out,” Pollock said. “But in terms of actually making some substantive changes, they don’t do much.”

“We’re one of the only countries in the world where healthcare coverage is privatized, and we’ve got the most expensive healthcare in the world with the 44th-best health outcomes,” he said. “It’s hard to justify the status quo on any rational basis.

“So if they want to repair and protect their reputation with customers and avoid this kind of backlash in the future, they have to understand where the customer is coming from and then find ways to speak to those problems and offer up a set of policies or practices they’re going to engage in—changes they’re going to make—to make this easier and better for customers.”

Health industry executives who try to defend the status quo of the U.S. healthcare system come off as tone-deaf at best, and uncaring or willfully dismissive of people’s suffering at worst.

“One of the mistakes that a lot of CEOs make is they try to defend the status quo, instead of saying, ‘You’re right; we’re not doing what we should be doing,’ and then, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to make it to make it better,’” Pollock said. “There’s a whole other set of issues related to whether or not these things get implemented, but at least symbolically acknowledging their pain, their anger, taking some responsibility for it, and then saying, ‘We’re going to make changes that will address these problems and make things better going forward’ counts for something.

“But if they come out and talk about profitability, that their responsibility is to shareholders, or that this isn’t really a problem, or try to downplay the challenges that people have with high costs, denials of coverage, and administrative burdens, there’s a disconnect from patients’ experiences,” he said. “This is the issue you run into when leaders and customers are coming at a problem from opposite sides or completely different perspectives.”