 |
|
|
|||||
Kim (not her real name) is a scientist and tenured faculty member at a high-profile university. For years, she steadily moved up the hierarchy, yet no one could point to what she accomplished. She kept transferring from role to role, not because she succeeded. In fact, it was the opposite. Kim wasnt delivering measurable results, and no one liked working with her. She occupied an uncomfortable middle ground: not unsuccessful enough for the university to dismiss her, but no longer effective enough to stay. They transferred her to a newly created role. It came with bigger, but opaque responsibilities. The result looked like a promotion, but functioned as avoidance. I study and speak about high achievers in the workplace, including in my recent book, The Success Factor, and have observed this problem resurface, leading to the departure of top performers. What happened to Kim is what I call promotion by failure. Its the practice of moving an underperforming or difficult employee into a higher status role, often with increased influence and reduced accountability, to avoid directly addressing the poor performance. Ultimately, this isnt just a performance issueits a leadership and systems failure. Achieving promotion by failure When companies reassign, elevate, or create new positions for under-performing employees, this misaligned intervention sends an alarming signal with reverberating negative ripple effects on teams and the entire organization. The displacement strategy removes the bad employee from immediate friction but ignores the root cause. Sadly, the underperforming employee will eventually repeat their behavior in a new role. But promotion by failure doesnt help anyone. Its not a developmental rotation, and it doesnt provide a stretch assignment to the troubled employee. What it does do is reward poor behavior without consequence and leaves a trail of damage and mistrust in its wake. Reasons for this lack of accountability can be structural, psychological, or legal in nature. We typically see this to be more prevalent in large bureaucratic systems, organizations with weak performance management, and cultures that avoid conflict. Letting someone go may open a company up to litigation, especially if theres a lack of clear performance metrics. As a result, they end up shuffling the employee around so they can make sure that they dont do too much damage. Organizations then repeat the cycle until the employee leaves on their own, or the issues escalate to the point where companies cannot ignore the issue. Weak leaders share blame in fueling promotion by failure. They are often conflict-avoidant and worry that any potential grievances will damage their reputation. Theyve also convinced themselves that the role wasnt the right fit for the individual or have overestimated the power of a new role for the individual, instead of addressing their capability gaps. Why high performers leave when this happens Ultimately, while they might have avoided conflict by promoting a weak performer, there are unintended negative consequences. Top performers, in particular, can become disillusioned, which leads to employee disengagement, lack of innovation, and retention issues. High performers value competence, clarity, and fairness. Promotion by failure violates all three. It signals that results dont matter, negative behavior has no consequence, and excellence is optional. This causes your top performers to be disenfranchised, cynical, and disengaged. And when they feel all those things, eventually they leave the organization. As a result, organizations dont only end up losing their best talent, but also their trust. And when these people leave, who remains? Those who operate by smoke and mirrors rather than achieve results. The organizational cost that leaders underestimate Its not just poor leadership. Theres a tangible organizational cost and messaging when you reward poor performance. Erosion of performance culture: High performers have the image that optics trump output, and that they dont reward consistent results as much as visibility or tenure. It also sends a signal that performance standards vary depending on who the company is evaluating. Loss of institutional credibility: When communication about merit conflicts with reality, employees no longer trust promotion or role assignment decisions. Employees respond to leaders explanations with silence, rather than buy-in. Increased attrition among top talent: High performers leave due to neglect. The strongest contributors leave quietly, without waiting for counteroffers. The exit interviews raise red flags of poor leadership rather than workload or salary. Normalization of mediocrity: Instead of rewarding high performance and productivity, average becomes the acceptable norm, which stunts innovation. Feedback and brainstorming sessions shift from improvement to reassurance, while the company treats excellence as optional rather than expected. Succession pipelines filled with the wrong people: If you ever wondered why certain people are in leadership roles, its because in some institutions, promotion is about loyalty rather than capability. Companies fill those roles with people who create the least resistance. What senior leaders need to do If youre a leader who is committed to excellence, its time to address this overlooked (yet undeniable) reality. Address performance early and directly: Make feedback specific and behavior-based, not tied to outcomes or personality. Give ideas on how to improve performance and communication. Separate compassion from avoidance: There is no way around it. Difficult conversations need to happen despite discomfort, not when your top performers leave en masse. Its necessary for leaders to pair, not substitute, their support with accountability. Create consequences that dont rely on relocation: You should not reward poor performance. If someone is unfit for the role, think about reducing or redesigning their leadership role. Their compensation, scope, or authority changes should reflect performance realities, not wish lists. Invest in real development or make hard exit decisions: Measure progress based on pre-agreed milestones. If improvement doesnt happen, act decisively rather than extending the process indefinitely. Audit roles that exist without outcomes: Do an inventory of the leadership roles and flag those positions without clear deliverables. If necessary, redesign or eliminate them, and align titles and influence with measurable contributions. The mistake you accept becomes the new standard. Promotion by failure is rarely about one person. It mirrors what leaders tolerate, reward, and avoid. Ending promotion by failure is not about being harsher. Its about being honest, accountable, and fair. Its time to stop using title inflation as conflict management.
Category:
E-Commerce
A new book by a former Deloitte executive turned workplace well-being expert argues exactly that In her new book Hope Is the Strategy, Jen Fisher, an expert on workplace well-being and human sustainability, makes a clear and timely case that hope isn’t a soft skill or a leadership afterthought; it’s a practical, learnable approach to navigating uncertainty and building healthier, more resilient organizations. In the following excerpt, Fisher draws on her personal experience grappling with burnout, as well as her research on well-being, leadership, and corporate culture, to reframe hope as something we can all learn and implement for ourselves and those we work with. We’ve long misunderstood hope in the workplace. We’ve treated it as wishful thinkinga nice-to-have feeling that emerges when things are going well. But research from psychologist C.R. Snyder reveals something far more powerful: Hope is a cognitive process with three essential components: goals (what we want to achieve), pathways (our ability to identify routes to those goals), and agency (our belief that we can pursue those paths). This isn’t passive optimism; it’s an active strategy for navigating uncertainty and driving meaningful change. After my own experience with burnout, I discovered that hope isn’t what you turn to after strength failshope is the strength we’ve been looking for all along. It’s not the light at the end of the tunnel; it’s the torch we need to lead others through it. And when organizations embed hope into their leadership practices and culture, they unlock something remarkable: the capacity to transform not just how people feel about work, but what they can actually accomplish together. As more organizations prioritize helping their employees become healthier, more skilled for the future, and connected to a sense of purpose and belonging, they have an opportunity to instill hope in leadership and encourage it in workers. A roadmap for the future A leader who has hope can map out a path for an employee, offering a solid roadmap rather than an empty promise. They might say, “I can’t promise you complete job security, but I can provide you with the skills that will make you attractive in the job market.” That, in turn, helps foster hope in the worker, because they know that they’ll have more tools in their success toolkit, no matter what the future holds. That’s not just a win for the individual, but for the group. An organization (of any typeit could also be a community, or a family) filled with people tapped into their meaning and purpose is stronger than one made up of disengaged, unhealthy, and unhappy people. In fact, hope is a strategy for a variety of prevalent workplace problems: It can improve mental well-being and stress management; it can drive action and reduce catastrophic thinking; and it can help overcome the disengagement crisis at work. What’s more, hope will support our transition to a more human-centered workplace as AI takes on the more mundane, tactical aspects of work. Creating new ripples from leadership on down is possibleand as with the negative ones, it starts with modeling behaviors to set the tone for your team and your peers. That is, modeling the sustainable work behaviors and values that will drive purpose and well-being. Here are four examples: 1. Get clear on what your own boundaries are If you’re following someone else’s vision of success instead of your own, you’re going to end up miserable and probably burned out. So take that PTOreally. The company will not crumble without you. And don’t answer that email at midnightreply in the morning, during work hours. A leader who actually sets healthy boundaries and lives by them gives employees permission to do the same. As I reevaluated the role that work played in my life, I set my own new boundaries. I got clear on what my definition of success was, instead of allowing the external world to define that for me. And I brought hope into my life: I started each day with a set of “what if” questions, looking at the day ahead through the lens of possibility: What if this goes right? What if I do things this way? Then I’d end each day with reflection: How did it go? It helped me to see challenges as an opportunity for change. Here are some other daily practices I put in place, all of which I still follow today: Treat sleep as a nonnegotiable. I protect my eight hours like the business asset it actually is, recognizing that sleep isn’t a luxury but the foundation that makes everything else possible. Schedule humanity into the calendar. Not vague “personal time” but specific blocks for connections that make me human: dinner with my husband, phone calls with friends, reading fiction that has nothing to do with work. Incorporate daily recovery rituals. Three-minute breathing breaks between meetings, a proper lunch away from my desk, a brief walk outside to reset my nervous systemthese small moments of renewal prevent depletion from accumulating. Defend the calendar against the tyranny of urgency. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, exercise, and sleep aren’t just activities to fit around “real work”they comprise the immovable infrastructure that sustains my performance. Everything else has to work around them, not the other way around. 2. Embrace the unknown When we temporarily suspend our need for certainty, a different kind of productivity emerges. I call these my Possibility Days: Once a week, I grant myself permission to coexist with uncertainty. Instead of trying to control outcomes, I deliberately seek experiences with unknown results. I have conversations without preparing talking points. I explore ideas that seem impractical. I follow curiosity down rabbit holes without worrying where they lead. My most innovative solutions and deepest insights almost always trace back to these deliberate ventures into possibility thinking. 3. Walk the walk The old ways of leading through power and control are giving way to something more human, more hopeful, and more whole. The future of leadership isn’t just about what we doit’s about how we show up, how we hold space for both struggle and possibility, and how we cultivate well-being as a vital way of being. There’s this old thinking that we should check our feelings or emotions at work. It’s basically telling people: Don’t show up as who you truly are. When leaders normalize having no energy, no life, no nothing beyond work, it becomes not just accepted but expected. Emotions, whether they’re positive or negative, are really a sign of the things we care aboutand when we’re told not to bring emotions into the workplace, it stunts creativity, growth, innovation, connection, and understanding. The answer is simple: Show your emotions. Your employees look to you to set the pace, tone, and stakes of the team and the work being done. Be vulnerable and authentic about when you’ve made a mistake, when you said one thing and you did another, when you screwed up. Your actions show themthat decisions to support their own health and well-being and career growth aren’t going to be viewed negatively or make it seem like they’re less committed to their work. 4. Build teams grounded in trust True organizational and individual success depends on teams built on mutual trustteams that prioritize deep relationships alongside personal well-being. Trust-based teams require leaders who actively invite people to show up authentically and provide genuine support when they do. This means fostering psychological safety where team members feel confident giving honest feedback, taking calculated risks, learning from missteps, and growing from challenges rather than facing punishment for them. Organizations with the strongest well-being cultures maintain ongoing dialogue between leaders and team members. Within trust-based environments, people develop a growth-oriented perspective. Colleagues treat each other with genuine care and respect, creating workplaces rooted in kindness. This positive energy extends far beyond individual teams, helping organizations attract diverse talent, improve retention, spark innovation, and build lasting resilience.
Category:
E-Commerce
When one of the founders of modern AI walks away from one of the worlds most powerful tech companies to start something new, the industry should pay attention. Yann LeCuns departure from Meta after more than a decade shaping its AI research is not just another leadership change. It highlights a deep intellectual rift about the future of artificial intelligence: whether we should continue scaling large language models (LLMs) or pursue systems that understand the world, not merely echo it. Who Yann LeCun is, and why it matters LeCun is a French American computer scientist widely acknowledged as one of the Godfathers of AI. Alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, he received the 2018 Association for Computing Machinerys A.M. Turing Award for foundational work in deep learning. He joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2013 to build its AI research organization, eventually known as FAIR (Facebook/META Artificial Intelligence Research), a lab that tried to advance foundational tools such as PyTorch and contributed to early versions of Llama. Over the years, LeCun became a global figure in AI research, frequently arguing that current generative models, powerful as they are, do not constitute true intelligence. What led him to leave Meta LeCuns decision to depart, confirmed in late 2025, was shaped by both strategic and philosophical differences with Metas evolving AI focus. In 2025, Meta reorganized its AI efforts under Meta Superintelligence Labs, a division emphasizing rapid product development and aggressive scaling of generative systems. This reorganization consolidated research, product, infrastructure, and LLM initiatives under leadership distinct from LeCuns traditional domain. Within this new structure, LeCun reported not to a pure research leader, but to a product and commercialization-oriented chain of command, a sign of shifting priorities. But more important than that, theres a deep philosophical divergence: LeCun has been increasingly vocal that LLMs, the backbone of generative AI, including Metas Llama models, are limited. They predict text patterns, but they do not reason or understand the physical world in a meaningful way. Contemporary LLMs excel at surface-level mimicry, but lack robust causal reasoning, planning, and grounding in sensory experience. As he has said and written, LeCun believes LLMs are useful, but they are not a path to human-level intelligence. This tension was compounded by strategic reorganizations inside Meta, including workforce changes, budget reallocations, and a cultural shift toward short-term product cycles at the expense of long-term exploratory research. The big idea behind his new company LeCuns new venture is centered on alternative AI architectures that prioritize grounded understanding over language mimicry. While details remain scarce, some elements have emerged: The company will develop AI systems capable of real-world perception and reasoning, not merely text prediction. It will focus on world models, AI that understands environments through vision, causal interaction, and simulation rather than only statistical patterns in text. LeCun has suggested the goal is systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex actions. In LeCuns own framing, this is not a minor variation on todays AI: Its a fundamentally different learning paradigm that could unlock genuine machine reasoning. Although Meta founders and other insiders have not released official fundraising figures, multiple reports indicate that LeCun is in early talks with investors and that the venture is attracting atention precisely because of his reputation and vision. Why this matters for the future of AI LeCuns break with Meta points to a larger debate unfolding across the AI industry. LLMs versus world models:LLMs have dominated public attention and corporate strategy because they are powerful, commercially viable, and increasingly useful. But there is growing recognition, echoed by researchers like LeCun, that understanding, planning, and physical reasoning will require architectures that go beyond text. Commercial urgency versus foundational science:Big Tech companies are understandably focused on shipping products and capturing market share. But foundational research, the kind that may not pay off for years, requires a different timeline and incentives structure. LeCuns exit underscores how those timelines can diverge. A new wave of AI innovation:If LeCuns new company succeeds in advancing world models at scale, it could reshape the AI landscape. We may see AI systems that not only generate text but also predict outcomes, make decisions in complex environments, and reason about cause and effect. This would have profound implications across industries, from robotics and autonomous systems to scientific research, climate modeling, and strategic decision-making. What it means for Meta and the industry Metas AI strategy increasingly looks short-term, shallow, and opportunistic, shaped less by a coherent research vision than by Mark Zuckerbergs highly personalistic leadership style. Just as the metaverse pivot burned tens of billions of dollars chasing a narrative before the technology or market was ready, Metas current AI push prioritizes speed, positioning, and headlines over deep, patient inquiry. In contrast, organizations like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, whatever their flaws, remain anchored in long-horizon research agendas that treat foundational understanding as a prerequisite for durable advantage. Metas approach reflects a familiar pattern: abrupt strategic swings driven by executive conviction rather than epistemic rigor, where ambition substitutes for insight and scale is mistaken for progress. Yann LeCuns departure is less an anomaly than a predictable consequence of that model. But LeCuns departure is also a reminder that the AI field is not monolithic. Different visions of intelligence, whether generative language, embodied reasoning, or something in between, are competing for dominance. Corporations chasing short-term gains will always have a place in the ecosystem. But visionary research, the kind that might enable true understanding, may increasingly find its home in independent ventures, academic partnerships, and hybrid collaborations. A turning point in AI LeCuns decision to leave Meta and pursue his own vision is more than a career move. It is a signal: that the current generative AI paradigm, brilliant though it is, will not be the final word in artificial intelligence. For leaders in business and technology, the question is no longer whether AI will transform industries, its how it will evolve next. LeCuns new line of research is not unique: Other companies are following the same idea. And this idea might not just shape the future of AI researchit could define it.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||