The worlds largest retailer has announced massive job cuts before the holidays.
On Tuesday, Amazon said in a memo to staff that it will lay off 14,000 employees. Heres what you need to know about the Amazon layoffs, and why these arent the last jobs that Amazon will likely cut in the future.
Whats happened?
On Tuesday, Amazons senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, announced the company was eliminating approximately 14,000 positions. Galetti sent a memo about the layoffs to Amazon employees, which was then published to the Amazon website.
The headcount reduction of 14,000 positions is less than the up to 30,000 job cuts that Reuters had reported in the hours before Galettis memo was made public. However, it still represents one of the largest single layoff rounds of 2025. It also comes just days after competitor Target announced it was laying off 1,800 corporate roles.
Amazon did not say which 14,000 jobs would be eliminated, but the memo specified that they would be corporate workforce positions, suggesting Amazons warehouse workforce is safe from the cuts.
But that is to be expected as Amazon would be unlikely to reduce its warehouse staff ahead of the busy holiday season.
According to PitchBook, Amazon has a total workforce of more than 1.5 million employees.
Why is Amazon laying off 14,000 employees?
In the memo, Galetti stated that the layoffs are a continuation of Amazon CEO Andy Jassys September 2024 directive to strengthen Amazon’s culture and teams.
In 2024, that strengthening resulted in a return-to-office (RTO) mandate. In 2025, strengthening your culture apparently means cutting your workforce.
The reductions were sharing today, Galettis memo states, are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure were investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers current and future needs.
But Galetti continued, explaining that the main driver for the cuts isyou guessed itartificial intelligence.
The world is changing quickly, Galetti said. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology weve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).
Because of this, Galetti said that Amazon is convinced it needs to become a leaner company with fewer layers.
The “layers” here are people.
Amazon could cut even more jobs next year
While the 14,000 job cuts Amazon announced today are devastating to the workers and their families who are affected, Amazon may not be done cutting positions.
In the memo, Galetti added that looking ahead to 2026, Amazon expects to hire in key areas, while also finding additional places we can remove layers.
How has Amazons stock price reacted?
While the layoffs are devastating to the workers losing their jobs, Wall Street often sees layoffs as a good thing. Thats because laying off a large number of workers is usually the fastest way for a company to cut costs and thus increase its bottom line.
But if Amazon was hoping to see a stock price boost from its layoff announcements this morning, the company is going to be disappointed.
As of this writing, Amazons stock price (Nasdaq: AMZN) is relatively flat in premarket trading. Its up just half a percent to around $228.22 per share.
As a matter of fact, Amazons stock price for 2025 hasnt moved much. Year to date, the companys share price is up just 3.4%. Thats compared to the Nasdaqs 21% gain in the same period.
Amazon is expected to share its third-quarter 2025 financial results on Thursday, October 30.
Early in my career, I was fortunate to cross paths with a mentor who changed how I saw designand myself. He ran a small studio whose influence reached far beyond its size. He led with a quiet confidence and quick wit, showing how intelligence and humility could coexist in the creative process. I was passionate about the craft, but there was still so much more to learn about the tools, and about business. He taught me how to infuse storytelling into design. How to navigate constraints. How to bring meaning to every project, not just the ones that sparked instant excitement. He reminded me that creativity thrives on play and curiosity, and that if you lose joy in the process, the work suffers. Those experiences taught me that mentorship is about passing down not just skills, but a way of seeing and approaching the work.
The guru form of mentorshipthe close, sustained one-to-one relationship between an experienced guide and an eager apprenticehas given way to something more imaginative and community-based. For me, much of that evolution has been visible through creative networks like AIGA that champion connection and professional growth. In addition, platforms like ADP List help creatives solve problems and refine their portfolios through focused, 20-minute feedback exchanges. Inclusive group-based initiatives such as Break the Wall blend workshops, one-on-one meetings, and targeted training to build confidence and open doors for underrepresented creatives.
This new wave of mentorship redefines how we learn from each other in a post-pandemic world when proximity is no longer a given. It challenges the belief that deep creative growth depends on shared physical space, replacing it with something more fluid and democratic.
How are these new approaches enriching creative mentorship, and what do we risk losing along the way?
The Demise of Guru Mentoring
During the era of the hands-on mentor, you didnt just learn what someone did. You absorbed how they thought, often through shared experiences. When I joined Fifty Thousand Feet in 2004, the lessons my mentor taught me became the foundation for how I approached creative leadership and helped grow the practice. I learned that mentorship doesnt stop with one relationship; it becomes part of how you leadand help others to lead. When more experienced designers remind their teammates that trust is as essential to great design as aesthetics, mentorship becomes collective. It becomes how we grow together.
When the pandemic hit, creative studios went quiet. Overnight, our way of working, defined by proximity and spontaneity, was replaced by screens and schedules. We lost the informal learning that happens in passing: the sketch on someones desk, the overheard critique, the unplanned spark of collaboration.
Many leaders tried to re-create that closeness through digital tools. We held virtual check-ins and all-hands meetings. But something was missing. The energy of shared space, the easy conversations, the sense of momentum, was hard to replicate. Collaboration became more intentional, but less organic. In that absence, the creative industry began searching for new models that could sustain connection and growth in a hybrid world.
The Rise of New Mentorship Models
What followed was a burst of experimentation. Across the industry, new forms of mentoring have gained momentum since the pandemic, combining structure with flexibility and access.
Micro mentorship has become a favorite starting point. These short, focused sessions meet creatives where they are, helping them refine portfolios, shape presentations, or overcome creative blocks. The approach trades hierarchy for immediacy. For younger designers, it opens the door to multiple mentors instead of one. For mentors, it offers the chance to share expertise in moments that matter most.
At the same time, peer learning communities are reshaping how creatives connect. These networks erase titles and encourage reciprocity. One week you are the mentor, the next you are the learner. Younger professionals bring fresh fluency in tools and culture, while veterans share hard-won perspectives. That exchange keeps creative cultures evolving.
Even traditional apprenticeship models are changing shape. Adobes Creative Apprenticeship, for instance, links aspiring designers with more than 200 creative leaders and 35 agency partners. It borrows the rigor of the studio system but scales it globally.
Meanwhile, digital communities of practice have become the connective tissue of the industry. Organized around disciplines or shared challenges, they create space for ongoing dialogue, workshops, and portfolio exchange.
Together, these models show that mentorship did not vanish in the pandemic. It adapted. It became faster, more open, and more human in its reach.
The Benefits of Peer Learning and Community
New forms of mentorship break down barriers of geography, hierarchy, and privilege. A designer in Nairobi can now receive feedback from a creative director in New York. A freelancer can find a sense of belonging in a global online forum.
They also diversify the voices shaping creative careers. Traditional mentorship often reflected proximitywho sat near whom, who belonged to which agency, who got noticed. Community-based mentorship opens the door to people with different experiences, disciplines, and perspectives. That diversity fuels innovation by exposing creatives to new ways of thinking and working.
Peer and micro-mentorship also allow for real-time feedback rather than waiting for annual reviews or rare moments of contact. They make mentorship a living part of the workday. And perhaps most importantly, they distribute the emotional labor of mentorship. Instead of depending on one relationship, creatives can build a constellation of guides, akin to a network that evolves as their career does.
What We Risk Losing
Yet efficiency has its costs. The quiet accumulation of trust and shared history that forms the long arc of mentorship is harder to replicate online. Tacit knowledge, the kind that comes from watching how someone handles conflict or reads a room, can be difficult to transfer in a virtual environment.
There is something to be said for the value of serendipity, too. In-person work creates unplanned learning: the overheard insight, the offhand comment that sparks an idea. Virtual platforms tend to optimize for structure, not discovery. Without care, mentorship risks becoming transactional, something to schedule rather than something to live.
Blending the Old and the New
But we dont have to lose the good things about one-to-one mentorship. The future of creative mentorship might not be about choosing one model over another. Its about synthesis. The one-to-one relationships that shaped generations of creatives can coexist with todays distributed, community-driven systems. The key is to preserve the human connection at the heart of mentorship while expanding who gets to participate.
For creative leaders, that means being intentional about creating the conditions where mentorship thrives. Make it part of your culture, not an HR program. Pair senior and junior talent on projects and encourage them to exchange feedback in both directions. Create small circles or pods where peers can learn from each other. Recognize mentorship in performance reviews, not just deliverables. Use digital platforms for access but keep curiosity, trust, and generosity as your operating principles.
Mentorship is how creative culture renews itself. Whether it happens across a desk or across a screen, it remains the most human way we learn to create, lead, and grow.
In January 2025, subway riders at the 59th Street-Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan noticed a surprising new addition: spiked metal partitions between each fare gate. Some commuters called the partitions silly and foolish. Others said they were a waste of money.
Over the past nine months, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has rolled out the same spiked partitions to 183 stations across the subway network, with more on the way. Like spikes on a handrail prevent people from sitting on it, these metal screens (which the MTA calls sleeves) are designed to prevent people from hoisting themselves over the turnstiles. Theyve also turned what was already an inhospitable system into an actively hostile public space.
The MTA argues it has good reason to take these measures. About 40% of the agencys operating budget comes from fares and tolls, meaning every tap and every swipe helps keep trains and buses running. But many riders arent paying at all. In 2024, fare evasion on the subway cost the agency around $350 million, though it topped $1 billion if you include unpaid buses, trains, and tolls.
[Photo: courtesy of the author]
At 59th Street-Lexington Avenue, the spiked partitions, which were custom-made specifically for the New York subway, seem to have worked. According to an April 2025 MTA press releasefour months after installing the mechanismsfare evasion at the station dropped by roughly 60%.
There is no way of knowing, however, if the drop is due to the “sleeves” or the other measures the MTA introduced at that station, including turnstiles with larger “fins,” and new anti back-cocking mechanisms to prevent people from squeezing in through the turnstile without paying. It is also possible that offenders simply moved on to a nearby station that hasn’t been retrofitted with these anti fare-evasion designs.
Earlier this year, the MTA began piloting modern, glass-paneled gates at a limited number of stations, combined with gate guards now stationed at more than 200 locations. These efforts helped the MTA collect $5 billion in fare revenue in 2024, up $322 million from the previous year.
The apparent success poses two uncomfortable questions: Should we accept a fortified, unwelcoming subway if it really does deter people from jumping the turnstile? And is there really no better way to get people to pay?
[Photo: Marc A. Hermann/MTA/Flickr]
A worldwide challenge
Fare evasion is a global headache with no standardized solution, and different cities have taken different approaches to stopping it. In Paris, officials have relied on a growing army of fare inspectors and hefty fines. Transport for London, which lost more than $170 million in revenue to fare dodgers in the capital city in 2023, is considering adding AI-enabled, extra-tall ticket barriers to trap offenders. Meanwhile, Queensland, Australia, recently slashed train and bus fares from as much as $6.23 to a flat 50 cents, and fare evasion plummeted.
New Yorks MTA, for its part, has mostly favored enforcement. In 2022, it convened a Blue-Ribbon Panel on Fare Evasion to recommend solutions. The panels report suggested promoting the citys Fair Fares program (which offers half-priced MetroCards to low-income residents), partnering with public schools to teach students transit etiquette, redesigning fare gates as part of a 2025-2029 Capital Plan, and posting gate guards to deter evasion.
A spokesperson for the MTA told Fast Company that the agencys aggressive strategy stems directly from those recommendations, but declined to specify whether any education and outreach campaigns have been implemented so far.
For now, the retrofitted gates and guards appear to be working: Subway fare evasion across the entire network dropped by 30% in 2024.
[Photo: STraffic/MTA/Flickr]
How far do we have to go?
The New York City subwayrat-infested and delay-prone as it may beis one of the citys most vital public spaces. It may lack the allure of a park, or the quiet of your local public library branch, but it brings millions of people together across class, race, and borough lines.
The subway is known as a place that generates community, where you see people different from you, sometimes even start conversations, says Setha Low, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. Making it into a fearful environment, making it less inclusive, isnt going to help the MTA get people back on the subway.
The spiked walls havent yet reached Lows local station in Brooklyn, but when shown a photo of the spiked sleeves at Barclays Center, she drew comparisons to the kind of barbed wire shes seen across Latin America, where she conducted fieldwork for 15 years.
The problem, she says, isnt just that the measures look hostile, its that they reflect a growing citywide aesthetic. Hostile architecturea term describing exclusionary urban design like spikes on flat surfaces or benches with dividers to deter sleepingfirst spread across New York in the 1970s, when the city was facing budget crises and rising homelessness. Over the past decade, it has multiplied and morphed.
Inside Moynihan Train Hall on Madison Avenue, and in Low’s own subway station in Brooklyn, benches have disappeared altogethera strategic decision from the city to prevent unhoused people from sleeping in public spaces (see also the MTA’s new leaning benches). I walked 30 blocks down Madison Avenue the other day, and there wasnt one place to sit down, Low says.
From the citys perspective, these new subway barriers are efficient. They maintain order, improve safety, and protect revenue. But that logic comes with a cost. I think its legitimate to think about the psychological impact of how we internalize these surveilled, parceled structures all around us, says Jon Ritter, a clinical professor of architecture at New York University. Assuming [the spiked partitions] work as deterrents, it raises the question: How far do we have to go to achieve the public good of fare collection?
[Photo: Wells Baum/Unsplash]
Going beyond infrastructure
Not everyone jumps a turnstile for the same reasons. A 2019 study of the Transantiago system in Santiago, Chile, grouped fare evaders into four types: those who evade as protest, those who do it because the risk is low, those who see no value in paying, and those who simply forget.
Milad Haghani, a researcher and principal fellow in urban resilience and mobility at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed his own understanding of the factors at play. These include how difficult it is to physically evade a fare, the quality and reliability of the service, the cost of the fare relative to the local minimum income, and the perceived likelihood of getting caught.
The MTAs current strategytaller gates, spiked partitions, human guardsaddresses only the first factor: physical difficulty. It makes fare evasion harder, Haghani says, but it doesnt address why people choose to evade in the first place.
He adds that when service quality is poor, people often justify evasion as a form of protest. And in New York, where locals regularly complain about unreliable weekend service or aging infrastructure that floods during storms, the MTA is giving them plenty to protest about. (Did we mention the rats?)
In July, the MTA celebrated a small victory after its spring survey reported 57% subway rider satisfactionits highest since 2022. What was left unsaid, however, was that more than 40% of riders remain dissatisfied. If the goal is genuinely to reduce fare evasion, says Haghani, physical enforcement has to be paired with improving service and restoring trust. Passengers are far less likely to avoid paying when they believe the fare is fair.
Until the MTA finds a way to improve its service and restore trust, the spikes might have to do. But if they also stop New Yorkers from feeling like the subway is a safe and inclusive space for everyone, there might be an even bigger price to pay.
As a mother of two little girls, I expected that puberty would be a tempestuous time for our family, full of emotional roller coasters and bodily changes. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.
When my oldest daughter turned 9, her pediatrician said she could get her period within the year. I was blindsided: When I was growing up, girls expected to get their periods around the age of 13. I rushed out to buy a pack of menstrual pads to keep in her backpack, in case she gets her first period in school, and ordered The Care and Keeping of You, the iconic puberty guide that has sold 8 million copies since it debuted in 1998.
I’m far from the only flummoxed parent. Generation Alpha girlsthe oldest of whom are just entering middle schoolare expected to go through puberty between six months and two years earlier than their parents. But don’t panic. Help has arrived in the form of Less Awkward, a company that provides resources that allow children, parents, and schools to better navigate puberty.
Less Awkward is the brainchild of a pediatrician, Cara Natterson, who has written extensively about puberty (including serving as the medical consultant on The Care and Keeping of You), and a puberty educator, Vanessa Kroll Bennett, whose career has been devoted to helping girls build self-esteem.
In the past, parents could look back at their own adolescence as a guide for what might happen to their children, but today’s kids are experiencing adolescence differently than any previous generation. And while there’s an abundance of resources for early childhood, it’s far harder to find reliable information about how to navigate this brave new world of puberty.
Many parents today are looking for reliable parenting information beyond books, and through other forms of media such as apps, podcasts, Instagram, and TikTok. Dr. Becky Kennedy, a guru for parents of young children, has mastered the art of speaking to Gen Z and millennial parents on social media and through her new AI-powered app that provides parents with answers tailored to their specific problems. Natterson and Bennett are following a similar playbook, picking up where Dr. Becky leaves off, and guiding families through the transitions children will face between the ages of 8 and 18. It’s an approach that seems to be resonating with parents, who are willing to pay to use these services.
Natterson and Bennett started Less Awkward in 2021 as a podcast called This Is So Awkward. And as their audience has grown to more than 2.5 million listeners a month, so have their ambitions.
They recently turned Less Awkward into a full-fledged resource for parents with puberty-aged children, including a $10 a month hub that gives them access to videos, workshops, and even an AI chatbot that allows parents to ask specific questions and receive answers trained on Less Awkward content. And this year, they’re expanding into schools with a curriculum meant to improve the way kids learn about puberty.
Given the relative lack of resources for parents of tweens and teens, Natterson and Bennett want to provide trustworthy, evidence-based advice that is tailored to the very unique circumstances today’s kids are facing. But it turns out, this is also a recipe for a new kind of parenting business. “There is this wide open lane,” Bennett says. “We wanted to fill it quickly because we believe we can change a child’s trajectory if we can surround them with empathy and community during these years, rather than ignoring or judging them.”
The Brave New World of Puberty
Over the past five years, the media has been flooded with unsettling stories about how puberty is shifting earlier. In 2022, The New York Times reported that girls were developing breasts as young as 6. Last year, NPR described how more girls were getting their periods before the age of 9. Parents everywhere began to panic.
Doctors have been observing this trend for several decades now. In 1997, Marcia Herman-Giddens, then a physician’s associate in the pediatric department at Duke University Medical Center, published a longitudinal study of 17,000 girls, which found that they were hitting puberty at the age of 10, a year earlier than girls in the 1960s. Many studies since have found that all over the world, puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s. We see a similar pattern, though less extreme, in boys.
Researchers don’t fully understand why this is happening. But newer studiesthe ones which newspapers have covered in recent yearssuggest that earlier puberty may be the result of obesity, childhood stress, and the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals in our personal care products. All of this set off alarm bells.
As puberty experts, Natterson and Bennett are very familiar with these studies. But as they saw the panic this news provoked among adults, they were concerned about how little attention people were paying to the kids going through this new experience of puberty. “There was so much Monday morning quarterbacking about what’s causing this earlier puberty,” Bennett says. “What we cared about was the 45 million kids going through puberty right now. They need reliable information from adults who aren’t freaking out.”
When they looked around, they couldn’t find many resources for parents and kids trying to navigate these years. Natterson, who helped write the updated version of The Care and Keeping of You, arguably the most influential puberty guidebook on the market, believed that families were craving more knowledge and guidanceparticularly since puberty itself is evolving. But while there is an abundance of resources about each stage of early childhood, there are relatively few resources for tweens and teens. “The parent industry drops kids like hot potatoes after kindergarten,” Natterson says.
Natterson and Bennett have theories about why this is the case. For one thing, many adults today dealt with the trials of puberty on their own, without much support from their parents or communities, so they assume their job is to distance themselves from their children during these years. There are aso many cultural stereotypes that teenagers are intolerable, prone to violent mood swings, and rude to adults. Even some doctors and psychologists avoid working with adolescents. “It’s an intimidating stage of life,” Bennett says. “It’s unpredictable. And people are scared of dealing with young people’s reactions.”
Dr. Rebekah Fenton, who specializes in adolescent medicine (and has no connection to Less Awkward), observes that many pediatricians are not very comfortable speaking with teens, and she wishes there were more resources for them to learn how to speak with older patients. “When we’re dealing with older children who are seeing changes in their own bodies, we really should be having conversations with them directly,” she says. “But there’s a gap in our training when it comes to learning how to speak with teens.”
Making It Less Awkward
Less Awkward began as a pandemic project. In 2021, in the midst of the lockdown, Natterson and Bennett poured their energies into launching a podcast targeted at parents called This Is So Awkward. They began by covering the basics of puberty today, like when a girl can expect to get her period, how to talk to tweens about sex, and why kids experience emotional swings.
The show quickly developed an audience, racking up hundreds of thousands of listeners, and Natterson and Bennett began to tackle more complex and nuanced questions about the sociocultural impacts of earlier puberty. For instance, even though girls’ bodies are developing faster, they are not more emotionally mature; yet other people might sexualize them because they look older than they are. “When strangers on the street are sexualizing 9-year-olds, this has an impact on their mental health and self-esteem,” Bennett says. “But we don’t need to assume that young girls are going to have these negative outcomes. There are plenty of things we can do to intervene.”
[Cover Images: Less Awkward]
Soon, Natterson and Bennett were flooded with requests to conduct workshops at schools and other organizations. It wasn’t long before they couldn’t keep up with these requests. Their solution was to write a book so they could get their ideas into the hands of more people. In 2023, they published This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained. It explains the science of puberty as well as covers their approach to parenting, which is all about staying connected to children during this period and creating spaces for conversation.
Fenton believes it is critical to offer parents and kids more information about puberty and thinks it is good that Less Awkward is creating resources that are easy to digest. “The main resource families have access to these days is books, and many are very research-heavy rather than practical,” she says. “This information needs to be in a form that parents and children will be able to receive it, like social media posts, podcasts, and videos.”
Now, Natterson and Bennett are thinking about how to make their content accessible across even more formats. They’ve spent the last few years building “The Hub,” a website that makes it easy for parents to access all of the Less Awkward content, organized by theme, at a price of $10 per month.
If a parent is trying to help their child deal with acne or a friendship problem, they can search for the topic and find everything from short social media videos to long-form podcasts that address the issue. They’ve also built an AI tool on the site that is trained on all of Natterson and Bennett’s work, allowing parents to ask more specific questions and get Less Awkward-approved answers, tailored to their situations.
This approach is similar to Dr. Becky Kennedy, who became a guru to millennials during the pandemic when she started posting short-form parenting advice videos on Instagram and TikTok. This blossomed into a book called Good Inside, and more recently evolved into an AI-powered app that answers parents’ questions on the go, using Kennedy’s methodology.
Beyond the book
Natterson and Bennett are now taking their content a step further and bringing it to schools. There isn’t a standardized sex education curriculum that schools across the country use today, and there is a lot of variation in terms of what content they cover. But broadly, many educators aren’t being equipped to handle the complexities of puberty in 2025from the fact that it is happening sooner to the ways that technology is impacting childhood.
[Screenshot: Less Awkward]
They’ve launched a school-based health education course called That Health Class that provides teachers with the tools to educate kids from fourth grade to high school. They’ve tailored the content to each age, and go beyond biology to consider the sociocultural aspects of puberty. Fifth graders will learn about physical anatomy and periods, but there are also modules about body image, social media, and consent in relationships. By the time kids get to eighth grade, there is a module about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and how to prevent them. “Sex ed is not reliable if its outdated,” Natterson says. “We’re trying to offer relatable content in whatever form a kid and their trusted adults can best receive it.”
The curriculum comes with decks and videos that teachers can use in the classroom, as well as professional development content for the educators. And it also gives access to The Hub, so parents can view parallel lessons, allowing them to understand what their childrenare learning and engage them in conversations. “The kids need to be educated about modern puberty, but so do teachers who are teaching them,” Natterson says.
While Fenton applauds Less Awkward for helping to spread knowledge about puberty and make the concept less terrifying, she hopes theyand other puberty educatorscontinue to make a lot of their content free. “I’m always a little worried education is available to parents who have the resources, even though every parent needs it,” she says. “We should be trying to make as much high-quality, reliable information as possible free.”
If there’s one message that Bennett wants people to take away from the whole Less Awkward approach, it’s that puberty doesn’t have to be such a difficult time for children, parents, and their teachers. In her experience, it can also be a very rich time of connection between children and their parents, laying the foundation for a deeper lifelong relationship. But to get there, we need to rewrite the cultural narrative about puberty. “We all have baggage and trauma from these years,” Bennett says. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. We can rewrite the script.”
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is ready to spill the tea in a new newsletter.
Called The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe, the revamped newsletter for the popular morning show on the network that will soon be called MS NOW (the name change is official on November 15, the network says) took its inspiration from the world of print magazines. It’s designed to be part of a larger flywheel to grow and connect with the show’s audience.
We wanted something that was visually arresting, that was simple, elegant, and that people could read and get insight from, Scarborough tells Fast Company.
[Image: courtesy The Tea]
The newsletter will be sent in the early afternoon, Monday through Friday, and feature daily, original illustrations from illustrator Natalie Sanders. Scarborough says if the secret to Julia Child’s cooking is butter, butter, and butter, the secret to the newsletter will be white space, white space, and white space. This isn’t meant to be a dense newsletter.
I dont want picture, block of text, picture, block of text, picture block of text, Scarborough says, adding that editor Graydon Carters work at Vanity Fair and the newsletter Air Mail was a bit of an inspiration for me.
I liked how he still focused on the visual, he says.
As MSNBC’s outgoing parent company, Comcasts NBCUniversal, splits into two, its cable portfolioconsisting of MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, E!, SyFy, and the Golf Channelis becoming an independent company called Versant. That means for the first time in its 30-year history, MSNBC is operating independently from NBC News.
Per the breakup agreement, the liberal-leaning cable news and opinion network has to drop the “NBC” from its name, hence the rebrand to MS NOW, an acronym for “My Source for News, Opinion, and the World.” It has built out its own Washington bureau for news gathering and signed a multiyear deal with the London-based Sky News for international coverage, and the shows are adapting to a future in which an increasing number of people watch clips online instead of on traditional TV.
Standing on its own also means MS NOW shows will need to build deeper relationships with their audiences and find new revenue models at a time when cable subscribers continue to cut their cords. Already, the network is building a live events business as a new revenue line, and the Morning Joe newsletter shows how it’s building new digital products to be integrated with the show.
The Tea extends the Morning Joe brand into the afternoon, with each issue including one daily video from the morning’s show, and it also gives the hosts a direct line to their audience.
Subscribers will get exclusive invites to virtual town halls with Scarborough, cohosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, and others, and each issue will include a form for reader questions that the network says will be answered in future issues or shows.
Scarborough says the look of the newsletter is a bit more avant-garde than any cable news show, and considering he’s no longer working for a traditional TV news conglomerate parent company, like GE or Comcast, he’s rethinking the tone and approach he can take with the newsletter.
Scarborough says he told MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler that we’re going to be taking chances, and I can’t have people freaking out every day. He tested the network’s front office in a mock-up prototype newsletter that dropped an f-bomb in the daily quote section. The only questions they got back from the mock-up issue were technical, like about wrapping the text around the images, but there were no qualms about the expletive.
That is like, whoa, we’re not in Kansas anymore, baby, Scarborough says. I do want something that is going to be culturally relevant, politically relevant, wherever that may be, and they’re giving us freedom to do that.
He describes the mentality of Versant as that of a startup and says it’s radically different than what we’ve seen over the past 20 years.
When considering names for the newsletter, Scarborough says he and his team considered names that played off Morning Joe, like The Press, but The Tea seemed to better capture the tone he was going for.
Everybody said, Oh no, no, no, we can’t do that. It’s not serious enough.’ I go, ‘Exactly, Scarborough says.
Across cultures, people often wrestle with whether having lots of money is a blessing, a burden, or a moral problem. According to our new research, how someone views billionaires isnt just about economics. Judgment also hinges on certain cultural and moral instincts, which help explain why opinions about wealth are so polarized.
The study, which my colleague Mohammad Atari and I published in the research journal PNAS Nexus in June 2025, examined survey data from more than 4,300 people across 20 countries. We found that while most people around the world do not strongly condemn having too much money, there are striking cultural differences.
In wealthy, more economically equal countries such as Switzerland and Belgium, people were more likely to say that having too much money is immoral. In countries that are poorer and more unequal, such as Peru or Nigeria, people tended to view wealth accumulation as more acceptable.
Beyond economics, we found that judgments about excessive wealth are also shaped by deeper moral intuitions. Our study drew on moral foundations theory, which proposes that peoples sense of right and wrong is built on six core valuescare, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, and purity. We found that people who highly value equality and purity were more likely to see excessive wealth as wrong.
The equality result was expected, but the role of purity was more surprising. Purity is usually associated with ideas about cleanliness, sanctity, or avoiding contaminationso finding that it is associated with negative views about wealth gives new meaning to the phrase filthy rich.
As a social psychologist who studies morality, culture, and technology, Im interested in how these kinds of judgments differ across groups and societies. Social and institutional systems interact with individual moral beliefs, shaping how people view culture war issues such as wealth and inequalityand, in turn, how they engage with the policies and conflicts that emerge around them.
Why it matters
Billionaires wield growing influence in politics, technology, and global development. The richest 1% of people on Earth own more wealth than 95% of people combined, according to Oxfam, an organization focused on fighting poverty.
Efforts to address inequality by taxing or regulating the rich may, however, rest on a mistaken assumptionthat the public generally condemns extreme wealth. If most people instead view amassing wealth as morally justifiable, such reforms could face limited support.
Our findings suggest that in countries where inequality is highly visible and persistent, people may adapt by morally justifying their structural economic system, arguing that it is fair and legitimate. In wealthier, more equal societies, people appear more sensitive to the potential harms of excess.
While our study shows that most people around the world do not view excessive wealth as morally wrong, those in wealthier and more equal countries are far more likely to condemn it.
That contrast raises a sharper question: When people in privileged societies denounce and attempt to limit billionaires, are they shining a light on global injusticeor projecting their own sense of guilt? Are they projecting a moral principle shaped by their own prosperity onto poorer countries, where wealth may represent survival, progress, or even hope?
What still isnt known
One open question: How do these views change over time? Do attitudes shift when societies become wealthier or more equal? Are young people more likely than older generations to condemn billionaires? Our study offers a snapshot, but long-term research could reveal whether moral judgments track broader economic or cultural changes.
Another uncertainty is the unexpected role of purity. Why would a value tied to cleanliness and sanctity shape how people judge billionaires? Our follow-up study found that purity concerns extended beyond money to other forms of excess, such as disapproving of having too much ambition, sex or fun. This suggests that people may see excess itselfnot just inequalityas corrupting.
Whats next
Were continuing to study how cultural values, social systems, and moral intuitions shape peoples judgments of fairness and excessfrom views of wealth and ambition to knowledge and AI computing power.
Understanding these gut-level, moral reactions within larger social systems matters for debates about inequality. But it can also help explain how people evaluate technologies, leaders, and institutions that accumulate disproportionate, excessive power or influence.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Jackson Trager is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Below, Zelana Montminy shares five key insights from her new book, Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction.
Zelana is a behavioral scientist who is pioneering a transformative approach to mental health and resilience. She has built a career advising and speaking for Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, and academic institutions. Her recent clients include American Express, Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Bank of America, UCLA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She appears regularly on The Doctors, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Access Hollywood.
Whats the big idea?
We live in a world that is quietly, relentlessly unraveling our attention and, with it, our capacity to think clearly, feel deeply, and live purposefully. Finding Focus is about how to come home to yourself and what matters most. Focus isnt about what we pay attention to; its about how we move through the world.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Zelana herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Focus is not about forcing attention.
Focus is about creating the conditions for attention. We treat focus like a musclepush harder, power through, tune outbut attention doesnt work that way. Its more like breath. The more we grip it, the more it slips away. Think of a snow globe. When you stop shaking it, the flakes settle. Clarity rises. Focus works in the same way. The real work of harnessing attention is not about willpower, but rather its about the conditions. Its about clearing the clutter mentally, physically, and emotionally so that your attention can finally exhale.
2. We are addicted to avoiding discomfort.
Lets be honest, most of us dont pick up our phones out of curiosity. We pick them up to escape boredom, stillness, and that quiet ache just beneath the surface. One study found that people preferred electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts. Thats how intolerable stillness has become. But if we want to reclaim our attention, we must reclaim our capacity to stay with the pause, the discomfort, the urge, because distraction isnt random. Its patterned, protective, and emotional. If we want to change it, we have to start in the discomfort.
3. Do you remember how it feels to focus?
We talk about focus like its purely mental: a task, a strategy, a checkbox. But real focus is also a state. Its a sensation, and when youre in it, you feel lit up and anchored, calm but alive. The problem is that weve been so overstimulated, scattered, and flooded with inputs that we hardly even recognize that feeling of focus anymore.
Its a sensation, and when youre in it, you feel lit up and anchored, calm but alive.
Thats why I created something called The Focus Baseline. Its a guided process to help re-attune to your own internal clarity and remember what being present feels like in your body, not just your brain. Once you feel it, you can find it again because you know what to access. That becomes your compass through the noise, chaos, and overwhelm.
4. Theres no clarity without grief.
This is the quiet truth underneath so much of our distraction. When we finally slow down, put down the phone, close the tabs, and turn off the noise, the first thing that rises is not peace. Its grief and loss. Grief over how long weve been on autopilot. Grief over what weve missed, what weve buried, and what we didnt let ourselves feel.
One reader wrote to me after finishing the book and said, When I stopped distracting myself, I realized Id been numbing the ache of being alive. Thats it right there. Focus asks us to sit with that ache, not to fix it or outrun it. In making room for it, we give that ache less power over us, and slowly, over time, it dulls. That room and that honesty are what clear the fog. Its what makes space for something real, and in that realness, we can reconnect with our attention and focus.
5. Hold focus and tenderness at the same time.
Weve been taught that focus means grit and control. But the most powerful, grounded people arent the ones who shut down their feelings to get things done. Theyre the ones who know how to hold both clarity and compassion, direction and depth, presence and heart. Thats the new frontier. Not just the laser-sharp minds that are super productive, but also steady nervous systems that can handle the task switching that comes with tender focus. We dont need more control. We need more coherence. People who can stay regulated under pressurewho can stay human under stressare the ones who will lead us forward.
We dont need more control. We need more coherence.
If your focus feels fractured, if your mind feels foggy, and if your days feel like a blur, know that youre not broken, failing, or alone. Its literally all of us, and youre responding wisely and humanely to a world that has been at odds with our biology for far too long.
But there is another way. You dont have to outsource your attention to the loudest thing in the room. You dont have to perform productivity while feeling completely numb. You can build a different rhythm that feels less like chasing and more like coming home. So much becomes possible when you quiet the noise inside and out and return to your life. Stay grounded, stay human, and above all, stay close to what matters.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Two decades of coaching leaders and developing myself as a leader have taught me a key lesson: Leadership isnt a destination. Just when you think youve reached the top of the mountain, look upyoull see another peak waiting.
The truth is, theres no secret sauce for leading yourself or others. Leadership is an ever-evolving process of learning and growing. The best leaders never stop evolving.
Here are four lessons every great leader eventually learns.
1. Humility is a strength
Humility is often mistaken for weakness. In one survey, more than half of fifth and sixth graders described humility as embarrassed, sad, or shy. Adults often confuse it with humiliation.
But groundbreaking research tells a different story. Bradley Owens and David Hekman found that humble leaders dont assume success is guaranteed. They test their progress, revise plans, and seek feedback. They empower others to take initiative and celebrate team wins over personal credit.
Far from soft, humility gives leaders flexibility and strength. They avoid reacting from ego or abusing power, and instead lead from integrity, self-control, and emotional intelligence.
2. Great leaders learn from others
Strong leaders know they dont know it all. They constantly seek wisdom from others and expand their perspective beyond their own experience.
Remember the saying: If youre the smartest person in the room, youre in the wrong room.
The best leaders deliberately put themselves in spaces where they can learn, grow, and connect with people further down the path. They remain lifelong students.
3. Patience gives you an edge
Patience doesnt always get attention and it wont make any headlines, but its one of leaderships most underrated strengths. (I cover patience extensively in my new book.)
Research shows that patient people make more progress toward tough goals, feel more satisfied when they achieve them, and experience less stress and depression.
Impatient leaders tend to jump to conclusions and act impulsively. Patient leaders, by contrast, are steady and rational. In conflict, they listen first, respond calmly, and diffuse tension. That kind of presence builds trust and resilience in teams.
4. Self-awareness is nonnegotiable
In a study reported by Harvard Business Review, teams with less self-aware team members made worse decisions, coordinated poorly, and struggled with conflict compared with teams led by self-aware individuals.
Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Leaders who cultivate it see the bigger picture, regulate emotions, and empathize with others. As emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman put it:
If your emotional abilities arent in hand, if you dont have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you cant have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
In closing, remember: Leadership is about committing to the climb. And heres the real test: You dont prove your leadership on the easy days when everything goes smoothly. You prove it in the moments when your patience is tested, your humility is questioned, and your self-awareness is the difference between escalating a conflict or inspiring a breakthrough.
Keep climbing. Keep growing. The best leaders arent defined by the peak theyve reached, but by their willingness to take the next step.
Marcel Schwantes
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
On a recent flight, I watched a woman try to sneak an oversize briefcase and suitcase onto the plane. When challenged, she waved her boarding pass at the gate agent and declared, Do you see what that says? pointing to her top-tier status. That means I get to do what I want.
Her sense of entitlement was staggering, but familiar. Leaders of organizational transformation, such as major digital/data analytical capability overhauls, or launching a new set off offerings across the globe, often cling to equally delusional rationalizations. And just like that traveler, their self-justifications backfire.
The odds of transformation success are already dismal: 70% to 80% of efforts fail. While external forces can derail even the best-laid plans, more often its leaders self-inflicted fallacies that undo their own initiatives. Ive identified five particularly destructive fallacies that appear again and again. Recognizing them is the first step. Choosing better responses is the only way through.
1. The Myth of the Mandate: Repeating Yesterdays Wins
Justification: Ive done this before, and I was hired to do it again.Reality: Past victories offer wisdom, not formulas.
Many leaders believe their résumé is a ready-made solution. They assume that because a strategy, campaign, or turnaround worked once, it should work again. A consumer-products executive I advised had saved a skincare brand with a precise campaign. When he joined a tech firm, he tried to cut-and-paste the same formula. The market, customer base, and competitors were different, and the approach failed miserably.
The danger of this fallacy is that it hides behind genuine strength. Leaders should use their experience, but if they impose it as a mandate, they miss the nuances of the new context. Teams sense the mismatch, and enthusiasm drains as people see yesterdays playbook failing on todays field.
The antidote: Treat mandates as invitations, not marching orders. Start by studying your new environment as if you were an anthropologist: walk the halls, ask questions, listen deeply. Instead of asking What worked last time? ask What does this context demand? Extract principlessuch as how you built trust or navigated resistancefrom your past, but resist the temptation to replicate recipes. Thats how you turn past wisdom into present credibility.
2. Excessive Tolerance: Making Change Optional
Justification: Im sure theyll get on board eventually, we just need to give them time.Reality: Some people have no intention of getting on board.
When leaders become exhausted, confrontation often feels harder than compromise. Deadlines slip, underperformers are excused, and resistance festers. Employees learn quickly that change is recommended but not required.
The costs are steep. Accountability erodes, peers resent double standards, and even those committed to change begin asking, Why should I bother if others arent held to it?
The antidote: Sharpen accountability and send clear, early signals. Use symbolssometimes tough onesto show that the urgency of now is real. Dashboards of metrics tracking progress and regressions are common. Sometimes removing long-tenured leaders whose behavior contradicts the change is necessary. When actions dont match commitments, call it out. Consequences matter. Research on loss aversion shows that people fight harder to avoid losses than to gain bonuses. That means accountability must accompany rewards.
Yes, it will feel lonely. Yes, you may lose popularity. But credibility depends on consistency. Tolerance masquerades as empathy, but it undermines urgency. Leaders who name and enforce consequences create trust, because people know the rules apply to everyone.
3. Settling For Dysfunction: Accepting the Wrong Norms
Justification: It is what it is. With time, people will come around.Reality: Without sustained pressure, dysfunction becomes the new normal.
One COO I worked with entered his role determined to challenge entrenched practices. But when resistance persisted, his frustration grew. Eventually he lost his composure in a board meeting, mirroring the very volatility of the previous CEO hed been hired to replace. Employees sighed, At least with the old guy, we knew what to expect. Instead of disrupting dysfunction, he had absorbed it.
This rationalization is subtle. Leaders begin doubting their instincts: Maybe its me. Maybe Im asking too much. Surrounded by colleagues who shrug and say Rome wasnt built in a day, leaders can slowly adopt resignation as their operating norm.
The antidote: Stay differentiated. Make time to decode the unhealthy patterns you seewhy do meetings after the meeting carry more energy than the actual meeting? Why does feedback trigger overreaction? Then encode what should be trueoptimism, accountability, or healthy debateand measure progress against it. Even incremental wins reinforce hope and prevent you from being seduced into complacency.
Transformation requires leaders to behave differently than the culture they inherit. Settling into dysfunction might feel like relief, but it heralds surrender.
4. Dismissing the Devil You Know: Protecting the Wrong People
Justification: She may not be perfect, but I cant afford to lose her now. Better the devil you know.Reality: The devil you know is still the devil.
Few decisions are harder than removing a long-tenured executive. Leaders justify delay by citing loyalty, sunk costs, or fear of disruption. But keeping misaligned leaders is corrosive. It demoralizes others, who see that performance doesnt matter. It consumes disproportionate time and energy. And it erodes credibility, as people conclude the leader lacks the courage to act.
The antidote: Evict the devils. Not everyone should make the journey. Leaving someone in a role they cannot succeed in isnt compassion, its cruelty. It sets them up for failure and broadcasts to everyone else that standards are optional.
Yes, exits are painful. But acute pain from a tough decision is far better than chronic pain from avoiding it. Free yourself to focus on people already predisposed to advance the vision. When you remove dams, momentum flows again.
5. Reporting Enmeshment: Confusing Emulation with Growth/h2>
Justification: Weve been a great team for years, and shes now ready to succeed me.Reality: Long-term reporting relationships often breed co-dependence, not development.
Mentoring is essential. But when a promising leader spends too long in one bosss orbit, they risk becoming a replica rather than an original. Ive seen organizations elevate successors who sound and act just like their predecessor, only to find that more of the same isnt what transformation requires.
Enmeshment feels safe but creates blind spots. It can also choke off opportunities for broader growth. Without varied assignments, leaders stagnate, lacking the agility transformation demands.
The antidote: Move talent around, early and often. Diverse experiences stretch leaders styles and voices. Assign high-potentials to struggling business units, rival functions, or cross-border roles. The more of the organization they see, the strongerand more authenticthey become. Emulation is admirable, but growth requires mobility.
Choosing the Path of Progress
Transformation isnt undone by markets alone. More often, its these rationalizations, comforting stories leaders tell themselves, that derail progress. The woman at the airport thought her special status exempted her from the rules. Leaders often think the same.
But leaders who resist these fallacies, and instead choose accountability, contextual wisdom, differentiation, courage, and mobility, create transformations that last.
The costs of indulging rationalizations are dire: wasted time, lost credibility, and failed change. The benefits of escaping them are equally profound: resilient organizations, energized people, and futures worth building.
Dont let the justifications win.
The announcement came suddenly on Thursday. A Fortune 500 technology client needed an interim CFO immediately. Its previous executive had departed unexpectedly, leaving a $2.3 billion merger and reorganization in limbo. By Monday, Denise, the number two finance executive, occupied the interim CFO post. She faced 10,000 skeptical employees and a board expecting miracles.
Interim leadership has exploded: The number of Fortune 1000 companies that have used an interim CXO has increased 117% since 2022. Yet most leaders enter these roles unprepared for the unique demands that await.
Not only do these leaders suffer, companies do as well. When leadership transitions fail, organizations face a 20% higher likelihood of losing direct reports, experience 20% lower employee engagement, and incur replacement costs up to 10 times the executive’s salary. I’ve helped several interim executives land the job: here’s what worked.
In this piece, paid subscribers will learn:
Five tried and true strategies interim executives can use to land the job
The questions they should ask to assess their performance
Common pitfalls to avoid
1. From Methodical Relationship Building to Accelerated Trust
Unlike executives afforded the luxurious nine months before performance expectations kick in, interim leaders face immediate scrutiny. Organizations typically place them during crises that don’t afford more reasonable onboarding runways. If externally hired, their high fees create financial pressure for quick returns.
It can take months to build relationships, and understand where the problems in an organization lie. I worked with an interim COO at a manufacturing company who cracked this code. The COO and a small team conducted 20-minute interview sessions with 70% of the 350 stakeholders over a two week period to map the real power structure of the organization. This allowed him to identify needed wins neglected by the prior COO within 18 days.
The learning: dont assume people with big titles have the deepest and most impactful influence. Here are some questions to surface needed relational information quickly and accelerate trust building:
Who are the three most influential people beyond the org chart?
What’s the one thing everyone complains about, but no one fixes?
Which relationships will make or break my first initiative?
What unspoken rules govern how decisions really get made?
2. From Holistic Solutions to Getting Traction with Visible Wins
Instead of focusing on holistic solutions that include too much at once, getting traction in a few critical areas through visible and well-timed wins can take you to the finish line of landing the big role. These wins must coincide with high visibility, broadly supported parallel initiatives, and experience minimal disruption.
As an example, an interim CHRO I worked with in a rapidly growing global Fortune 500 retailer was appointed to stop a talent hemorrhage in a flagship brand. The loss of recently hired talent was causing confusion, communication problems, and erroneous product assortments being sent to stores. Sales were suffering and internal teams started blaming each other for the errors. There were several areas across the company that needed to be addressed, but the CHRO honed in on what was underneath her control: onboarding new talent.
The existing onboarding program for employees was expensive, lengthy, and outdated. However, a full redesign of the program would have taken eight months and rolling out the program would have taken another year. Instead, the CHRO and her new team laser focused on redesigning a module for field and merchandising employees: the employees who could make the most impact in fixing the organizations problems.
The team transformed the 21-day onboarding program, which had a 23% dropout rate, into an efficient 10-day program with an 8% drop rate. The program also trained new hires in the field more efficiently on how to communicate with product decision-makers in merchandising.
The result: better product assortment and sales for the brand, more collaborative relationships across merchandising and field organizations, and an improvement of 15% retention in the onboarding program. All of this was done within the interim CHROs tenure, over the period of a month without disruptions, and was universally celebrated as an all around win.
Well-timed wins to focus on can be easily identified with some simple questions:
What’s causing the most visible pain across departments?
Which broken process would everyone celebrate fixing?
What improvement would make my biggest skeptic an ally?
Where can I demonstrate competence without threatening existing structures?
3. From Moving Quickly to Progressive Decision-Making
I often observe new leaders put immense pressure on themselves to achieve something quickly, as a means of demonstrating their worth. Many times this leads to catastrophic overaction.
An interim CTO inherited a cybersecurity software product failure crisis that resulted in a public customer backlash and a steady quarterly profit loss of 45%. Instead of a five-alarm fire reaction, he chose a graduated approach. His 30-day plan included an initial round of tactical fixes, while continuing to gather intelligence and keeping open lines of communication with both customer and investment communities.
By day 60, armed with data and buy-in, he unveiled a short-term strategy to fix the points of failure using customer feedback to improve security and user intuitiveness. For those existing customers that participated and were pleased with the new softwares performance, discounts and incentives were provided through a new program. Overall, the CTO mitigated an initial potential profit loss of 34% and increased sales steadily 20% per quarter thereafter. Both metrics fed into a longer-term strategy that was being developed in parallel.
Hitting pause on moving hastily allows you to step back and ask what decisions can be made incrementally for progressive success? Questions that can help are:
What decisions are easily reversible if wrong?
Which stakeholders must I consult before irreversible changes are made?
How can I test hypotheses on small scales first?
What data moves me from tactical to strategic decisions?
4. From Steward to Serious Candidate
Interim executives are often perceived as more stewards of the status quo, seat warmers, until the permanent executive arrives. To avoid this pitfall, I recommend taking two precautions.
Buffer risk by coalition building: Denise’s tech company merger carried enormous risks stemming from clashing cultures. Rather than freezing at the face of this risk, she identified 12 “culture carriers,” advocates from both organizations, forming an integration advisory committee, who became the companys informal culture coalition. The merger, projected for 22 months, was completed in 18 and considered widely as a success.
Role clarity negotiation focusing on management success: Because interim executives are automatically given shorter-term objectives as a test-drive strategy before being offered the permanent spot, I advise interim leaders to ask for more.
By actively working with sponsors to clarify the longer-term expectations of the job, interim leaders can make headway on demonstrating their managerial skills and ability to deliver on longer-term goals.
One interim CFO I advised drafted her own ideal CFO description of the role and what would be required of her so she could clarify what impact she could make if she were operating as the full-time, permanent CFO. She reviewed the description with her board sponsor and documented weekly progress reports with this criteria after their meetings. This created transparency about both short- and long-term operational plans and their intended strategic outcomes. This systematic communication transformed perceptions of her as a placeholder executive to a proven C-suite ready leader within three to four months. By month six, she had landed the job.
Demonstrate your abilities by asking the following:
What evidence can demonstrate my ability to perform in a longer-term capacity?
How do I maintain momentum while navigating the potential Caretaker perception?
What three initiatives warrant acceleration versus transformation?
What’s my exit strategy if the role doesn’t convert?
5. From Shifting Assumptions to Reputation Intelligence
Two to three months in, stakeholder misperceptions crystallize but haven’t hardened. This critical window is the perfect opportunity for course correctionyet most operate blind to ones internal reputation.
Dr. Chen’s cautionary tale illustrates this perfectly. As acting head of medicine within a highly esteemed healthcare institute, she delivered strong financial results with her CEOs support yet remained oblivious to her profound unpopularity amongst peers and her teams. When a permanent appointment seemed imminent, 40% of medical staff departed within six months.
A 360-feedback check would have revealed trust scores 70% below average at a time when she had a chance to turn it around. Unfortunately, this feedback was obtained in exit interviews as most knew of the strong relationship between Dr. Chen and the CEO. It took several months before Dr. Chen began to intellectually process the disparity between what the exit data showed and her CEOs exuberant support of her. Sadly, because the transition was not well supported through proper vetting and personal development, it simply became too late for the board to regain confidence in Dr. Chen as a full time candidate.
Unlike external recruitment’s gradual relationship-building, interim leaders are left in limbo. They arent given proper evaluations but people form impressions of them anyway. Companies should treat interim appointments like external searches from day one: establish formal evaluation criteria, capture feedback systematically, and reset relationship expectations immediately.
I advise leaders to get ahead of such challenges by negotiating support: 360 leadership evaluations with recommendations and follow up, 1:1 executive transition and team coaching that surfaces differing needs, values, and personalities.
Get ahead of potential reputation challenges by shifting assumptions to intelligence through these questions:
How might peers perceive me differently as their leader?
What concerns are discussed privately but not raised directly?
Which actions have been misinterpreted, under which context(s) and how?
Who provides genuinely candid feedback?
When and how should I seek feedback?
Interim does not always mean temporary if you possess a serious drive and desire to land the permanent role. If mastered, these five strategies can transform interim appointments into securing your role in the C-suite. And the rewardsboth personal and organizationalcan prove remarkable.
