Five Tune-Ups Your Company Needs in 2025

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

1. Figure out why people are giving the cold shoulder to good data.  This is not unusual. The graveyard of data science initiatives is filled with solutions that are advanced, accurate, and well-meaning yet unused.  To build a culture that can truly be data driven, leaders can do three things. First, they can identify the true pain point — a team’s real burning challenge — and identify someone to lead an initiative to determine how to fix it and influence user involvement. Second, leaders can drive adoption with executive storytelling and gamification. And third, they can identify success metrics early and work to rally teams around them.
2. Encourage people to experiment with reshaping their job roles.  There are three elements: task crafting, where employees are given opportunities to take on additional responsibilities, alter the way current tasks are performed, or drop tasks that don’t play to their strengths or interests; relational crafting, where employees enhance their job effectiveness by increasing collaboration with specific colleagues; and cognitive crafting, where employees focus on the aspects of their jobs that best align with their passions.  
3. Ask people what skills they want to master, and help them do it.  Mastery is the capacity to create a deep body of knowledge, and its foundation is rooted in micro skills — those proficiencies each of us builds up over the course of a working life. Together, they add up to a capability in a combination that is valuable and unique.  Skills are mastered through observation, repetition, and feedback.  Workers are hungry for organizational support in skill development, and they need clearer ways to demonstrate new mastery.
4. Get people back in practice with playing at work.  In good old-fashioned play, the goal isn’t to win or lose. It isn’t to achieve against an objective standard. It’s to have fun.  Contrast the intentions behind performing, practicing, and playing. When you’re performing, you’re trying to achieve excellence against a given standard. Your goal is to do as well as you possibly can. When you are practicing, you’re trying to improve your skills so that you can deliver against a given standard in the future. Your goal is to get better. But when you’re playing, there’s no judge or coach. You can engage in low-risk experimentation, capability development, and innovation. It can be awkward, but it can also be the scenario in which we learn the most.
5. Talk about whatever’s undiscussable at your organization.  Take a deep breath, because this is a hard leadership truth: Most people know that there are certain things that can’t be said at their company.  Because they violate the deep rules operating in most organizations — the unwritten understanding of what can’t be said, even in places that have surface-level psychological safety.  However, there are tools to break through the unwritten rules that make people self-censor. Leaders can convene a group of people within the organization with whom they have an established relationship, or they can develop an anonymous survey. They can ask, “What undiscussables would we discuss if we decided to discuss our undiscussables?” They can ask what the organization’s biggest follies are — things the organization says it wants or values, only to do or reward the opposite. 

And finally mind the weight you carry in your own vehicle.