Calm advice for thorny workplace problems.
Dear HBR: is a practical workplace advice show built around listener problems and careful diagnosis. Episodes bring HBR editors together with guests and academic research to sort through team conflict, career pivots, managing up, and office norms.
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Dear HBR: frames workplace frustration as a problem to diagnose, not a mood to vent. The basic unit is the listener dilemma. Someone has a boss who keeps calling outside work hours, a team that holds contempt for the rest of the organization, a military career that may or may not still fit, or an office that grew faster than its management habits. The conversation then slows everything down. Who has power here? What assumptions are being made? What would success look like for the employee, the boss, the team, and the broader organization? The show is especially strong on the difference between good intent and useful action. A manager may interrupt team members to shield them from pressure, but the advice asks whether that protection is also silencing them. A leader may want to reform a difficult team, but the answer starts with curiosity, warmth, competence, and a clear conversation with the boss about the actual assignment. Career questions get the same measured treatment. The show does not romanticize reinvention, yet it does not dismiss restlessness either. It asks what experience can transfer, what family or financial constraints matter, and what a current path may still offer. Episodes about challenging a boss are similarly cautious without being timid. The discussion recognizes that speaking up can carry penalties in always-on cultures, especially when promotion hopes depend on the person setting the pace. Guests add useful pressure to the conversation. Melanie Parrish brings the language of experimentation to tough teams. Monica Higgins looks at career pivots through education, risk, and opportunity. Liz Kislik focuses on authority, boundaries, and the practical courage required to challenge upward. HBR-adjacent episodes add related cases, including early-career office etiquette with Sarah Cooper and coaching conversations led by Muriel Wilkins. The show’s value is its refusal to treat work as only personal psychology or only corporate process. It sits between those explanations, where most real workplace problems live.
Made for: For managers, ambitious employees, early-career professionals, and anyone trying to handle conflict, authority, boundaries, or career choices with more clarity. It fits listeners who want practical advice without motivational gloss.
What sets it apart: Dear HBR: builds each episode from concrete listener dilemmas, then tests possible responses against research, expert judgment, and organizational politics. Its strength is the patient diagnostic work before the advice arrives.
Work can be frustrating. How can you get along with that maddening coworker? Figure out what your unapproachable boss really wants? Motivate your demoralized team? "Dear HBR:" is here to help. With empathy, experience, and humor, veteran Harvard Business Review editors and co-hosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn explore solutions to your workplace dilemmas. Bolstered by insights from guests and academic research, they help you navigate thorny situations to find a better way forward.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Dear HBR: makes difficult workplace decisions clearer by testing practical advice against research, competing incentives, and the realities of organizational power.
Dear HBR: turns listener workplace dilemmas into careful conversations about power, judgment, and the human mechanics of work. Alison Beard and Dan McGinn examine questions with a guest, test the advice against research, and keep returning to what someone can realistically say…
Dear HBR brings research to the awkward boss conversation you have been rehearsing in the shower.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Etiquette here is about the unwritten rules of a new job, not surface polish.
Office etiquette emerges here less as polish than as a lesson in the unwritten rules of starting a new job. The episode moves through email, meetings, and the shift from face-to-face cues to Slack, video calls, and other digital signals.
A focused coaching session about leading across tension without muting the team.
This coaching session centers on a manager caught between a white male boss and a team of people of color, and it keeps returning to a hard question: can protection also become a way of silencing people?
A practical framework for managing tough teams without turning the problem into one person.
This piece treats a difficult team less as a problem with one person than as a set of relationships and incentives that need attention. Melanie Parrish keeps the discussion grounded in curiosity and experimentation, with practical advice to ask sharper questions, confront…
A sober, useful look at whether a career move is a leap or a smart translation.
Career reinvention is treated as a practical problem here, not a pep talk. Monica Higgins talks with Dan McGinn and Alison Beard about what it takes to make a pivot when employers hesitate to back someone without a neat, linear record.
A practical guide to pushing back on authority without breaking trust.
Dear HBR listens in as Liz Kislik helps Dan McGinn and Alison Beard unpack why pushing back on a boss can feel loaded. The episode's cleanest point is simple: a boss can only decide well when they have the facts they need, so speaking up is part of making work function, not a…
Journalist Ashley Milne-Tyte interviews researchers and authors on women, money, bias, and burnout.
Isabel Berwick and FT colleagues dissect CEO loneliness, burnout and workplace power shifts.
Dear HBR is on hiatus.
A manager feels squeezed.
Tough teams come with the job of leadership.
Career pivots get harder under pressure.
Challenging authority can make people feel oddly small.