Watch Sandra in Action
About Sandra Sucher
"We often think of trust in an ephemeral way, as a good feeling that everyone shares," says Sandra J. Sucher. "But trust is actually a skill grounded in relationship management and understanding motivations." Sucher treats trust not as an aesthetic wrapper but as the foundation of an organization's relationships with customers, employees, investors and the public, and she gives leaders a roadmap for becoming trusted.
A business executive for 20 years before joining Harvard, Sucher was a senior executive at Filene's Basement, where she authored the proposal to expand the retailer from a single store into a national chain.
Sandra's Keynote Topics
Successful leaders – at any level and in any arena – are inevitably presented with moral and ethical choices. In both our business and personal lives, we navigate a complex web of problems that often don’t have clear-cut answers. Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher knows firsthand that business leaders are often tasked with making consequential decisions on issues that may conflict with organizational goals or interests. In this presentation, based on her Harvard Business School courses, Sucher teaches participants how to navigate difficult decisions, especially those with a moral or ethical component. She further encourages managers to confront those fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral leadership and how it can be translated into action.
While it’s vital for companies to trust the AI and generative AI tools they deploy, it is just as important for stakeholders to trust in how a company is managing AI. In this revealing, interactive session, Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher outlines her renowned, research-based framework describing what trust is and how and why people trust organizations and their leaders. From there, she details recent research into how The Financial Times has built trust in the adoption of generative AI in its newsroom, offering attendees insights into what can be learned from the FT’s approach. Attendees will explore how AI adoption can be strategized, implemented and communicated in ways that will ensure a transparent, trustworthy process among employees and the public alike.
Boards are fiduciaries, which means their duty is to protect other people’s interests, generally defined as consisting of a duty of care, a duty of loyalty, and, some legal scholars would argue, a duty of candor, says Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher, an internationally recognized expert on building institutional trust and moral leadership and co-author of “The Power of Trust” (July 2021). In this presentation, Professor Sucher outlines key steps board members can take to become moral role models such as ensuring their board has the right members, that it is structured correctly, and that members are able to have intentional, open, honest and timely conversations where issues of accountability can be fully addressed.
With tens of thousands of layoffs, especially in tech, since the end of 2022, Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher cautions organizations that the negative impacts of large-scale downsizing are greater than the cost savings. In this eye-opening session, she’ll present research that shows how mass layoffs can cause potentially irreversible damage to an organization’s reputation. Today, says Sucher, news spreads much faster and corporate decision-making is scrutinized more heavily than ever before. She warns that the effects of layoffs, like damaged trust, can linger in an organization while perpetuating the myth that downsizing the workforce inherently increases profitability. Sucher’s research-backed evidence offers a vivid warning to leaders that the short-term cost savings of layoffs will not equal long-term organizational success.
When proactive steps are not taken to make workplaces more inclusive, resentment can set in among those who feel slighted, overlooked or unfairly compensated. In some cases, companies face discrimination lawsuits. Even a brand’s well-meaning choice to passively participate in a social media campaign like #blackouttuesday can reveal a level of insincerity, which may, in turn, result in public and consumer distrust. In this presentation, Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher shows participants how to create an inclusive culture that enables trust within the organization and how to ensure their brand can be trusted by those on the outside.
Trust can mean different things to different people. As Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher explains, “Trust is an elusive, even mushy, concept. Betrayal of trust, however, underpins many issues related to corporate responsibility, ethics, and diversity, equity and inclusion.” In this presentation, based on her bestselling book “The Power of Trust,” Sucher provides a four-part model for understanding trust — competence, motives, means and impact — that transforms trust from a wish to something companies and their leaders can actively manage. To become trustworthy, she says, companies must be sensitive to diverse audiences when developing and marketing products, services and technologies, and caring in their treatment of people. Highlighting her decades of research, Sucher offers audiences a roadmap for building trust or regaining it once it’s lost.
Sandra in the Media
The One Word CFOs Often Won’t Say
How Leaders Can Build Stakeholder Trust in Uncertain Times
Layoffs Surging in a Strong Economy? Advice for Navigating Uncertain Times
Election 2024: What's at Stake for Business and the Workplace?
You Messed Up at Work. What Now?
The Importance of Trust for Managing Through a Crisis
The Hidden Toll of Surviving Layoffs
How Companies Should Weigh In on a Controversy
Layoffs Can Be Bad Business: 5 Strategies to Consider Before Cutting Staff
Company-Wide Layoffs Lead to Many More Workers Quitting, Study Finds
American CEOs Are ‘Failing’ Their Workers Right Now, Says Harvard Expert: ‘We’re In a Crisis of Trust’
If You're a New Hire, You're More Likely to Be Laid Off -- a Harvard Expert's No. 1 Way to Rebound
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