“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
W. Edwards Deming
I’ve spent nearly forty years trying to make work, and the workplace, better: higher individual, team, and organizational performance, and workplaces where people can thrive. The organization I’m part of has spent a century researching and funding work on effective management practice and employer-worker relations. Across that evidence base, the message is remarkably consistent: investing in people is a competitive advantage. Treat workers with respect, give them real voice and agency, and invest in their development, and organizations tend to see higher performance, more innovation, and better business results.
So, when people say leaders don’t have a compelling business case to make that investment, or simply don’t know what works, I push back. They do, and they know. The harder question, the one I keep coming back to, is why leaders don’t do what we know works.
What’s actually standing in the way?
Two obstacles I have frequently pointed to
One is cognitive: Fixed mindsets are hard to shift. Leaders trained to think of management as command-and-control don’t update easily just because new data arrives. Beliefs formed over a career – about what “real work” looks like, what a manager’s presence is supposed to accomplish, where good ideas come from – tend to outlast the evidence that contradicts them.
The other is structural: Old narratives still treat people as costs to be minimized, not assets to be developed. And it’s not just narrative, it’s policy; capital is taxed more favorably than labor in most systems, which quietly rewards substituting machines and software for people even when investing in people would produce better returns. That’s not fate. It’s a choice we’ve made, and it can be unmade.
A new piece of research, summarized in a guest essay in The New York Times, just gave me a third answer, and a different kind of answer than the first two.
A third obstacle, and a different kind of one
A Wharton research team – Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott – just published six years of work on why some leaders resist remote and hybrid work so fiercely. They surveyed thousands of executives, managers, and supervisors on personality traits, then examined which traits predicted opposition to remote work. The finding wasn’t that resistant leaders simply distrusted employees or valued in-person collaboration more. The strongest predictor was narcissism; specifically, a desire to maintain control over employees and to preserve personal prestige and social standing.
They found the same pattern at the top of the Fortune 500, using pay packages, signature size, and photo size in annual reports as established proxies for executive narcissism. And in an experiment, simply priming leaders to reflect on the “bold, assertive ego” behind famous founders made them more likely to oppose remote work afterward, suggesting the relationship isn’t just correlation. Ego isn’t incidental to the policy. For some leaders, it appears to be driving it.
This matters because the evidence on the other side hasn’t been ambiguous. Return-to-office mandates, studied across hundreds of companies and millions of employees, have not reliably shown up as a performance lever. What they more consistently produce is higher turnover – especially among senior, skilled, and female employees – longer time-to-hire, and lower job satisfaction. Hybrid arrangements that preserve some individual deep-work time and some in-person collaboration time tend to deliver engagement and retention benefits without an obvious loss of output. The point isn’t that remote is always better. It isn’t. The point is that a surprising number of full-RTO mandates aren’t actually built on the evidence at all. They’re built on something else, and now we have a name for some of that something else.
Here’s why I don’t think this third obstacle belongs on the same list as the first two. A fixed mindset can be informed; slowly, unevenly, but evidence and experience can move it over time. A structural incentive can be argued with and, eventually, legislated or redesigned. But a policy that’s quietly serving someone’s need for visibility and control isn’t really a policy decision anymore, it’s a status decision wearing a policy’s clothes. You can’t out-argue that with another chart.
What this means for practice
If ego and status-seeking are part of what drives resistance here, then data alone won’t be enough, because the resistance was never really about the data. The useful question isn’t “how do we make the case better,” it’s how to design decisions so that evidence has more power than any one leader’s need for visibility or control.
Separate the policy question from the person. When a leader pushes for full in-office mandates, ask what specific business problem it solves – onboarding, a particular team’s workflow, a culture rebuild – rather than accepting “productivity” or “culture” as self-evident. If the answer is vague, that’s a clue the decision is about status more than evidence.
Build decision-making structures that don’t depend on one person’s preferences. Policies made by a single leader, unilaterally, are far more exposed to that leader’s psychology. Policies built through broader input, from the managers and employees who’ll actually live with them, are more likely to reflect operational needs rather than any one person’s relationship to status and control.
Give leaders other ways to feel seen. This sounds soft, but it’s practical. Some of what drives resistance to flexible work is a real, if uncomfortable, human need for visibility and recognition. Leadership development that helps people meet that need without requiring everyone else’s physical presence addresses the actual problem rather than just managing around it.
Where this leaves the larger question and how to close the knowing-doing gap
Coming back to my opening question about why leaders don’t do what we know works, I still believe in the first two obstacles…and in the slow work of shifting mindsets, unwinding decades of old cost-center thinking, and redesigning incentives around how we tax and account for human capital. But this third obstacle is a reminder that the gap between knowing and doing isn’t always a gap that better evidence can close. Sometimes it’s a gap that better evidence can’t close, because the decision was never really about the evidence in the first place.
Return-to-office policy is a useful case study precisely because it exposes a broader pattern: even when the empirical case is visible, measurable, and business-relevant, leaders may still choose the option that protects authority, reinforces hierarchy, or makes control feel tangible.
But the ego/narcissism finding also points toward a deeper structural problem, one that John Boudreau and Pete Ramstad identified and addressed in their book Beyond HR, and that I have watched play out across multiple decades. The same ego-driven leader who resists flexible work based on intuition and status would not, in most organizations, override the CFO on a capital structure decision with comparable ease. The difference isn’t that ego disappears in financial conversations. It’s that Finance has built the infrastructure to constrain it: a theory of the firm, a unifying framework, standards like GAAP, and governance systems that hold leaders accountable for the quality of their financial decisions regardless of their instincts. HR has not built that infrastructure. As a result, leaders can spend their entire careers making simplistic, myopic, or ego-driven decisions about work and people and face no meaningful accountability for doing so.
The scholarship, evidence, and frameworks exist. Unfortunately, they largely circulate within the HR profession, among people like me, talking to each other. Boards, investors, and non-HR leaders rarely engage with them. Until organizations develop the same accountability systems for decisions about people that they have built for decisions about money, the knowing-doing gap in human capital won’t close; not because leaders can’t learn, but because the systems don’t require them to.
That’s a sobering conclusion after forty years in this work. But I don’t think it’s a fixed condition. The accountability infrastructure for financial decision-making didn’t appear overnight; it was built deliberately, over generations, by a profession that agreed on what good decisions looked like and created systems to enforce them. The HR profession is capable of doing the same. The question is whether we’re willing to stop talking mostly to each other and start building the governance, measurement, and accountability systems that would make good decisions about people as non-negotiable as good decisions about capital.
Jodi Starkman is Executive Director of the Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources.
