Sandra J. Sucher

Sandra J. Sucher

MBA Class of 1966 Professor of Management Practice

MBA Class of 1966 Professor of Management Practice

Sandra Sucher is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and an internationally recognized trust researcher. The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, is her third book. It is based on two decades of research on global companies' best practices and in the gray areas of business—where responsibilities to investors, customers, employees, and society pull companies and their leaders in different directions. She is on the Edelman Trust Institute advisory board, collaborates with Deloitte on TrustIQ™, a proprietary tool that measures key elements of trust in major corporations and public sector organizations, and collaborates with PwC on their Trust Leadership Institute. 

At Harvard, Sandra studies how organizations become trusted and the vital role leaders play in the process. She has authored 110 business cases, technical notes, video interviews, teaching notes, and three books. Her 2019 articles on trust were featured as a “big idea” in HBR.org and her 2018 article, “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company,” was selected as a Harvard Business Review “Must Read.” Sandra’s textbooks on ethical leadership, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights, and Tools and Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course were called “a ground-breaking approach for education in business ethics.”

Sandra was a business executive for 20 years before joining Harvard. As a senior executive at Fidelity Investments, she measured customer loyalty, redesigned back-office operations, and improved the quality of service. In retailing, she authored the proposal to expand Filene’s Basement from a single-unit business to a national chain. Sandra has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and as Chairwoman of the Better Business Bureau.

Sandra’s research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Quartz, Business Insider, CNBC, NPR, Marketplace, and in Germany, Latin America, and Japan. 

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Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors

Sandra Sucher is the MBA Class of 1966 Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and an internationally recognized trust researcher. The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, is her third book. It is based on two decades of research on global companies' best practices and in the gray areas of business—where responsibilities to investors, customers, employees, and society pull companies and their leaders in different directions. She is on the Edelman Trust Institute advisory board, collaborates with Deloitte on TrustIQ™, a proprietary tool that measures key elements of trust in major corporations and public sector organizations, and with PwC on their Trust Leadership Institute. 

At Harvard, Sandra studies how organizations become trusted and the vital role leaders play in the process. She has authored 110 business cases, technical notes, video interviews, teaching notes, and three books. Her 2019 articles on trust were featured as a “big idea” in HBR.org. Her 2018 article, “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company,” was designated as a “Must Read” by Harvard Business Review; it has been followed by a 2022 update: “What Companies Still Get Wrong About Layoffs” published by HBR.org. Sandra’s textbooks on ethical leadership, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights, and Tools and Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course were called “a ground-breaking approach for education in business ethics.”

Sandra was a business executive for 20 years before joining Harvard. As a senior executive at Fidelity Investments, she measured customer loyalty, redesigned back-office operations, and improved the quality of service. In retailing, she authored the proposal to expand Filene’s Basement from a single-unit business to a national chain. Sandra has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and as Chairwoman of the Better Business Bureau.

Sandra’s research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, Barron’s, Quartz, Insider, CNBC, NPR, Marketplace, and in India, China, South Korea, and Japan. 

Featured Work
The Power of Trust
How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It

Trust is the most powerful force underlying the success of every business. Yet it can be shattered in an instant, with a devastating impact on a company’s market cap and reputation. How to build and sustain trust requires fresh insight into why customers, employees, community members and investors decide whether an organization can be trusted.

Based on two decades of research and illustrated through vivid storytelling, Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the economic impact of trust, the science behind it and conclusively prove that trust is built from the inside-out. Trust emerges from a company being the "real deal": creating products and services that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not.

When trust is in the room great things can happen. Sucher and Gupta’s innovative foundation for executing the elements of trust - competence, motives, means, impact – explains how trust can be woven into the day-to-day and the long term. Most importantly, even when lost, trust can be regained, as illustrated through their accounts of companies across the globe who pull themselves out of scandal and corruption by doing the right things right.

You can purchase the book at Amazon, Target, and Walmart, among other booksellers. 
The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights and Tools
Student Textbook

Successful leaders – at any level and in any arena – are inevitably presented with moral and ethical choices. This unique and innovative textbook is designed to encourage students and 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. Drawing on the inspiration of major literary and historical figures such as Machiavelli, Achebe, Sir Thomas More, U.S. President Harry S. Truman, and based upon an impressive array of literary sources, including novels, plays, history and biography, the book centers on four questions implicitly asked of all leaders:

  • What is the nature of a moral challenge?
  • How do people 'reason morally'?
  • How do leaders contend with the moral choices they face?
  • How is moral leadership different from leadership in general?

The Moral Leader is based upon the renowned course of the same name taught at Harvard Business School for over two decades. With an emphasis on decision-making and action, students learn to identify moral problems, to address them systematically, and to develop skills that aid them throughout their studies and their professional lives. At times challenging, insightful, and always illuminating, this book is essential reading for all serious students of leadership, management, business ethics or policy.

Visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415400640

Teaching the Moral Leader: A Literature-Based Leadership Course
Instructor Manual

This book is a comprehensive, practical manual to help instructors integrate moral leadership in their own courses, drawing from the experience and resources of the Harvard Business School course 'The Moral Leader', an MBA elective taken by thousands of HBS students over nearly twenty years. Through the close study of literature--novels, plays, and historical accounts-- followed by rigorous classroom discussion, this innovative course encourages students to confront fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral leadership. 

Using the guide's background material and detailed teaching plans, instructors will be well prepared to lead their students in the study of this vital and important subject. Featuring a website to run alongside that links the manual with the textbook and provides a wealth of extra resources, including on-line links to Harvard Business School case studies and teaching notes this manual forms a perfect complement to The Moral Leader core text also by Sandra Sucher.

Books
Journal Articles
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
Presentations
Research Summary
Trust

In this research, I aim to provide a practical orientation to trust—how to build it, how it can be damaged, how it might be repaired—grounded in my experience as an executive and in the research on organizational trust and moral philosophy. As a case researcher, I study trust qualitatively. In fact, like the person who discovered they had been speaking in prose all their life, it appears that I have been studying organizational trust for decades, both at HBS and before. I introduced this work as a “Big Idea” series for Harvard Business Review in 2019, and followed it in July 2021 with the publication of my third book, The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, by Public Affairs.

This research examines the science behind trust, grounding our understanding of why we humans trust in the first place, describing how customers, employees, community members and investors decide whether an organization or a person can be trusted. It shows that creating and sustaining trust does not come from reputation-building and PR but by being the “real deal,” creating products, services, and technologies that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not. The research also corrects a common misperception: lost trust can, in fact, be regained, and delves into the process of how to do this, including the three steps of an effective apology.  

Keywords: Power; Globalization; Leadership; Corporate Culture; Future Of Work; Innovation; Human Resources; Technology Strategy; Automation; Stakeholder Engagement; Employee Attitude; Customer Behavior; Shareholder Value; Government And Business; Impact Investing; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Change And Sustainability; Asia; Europe; South America; Middle East; North And Central America; Trust; Asia; Europe; South America; Middle East; North and Central America
Workforce Change

This research encompasses layoffs, furloughs and restructuring, global practices that affect millions of employees and thousands of companies every year. In this work I aim to replace bad practice that damages trust with good (or at least better) practice through cases, notes and articles such as “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company: Better Approaches to Workforce Change,” (HBR 2018) and “How to Make Furloughs More Humane,” (HBR Digital 2020).

This research aims to identify best practices in managing workforce change and retention, looking at a set of forward-looking companies that are inventing strong and sustainable bridges between today’s realities and the future world of work.

Keywords: Layoffs; Leadership And Change Management; Global Innovation; Strategic Decision Making; Multinational Corporations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; United States; France; Germany; Hungary; Finland; United Kingdom; Netherlands; China; Japan; Brazil
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

In this research I develop cases and articles that provide thought-provoking, real-world examples of the ways in which social identity differences emerge and are managed in the workplace, and the skills needed to constructively engage with differences to create and nurture trust. The most recent case is about Sarah Al-Suhaimi, who at 34 became the first woman to head up an investment bank in Saudi Arabia (“The NCB Capital Turnaround: Waking the Sleeping Giant”), and article “Coming Out as Trans at Work,” (HBR October 2021). Other materials include "Differences at Work," 11 mini-cases based on HBS students' own experiences of social identity challenges in the workplace, conceptual notes on the individual experience and leadership challenges of managing differences, and "Global Diversity and Inclusion at Royal Dutch Shell," a case that examines the challenges of managing differences in 100 countries around the world.

Keywords: Diversity; Equity; Social Issues
Moral Muscle

Can we get better at moral decision making? How is the capacity to exercise moral leadership developed? One answer to these questions is the notion of “moral muscle,” which is a combination of moral awareness (the ability to recognize situations that can be legitimately considered from a moral point of view), motivation for day-to-day practice, and the desire to build moral character in the long term. Moral muscle emerged from research into student experiences in “The Moral Leader,” a literature-based course on leadership I have taught for two decades at Harvard Business School (for a description, see The Moral Leader: Challenges, Tools, and Insights, a student textbook, and Teaching ‘The Moral Leader,’ an instructor manual).

This research identifies how students acquire moral muscle beginning from different starting points, and charts the paths through which moral muscle develops. The research has promise for helping managers and employees get better at making decisions with moral consequences in all the areas where trust can be built or lost.

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Ethics; Decision Making
Awards & Honors
Received the 2019–2020 Robert F. Greenhill Award.
Received the 2007–2008 Robert F. Greenhill Award.
Named a Henry B. Arthur Fellow, 2003–2004.
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