Leslie A. Perlow

Leslie A. Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. She studies the everyday practices that shape how people spend their time, coordinate with colleagues, and experience work. Her research asks what happens when a team changes those practices together, rather than expecting each person to manage competing demands alone.

In Finding Time, Perlow examined the work of a software-engineering team, including how interruptions and expectations of availability affected its members. Sleeping with Your Smartphone describes an initiative in which consulting teams arranged predictable periods away from work communications. These accounts offer a useful lens on team routines, but their settings should not be treated as proof that the same changes will produce the same results everywhere.

Perlow also wrote When You Say Yes But Mean No, about the costs of suppressing disagreement. With coauthors, she later examined meeting overload in “Stop the Meeting Madness,” arguing for changes to a team’s meeting practices rather than isolated fixes. Across these projects, a recurring question is whether the way work is organized leaves people enough room to focus, speak candidly, and do the work that matters.