In today’s increasingly complex environment, leaders often hear two contradictory views on managing talent. One generally argues that tough times call for tough choices, so high standards and clear rules should be set and rigorously and consistently enforced for your people. Insist on hard work and dedication to excel in your market. Push the team to give 100% and “coach out” anyone who is unwilling to comply with these norms.
The other strain of advice stresses that modern employees, especially millennials and Gen Z, expect their leaders to show empathy and compassion, and even display vulnerability about their own struggles and shortcomings. Furthermore, good leaders and companies should offer generous benefits, lots of remote work, industry-leading salaries and generous PTO for mental health days while enforcing as few rules as possible. The cofounders of Basecamp wrote in their 2010 bestseller, Rework, that “Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again … Don’t create a policy because one person did something wrong once.”
If the goal is to effectively lead people, neither extreme works. Tough bosses get scorched on social media, especially on platforms like Blind or Fishbowl, which allow employees to complain anonymously about bad treatment (real, exaggerated or imagined). For instance, when Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah sent out an all-hands email at the end of 2023, praising the furniture retailer’s progress but warning that employees should expect to work long hours and “think of any company money you spend as your own,” the response was overwhelmingly negative. After several rounds of layoffs that year, surviving Wayfair employees didn’t appreciate Shah’s tough- love advice. They mocked statements such as “Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from. There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success.”
On the other hand, leaders who see themselves as empathetic and benevolent can be in for a rude awakening when employees fail to share their self-perception. Consider longtime Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who became a target of accusations by union organizers that he unfairly suppressed attempts at collective bargaining. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Schultz’s resistance to a union appears to be a matter of self-image, according to those who know him: He prefers to see himself as a generous boss, not a boss who is forced to treat employees generously.” Schultz himself wrote in his first memoir, “If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.”
Revathi Advaithi wrestles with this cross-pressure as CEO of Flex, the global technology, supply chain and manufacturing solutions company. Any contract manufacturer lives and dies on operational excellence; margins can be so thin that every penny matters. But Advaithi’s need to manage her P&L sometimes collides with her desire to protect her global workforce. She doesn’t want to forget the people on the shop floor who form the backbone of manufacturing, while still making room for experts in advanced robotics, additive manufacturing and other manufacturing technologies that improve efficiency and lower costs. In particular, she cares about preserving jobs in the United States, the country that gave her so much opportunity as an immigrant from India, which is why she takes a hands-on role with the future of domestic manufacturing. In 2022, she joined President Joe Biden’s Advisory Committee on Supply Chain Competitiveness and in 2023, the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations.
Asked about the tension around adopting new technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation, Advaithi replied, “We can’t have blinders on and say that this doesn’t exist, and this is not coming towards us. If you want manufacturing to survive and do well in countries that don’t have the free capital that countries like China provide, you have to build a very efficient, integrated combination of hardware and software that draws on the latest technology.”
‘I Don’t See It as a Zero-Sum Game'
Because Flex is a tech-driven manufacturing and supply chain company, the cross-pressure of managing output while showing empathy and concern for workers’ needs plays out most prominently around the overlap of innovation and job obsolescence.
Advaithi is clear-eyed in accepting that Flex can only compete by fully and constantly embracing new hardware and software solutions. But because she cares deeply about her people, she also puts a lot of energy into taking care of those employees whose jobs will be impacted by new, advanced manufacturing technologies. It’s easy to talk about retraining and reskilling in the abstract, but much harder when most of your 140,000 employees work in factories.
“Our factories are constantly changing because of the number and variety of customer programs we support,” she told me. “So training the same set of people to function differently has become a huge part of our everyday lives. We’ve made reskilling an inherent part of our organization.”
Globally, across about 100 Flex locations, more than 30,000 employees have enrolled in the company’s Capability Acceleration Program (CAP) to gain new technical and functional skills in domains such as Surface Mount Technology, Radio Frequency, Mobile, Optics, Plastics, Industrial Engineering, Project Management, Quality, Automation, Supply Chain Management, NPI Test & Test Development, Simulation DES and Extended Reality.
The CAP includes offerings for employees ranging from early career through senior leaders, covering fundamental, intermediate and advanced levels. Flex’s learning center in Guadalajara, Mexico, has trained more than 1,800 employees since 2023, and a partnership with 14 colleges and universities in Malaysia delivers continuing education ranging from certificate level to master’s degrees, all fully sponsored by the company.
Advaithi noted that such retraining had the added bonus of making Flex more appealing to younger workers. “Back when I started in manufacturing, it really meant standing next to large, greasy machines for 10 hours a day. Many assume that’s still the environment today, and in some places it is. That vision doesn’t appeal to younger generations who have been on their phones or tablets from a young age. But more and more, manufacturing means programming machines and monitoring highly automated production lines. That requires far more technical skills, and in many cases, it can be done from a different location, not standing in front of a machine.”
By optimizing for innovation, Flex can give younger employees a workplace environment more in line with their preferences and with more diverse career advancement pathways. Advaithi has also steered Flex to invest heavily in what she calls “cultural reskilling”— retraining its 130 general managers and factory leaders to embrace truly global collaboration. Traditionally, local executives at any global manufacturer operated in their own silos and defended their independence. But that collection-of-silos model is less and less viable as supply chains become increasingly integrated.
“We need to monitor how our Mexico team is working with our Poland team, and how our Poland team is communicating with our Malaysia team. Concentrated manufacturing is changing to more distributed manufacturing. In cases where we used to have customers in just one market, now they’re in three different markets, and we might have manufacturing locations in all three.”
While Flex’s retraining and reskilling is a global imperative, Advaithi is troubled by the decline of some American cities and towns that once offered plenty of well-paying manufacturing jobs: “I want to see small-town America have a resurgence in meaningful jobs. It’s one key to overcoming the opioid crisis and other signs of despair. I grew up here and have lived here for the last 30 years, including a lot of time in small manufacturing towns. I have a lot of friends in those communities.”
Does this constitute inappropriate favoritism? “Some people might say this conflicts with my role as CEO of a global manufacturing company, because I need to make decisions about Flex’s workforce in many countries,” Advaithi said. “But I don’t hide that one of my priorities is creating jobs in America. I don’t make any apologies for it. That priority can coexist with always making decisions in the best interests of Flex. We can create jobs in America and jobs in other countries, too. I don’t see it as a zero-sum game. I think it’s a good example of how to balance seemingly competing priorities.”
This bluntness exemplifies another key to Advaithi’s approach to people: her emphasis on consistency. “I don’t have the energy or strength to be different people in different settings. I just don’t understand people like that. I believe the person who walks in the door at home should be the same person who walks in the door at work.”
Adapted from the book The Systems Leader by Robert E. Siegel. Copyright 2025 by Robert E. Siegel. Published in the United States by Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
