Marissa Afton
Senior leaders are now asked to do hard things at a faster cadence than at any point in the last two decades. Restructures, layoffs, AI-driven role changes and return-to-office decisions all require courage, but courage delivered without humanity destroys trust faster than the original problem. The open question for boards is how to keep both at once.
Marissa Afton helps senior leaders make hard decisions, layoffs, restructures, AI-driven change, without losing the trust of the people they lead.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Marissa Afton
- She brings a published, board-ready framework for compassion paired with difficult action, set out in Compassionate Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), not a generic wellbeing message.
- She works at the inside edge of what leaders actually face right now: how to communicate restructure, layoff and AI-driven role change in a way that retains the people who stay.
- Her client base spans Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Google, Eli Lilly and Amgen, so her examples are drawn from leadership teams operating at the same scale and pressure as the buyer’s.
- She is one of the few voices on this topic with 25 years of mindfulness practice behind the management argument, which gives the material a depth of practice that pure consulting frameworks lack.
- Her recent HBR work on AI and compassionate leadership puts her ahead of most leadership speakers on the question of what changes when machines do more of the cognitive work.
Biography highlights
- Partner and Head of Global Accounts, Potential Project.
- Co-author, Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022).
- Contributing author, The Mind of the Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018).
- Recurring contributor to Harvard Business Review, including “Connect with Empathy, But Lead with Compassion” and “Using AI to Make You a More Compassionate Leader.”
- Client engagements at Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Eli Lilly, Google and Amgen.
- Twenty-five years of formal mindfulness practice, applied to executive development at scale.
Biography
Hard decisions are arriving faster, and the audience for them has changed. Boards are being asked to restructure, redeploy and let people go in the same year they ask for innovation, retention and engagement. The leaders inside that contradiction need a way to act decisively without becoming the problem they were hired to solve.
That is the territory Marissa Afton works in. As Partner and Head of Global Accounts at Potential Project, she runs leadership engagements with companies including Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Google, Eli Lilly and Amgen, and the brief is consistently the same: how do senior people deliver difficult news, drive hard change and still hold the room.
Her co-authored book Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) is the published frame for that work. The argument, also developed in her HBR pieces with Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, is that empathy on its own makes leaders worse at hard decisions, and that the discipline organisations need is wise compassion, the willingness to act on hard truth while keeping the human in view.
She brings a quarter century of mindfulness practice to the management argument, which gives her work a depth of attention that consulting frameworks typically lack. Her more recent HBR writing on AI and compassionate leadership pushes the same discipline into the next phase of corporate change, where the question is what kind of human presence still matters when more of the cognitive work runs through machines.
Key speaking topics
- Compassionate leadership and hard decisions
- Leading through restructure, layoffs and change
- The mind of the leader and mental agility
- Mindful leadership and self-leadership at senior levels
- Resilience and burnout prevention for executives
- Women in senior leadership
- Leading in the age of AI
- Building human connection in hybrid work
Ideal for
- CEOs, CHROs and senior HR leaders running restructure, redeployment or layoff programmes
- Executive leadership teams working on culture and trust through periods of significant change
- Boards and ELT offsites where the brief is to combine commercial honesty with humane delivery
- Women’s leadership programmes and senior leadership development cohorts
Audience outcomes
- A working language for combining hard decisions with humane delivery, drawn from a published HBR Press framework
- A clearer view of where empathy helps leaders and where it begins to undermine them
- Specific practices for self-leadership under pressure, grounded in mental training rather than motivation
- A perspective on AI-era leadership that treats human attention as a scarce, trainable resource
Talks
A keynote built directly from the HBR Press book, on how senior leaders deliver difficult decisions without losing trust.
Key takeaways:
- Why empathy alone is insufficient and often counter-productive at senior level
- A practical model for wise compassion in restructure, layoff and performance conversations
- How leadership teams hold credibility through repeated change
On the link between caring leadership behaviour and measurable performance in large organisations.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that distinguish high-performing leaders in caring cultures
- How candour and courage operate alongside care, not against it
- What boards and ELTs can do to make caring leadership a managed standard rather than a value statement
A leadership keynote on mental training as a strategic capability under sustained uncertainty.
Key takeaways:
- Why attention is the scarce resource at the top of the organisation
- How leaders build mental agility as a daily discipline
- Practices for sustained performance through continued change