There is no doubt that the capacity to lead change is at the top of the list of leadership competencies. But in today’s fast-paced and resource-constrained environment, many of us are delivering 100 percent on the current demands of our jobs. Not only is there little time to think about the current business, but we cannot easily carve out the time to sense new trends coming down the line or to develop ourselves further for a future move. That’s why a majority of the mangers I surveyed said that routine and operational aspects of their work consume too much of their time.

One of my executive MBA students recently told me, “I know that I have to carve out more time to think strategically about my company’s business, but all my peers are executing to the hilt and I don’t want to fall behind.” Prompted to describe her predicament, she was at a loss to explain what she should be doing increasing your outsight by redefining your job instead. She just knew that she was limiting her contribution by merely responding to the many client requests getting pushed down to her level without stopping to consider how the pieces fell together or how to prioritize directives coming down the line. But she didn’t dare stop, because everyone around her was continuing to push on the operational front.

What does it mean to take a more strategic approach to our jobs? Boiled down to its essence, strategy entails knowing what to do among the many things competing for our attention, how to get it done, and why. Unfortunately, the way most of us do our work leaves little room for this kind of strategic thinking.

Consider your typical work routine. For most of the managers I meet, the day usually begins with a quick check of the most urgent emails, followed by a round of long, routine, and often boring meetings and conference calls with the team or key customers. Incessant travel and dealing with the chronic talent shortages and high turnover of the emerging markets or the retrenchment of the more mature ones adds an unprecedented burden of overwork. With a multiplication of corporate initiatives, compliance procedures, and urgent requests from all corners, the responsibilities pile on. At the end of a long day, the inbox is full again and the requested reports (or budgets or analyses) have yet to be finished. There is little time to think about why you do what you do, about the meaning and purpose of your work beyond the immediate deliverables. It’s no wonder routine crowds out strategy.

This chapter is about how to apply the outsight principle to adopt a more strategic approach to your work, whether you are taking charge in a new role or simply stepping up to leadership within the confines of your current position. It will show you how to reallocate your time to prioritize unfamiliar and nonroutine activities that will increase your capacity to act more strategically through a wider view of your business, your group’s place in the larger organization, and your work’s contribution to outcomes that matter (figure 2-1).

Although she had built a loyal, high-performing team, Sophie had few relationships outside her group and even fewer at her boss’s level. Putting in long hours to continuously improve her operation left her little time to keep up with the latest trends in supply-chain management. Her function area, the supply chain, was also in the midst of a radical transformation as manufacturers expanded internationally, pursued strategic sourcing, and built more collaborative and sustainable relationships with suppliers. Lacking outsight on innovations in her field, she was blindsided by a proposal from her counterpart in manufacturing.

Her first reaction was defensive. The supply chain was her purview, and her results were impeccable; if a strategic review was in order, she should be the one in charge, she argued. But without the benefit of the broader, cross-functional, and external perspective that her boss expected of someone three years into the job, her ideas were discounted as parochial. Lacking greater strategic insight, she could not form a sellable plan for the future—one that took into account new industry realities and the shifting priorities of her firm.

At first, Sophie thought hard about quitting and moving to a “less political” firm. After all, she was only trying to do the right thing. It seemed to her that the only way to be heard was to spend time schmoozing with senior management instead of getting the job done. Only after some patient coaching from a senior manager did she start to venture outside her cocoon and talk to a broader set of people inside and outside the company. Reluctantly, she conducted a study to learn what other companies were doing. Next, she brought in a consultant to help her narrow down her options. This project brought her in contact with a range of people at her boss’s level, across the different divisions of the company. She learned about how they saw the business evolving. Eventually, after a 180-degree turn in how she defined and went about her job, she came to see that a very different supply-chain strategy was indeed required, one that made irrelevant most of what she had built.

Sophie learned the hard way that she was very efficient—at the wrong thing. She was not much different from many successful managers who continue to devote the bulk of their time to doing what they have learned too well. They define their jobs narrowly, in terms of their own areas of expertise, and confine their activities to where they have historically contributed the most value and consistent results. At first, this narrow role is what’s expected of them. But over time, expectations shift. To avoid the kind of competency trap Sophie fell into, you need to understand how once-useful mind-sets and operating habits can persist long after they have outlived their usefulness.

That is precisely what happens when we let the operational “day job” crowd out our engagement in more strategic, higher-value-added activities. Like athletes and companies, managers and professionals overinvest in their strengths under the false assumption that what produced their past successes will necessarily lead to future wins. Eventually we become trapped in well-honed routines that no longer correspond to the requirements of a new environment.

Consider Jeff, a general manager for a beverage company subsidiary. A star salesman before he became a star sales manager, Jeff also succeeded as country head in two successive assignments, both positions in which the general manager’s job was actually a mega–sales manager position, and the business required a turnaround. His third assignment, in Indonesia, looked like more of the same, albeit at a larger scale and scope. After two years of implementing what everyone regarded as a successful turnaround strategy, Jeff was sure that his results had put him squarely in the running for senior management. But no new assignment was in sight, and a poor performance review hinted that Jeff’s bosses were starting to expect something else from him.

What was going on? Although Jeff was still delivering results as before, his bosses now wanted to know more about his capacity to lead at a higher level. All the indicators left them doubtful.

For starters, it was becoming obvious that he was on the verge of losing his head of sales and marketing. Rajiv was the only person in the operation with the technological expertise required to develop and implement the company’s new digital strategy in its local market. The extroverted and relationship-oriented Jeff had little patience with the IT and data issues that consumed his highly analytical Indian marketing chief, and the cultural differences between the two men only made their communication harder. Rajiv saw his job as aligning new marketing technologies with business goals, serving as a liaison to the centralized brand groups, evaluating and choosing technology providers, and helping craft new digital business models. Jeff wanted Rajiv to devote more time to managing relationships with the group’s distributors, the cornerstone of his strategy, and felt that Rajiv was neglecting his sales responsibilities. Every time they spoke, the conversation ended in a stalemate. Unbeknownst to him, Jeff’s managers worried that he was ill equipped to manage the diverse teams he would encounter in a higher-level assignment.

Jeff’s bosses were also displeased by the way he routinely ignored corporate initiatives and failed to keep the brand and staff functions informed and involved. Earlier, Jeff’s superiors had shown more patience with his lone-ranger tactics, because the turnarounds he had been asked to pull off called for speedy and decisive action. Now his bosses were curious to see if he could adapt to changing circumstances. The Indonesian operation was in the black again, thanks to Jeff’s tried-and-true approach. E-commerce initiatives were forcing leaders to grapple with some of the responsibilities that typically fell to marketing, such as how to deliver brand messages directly via the web. But Jeff continued to define the local strategy pretty much in terms of sales, neglecting the views and priorities of his peers in the company’s corporate staff.

Not surprisingly, the leadership bench in Indonesia remained underdeveloped. Jeff routinely stifled his team’s development by intervening in the details of their work, “adding too much value,” as leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith jokingly describes this sort of micromanagement.² Jeff was starting to itch for a new challenge, but unfortunately, he had made himself so indispensable that there was no one ready to succeed him. Let’s analyze how Jeff had gotten himself into a competency trap.

We enjoy what we do well, so we do more of it and get still better at it. The more we do something, the more expert we become at it and the more we enjoy doing it. Such a feedback loop motivates us to get even more experience. The mastery we feel is like a drug, deepening both our enjoyment and our sense of self-efficacy.³ It also biases us to believe that the things we do well are the most valuable and important, justifying the time we devote to them. As one unusually frank, high-potential manager told me, it can be hard to do otherwise: “I annoy a lot of people by not being sympathetic to their priorities. It’s feedback I’ve had throughout my career: you work on things you like and think are important. It is a problem. It can seem disrespectful. Do I want to work on it? I should but probably never will.”

It was much the same for Jeff, who found himself solving other people’s problems over and over again. When his managers failed to build relationships with key clients, Jeff stepped in. When accounts were not settled, he rushed to the rescue. Instead of working through his team, he was working for them. “I can’t sit still if I see a problem that could have real financial consequences,” Jeff would say. “I need to hammer away at it until things get done correctly.”

His direct reports teased him for this: they made him a “Jeff’s hierarchy of needs” diagram, based on Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid (figure 2-2).⁴ Below the bottom rung (physiological needs), they had drawn another, titled “Solving problems.” Jeff liked the diagram; it reflected how he liked to see himself. When he was solving problems, his most basic needs were met: he felt valuable, decisive, competent, and in control of the ultimate outcome.

When we allocate more time to what we do best, we devote less time to learning other things that are also important. The problem isn’t just what we are doing; it’s what we’re neglecting to do (and not learning to do) instead. Because experience and competence work together in a virtuous (or vicious) cycle, when that competence is in demand, as it often is, it invites further utilization. So some leadership muscles get very strong while others remain underdeveloped.

Jeff, like many successful managers, was focusing too much on the details—particularly in his domain of functional expertise—and micromanaging his teams so that he single-handedly drove performance. What was he failing to do? A lot. He wasn’t strategizing for the more stable medium term made possible by his successful turnaround. He wasn’t taking into account the views and priorities of his corporate support functions. He wasn’t having difficult conversations with key members of his team or coaching them through the issues that got them in over their heads. He wasn’t keeping his far-off boss adequately informed. It’s not that Jeff was unable to do any of these things; he just didn’t know how to do them in a way that didn’t seem like a huge time sink.

Over time, it gets more costly to invest in learning to do new things. The better we are at something, the higher the opportunity cost of spending time doing something else. The returns from exploiting what we already do well are more certain and closer in time and space than the returns from exploring potential new areas in which we will necessarily feel weak at first.⁵ This self-reinforcing property of learning makes people sustain their current focus in the short term.

Perversely, the trap is sprung precisely because we are delivering on our results. When we are reaching and exceeding the goals our bosses have set for us, many will conspire to keep us where we are because we can be relied upon to perform. And they will justify their self-serving decision by pointing out that we have not shown enough leadership potential.

Jeff was so busy solving problems as they arose that he never stopped to put in place clear operating guidelines and performance objectives to guide his team. He failed to notice that his successful market strategy had run its course and that the operation needed a new post-turnaround direction. His constant intervention undermined the development of his key talents two or three layers below. Instead of working through his team, he was working for them. All this came at a cost: although he was working 24-7, neither his team nor his superiors were happy.

Because most of us come to define our jobs in terms of our core strengths and skills, similar versions of this story play out whenever we are asked to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. We have difficulty making the transition from work firmly rooted in our own functional knowledge or expertise to work that depends on guiding diverse parties, many outside our direct control, to a shared goal—that is, the work of leadership. The sidebar “How Do You Spend Your Time?” illustrates the importance of making this transition.

When doing our routine work, we’re asking, “How can we do the work better (i.e., faster, in a less costly way, with higher quality)?” We spend our time with our teams and current customers, or on our individual contributions, executing on plans and goals to which we have committed. We usually know what we’ll get for the time, effort, and resources we invest. We have faith that we’ll meet our goals because we are using the skills and procedures that have worked for us in the past.

When doing leadership work, we’re asking, “What should we be doing instead?” We spend our time on things that might not have any immediate payoff and may not even pay off at all. For example, we might be looking beyond our normal functions to envision a different future. Because transformation is always more uncertain than incremental progress (or decline), belief in the rightness of a new direction requires a leap of faith. We are more inclined to take the leap when the change engages us and when we buy into not only what the leaders do but, more importantly, who they are and what they stand for. In other words, to act like leaders, we will have to devote much of our time to the following practices:

In study after study over more than twenty years, MIT professor Deborah Ancona and her colleagues have consistently debunked this widespread belief about effective team leadership.⁷ They found that the team leaders who delivered the best results did not spend the bulk of their time playing these internal roles. Instead, the best leaders worked as bridges between the team and its external environment. They spent much of their time outside, not inside the team. They went out on reconnaissance, made sure the right information and resources were getting to the team, broadcasted accomplishments selectively, and secured buy-in from higher up when things got controversial. Moreover, successful leaders monitored what other teams—potential competitors, potential teams from whom they could learn and not reinvent the wheel—were doing.

Take, for example, a former BP manager named Vivienne Cox. When she took charge of a newly formed Gas, Power & Renewables group, she inherited a number of small, “futuristic” but peripheral businesses, including solar and wind energy and hydrogen gas. A neophyte on alternative energy, Cox gathered inputs from a broad group of outsiders to her group and company to analyze the business environment and to brainstorm ideas. These conversations brought to light the urgency of moving away from a purely petroleum-based business model.⁸

Cox is a classic example of the leader as a bridge between her team and the relevant parties outside the team. She chose a “number two,” who was complementary to her in his focus on internal and company processes, while she herself maintained a strategic, external, and inspirational role. She spent much of her time of talking to key people across and outside the firm to develop a strategic perspective on the nature of the threats and opportunities facing her nascent group and to sell the emerging notion of low-carbon power to then CEO John Browne and her peers. Her network included thought leaders in a range of sectors (more on this in chapter 3). She placed outsiders like her strategic adviser in key roles to transcend a parochial view. And Cox brought in key BP peers like the heads of technology and China to make sure her team was also informed by those who saw the world with a different lens.

Once she had a strategic direction in mind for her alternative-energy business, Cox activated her network to spread “sound bites” about the alternative energy industry across the company. She explained: “It can be so helpful to make a comment here, have a conversation there—it’s the socialisation of facts and ideas, creating a buzz. It’s much more important than presentations. If it works well, you create a demand for the information—they come to you to ask for more.”⁹

Another good example is Jack Klues, former CEO of Vivaki, the media-buying arm of Publicis Groupe. Publicis had consolidated many separate media operations to increase its purchasing power with the likes of Google and Yahoo and to consolidate expertise in digital advertising. The job entailed weaving together disparate talents to exploit the new economies of scale. Klues described his role: “I’ve always thought my job was to be a ‘connector.’ I see myself as connecting interesting and smart pieces in new and different ways … I was the one person about whom the other twenty media directors could say: ‘Yeah, we’ll work for him.’ And I think they all thought they were smarter than me in their particular areas, and they were probably right. But the job was about bringing the parts together. I didn’t get the job, because I knew something they didn’t know, and that something became the Holy Grail.”¹⁰

Table 2-1 outlines two contrasting roles team leaders play. When you play a hub role, your team and customers are at the center of your work; when you play a bridge role, as Cox did, you work to link your team to the rest of the relevant world. Both roles are critical. What role was Jeff playing? He was clearly a hub. But when people rate the effectiveness of leaders, guess which ones come out on top? The bridges. Leaders who focus on the right-hand column outperform the leaders on the left at nearly every turn.

No matter what kind of organization you work in, team leaders who scout ideas from outside the group, seek feedback from and coordinate with a range of outsiders, monitor the shifting winds within the organization, and obtain support and resources from top managers are able to build more innovative products and services faster than those who dedicate themselves solely to managing inside the team. Part of the secret of their success is that all their bridging activity gives them the outsight they need to develop a point of view on their business, see the big picture organizationally, and set direction accordingly.

Broad vision is not an obvious job requirement for many people, including former US president George H. W. Bush. When asked to look away from the short-term, specific goals of his campaign and start focusing on a future to which his voters might aspire, he famously replied, “Oh—you mean the vision thing?”

Although Bush derided the idea of broad vision and although execution-focused managers underplay its importance, the ability to envision possibilities for the future and to share that vision with others distinguishes leaders from nonleaders. Large-scale surveys by the likes of leadership gurus James Kouzes and Barry Posner bear out this observation.¹¹ Most people can easily describe what is inadequate, unsatisfactory, or meaningless about what they are doing. But they stay stuck in their jobs for lack of vision of a better way.

Just what does it mean to be visionary? Most everyone agrees that envisioning involves creating a compelling image of the future: what could be and, more importantly, what you, as a leader, would like the future to be.¹² But the kind of vision that takes an organization forward doesn’t come from a solitary process of inspired thought. Nor is it about Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets. It’s certainly not the mind-numbing vision statement crafted by the typical organization. The sidebar “What Does It Mean to Have Vision?” lists numerous important capabilities that contribute to true strategic vision.

Let’s examine how Vivienne Cox acquired her vision. Her prior role had been to run BP’s oil and gas trading operation according to clear-cut, BP-specified performance indicators and planning processes. In her new role, she had to decide what to do about all the bits and pieces of alternative-energy business that had sprouted around the edges of the organization and see if they might fit together. After much bridging to external sources of insight—and this included asking herself and key stakeholders whether BP should, as a big oil company, be in the alternative-energy business—she and her team started to coalesce around a low-carbon future that made sense at BP. Cox next asked, “What should be our ambition?” The conversations that ensued focused on where to compete and on what basis the Alternative Energy group might expect to win. Only much later did her group develop business plans specifying targets such as deal volume and market share.

As Cox’s example shows, crafting a vision entails developing and articulating an aspiration. Strategy involves using that aspiration to guide a set of choices about how to best invest time and resources to produce the result you actually want. Both are a far cry from participating in the organization’s annual planning process, as Roger Martin, former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has repeatedly explained.¹³ In annual planning, there is a clear process for producing and presenting a document consisting of a list of initiatives with their associated time frames and assigned resources. At best, an annual plan produces incremental gains. Envisioning the future is a much more dynamic, creative, and collaborative process of imagining a transformation in what an organization does and how it does it.

Many successful and competent managers are what I call vision-impaired. In the 360-degree assessments of the managers who come to my programs, envisioning the future direction of the company is one of the dimension of leadership competency on which most participants invariably fall short, compared with other skills such as team building and providing rewards and feedback.¹⁴ Figure 2-3, taken from a summary of feedback from 427 executives and 3,626 observers, shows the notable gap between how these managers see themselves and how the people they work with—juniors, peers, and seniors—view the managers with respect to vision. The gap between the managers’ self-perceptions of their envisioning skills and the views of their superiors is even bigger.

Asked to explain the gap, many managers say that their job is to implement what comes down from the top. They believe that strategy and vision are the purview of senior managers and outside consultants who formulate grand plans and then hand them off for execution to the rest of the organization.

Historically, strategy and vision were indeed handed down from the top. But technology has profoundly altered that neat division of labor, eliminating many of the tasks—performance monitoring, instant feedback, and reports and presentations—that were staples of managerial work even five years ago. Increasingly, executives are required to shift their emphasis from improving current operations and performance indicators to shaping a common understanding of the organization’s present environment and its desired future direction. When an empowered front line is in constant contact with customers and suppliers, and these same customers and suppliers increasingly participate in the innovation process, vision and strategy are no longer the exclusive purview of the CEO. Fast-cycle response and coordination depends on the layers of strategists beneath the C-suite. But we’ll never figure out vision and strategy if we remain shut up in our offices, as Jacob tried to do.

Kent, a division manager for a tech company that was having trouble adapting to new marketplace realities, learned this lesson the hard way. He had developed a clear and strong point of view about what his company needed to do to provide more integrated solutions for its customers and to better serve some underexploited markets. And he was determined to push his vision through the organization, damn the torpedoes. But he failed to bring people along. One day, he invited a consultant he knew well to sit in the audience as he gave his PowerPoint pitch to a cross-functional team. Kent drove through a long and complicated set of slides and was visibly surprised when his audience alternated between indifference and pushing back on his ideas.

“You heard me say some important things,” Kent told the consultant, “but everyone went to sleep. What happened?”

Admitting that the points Kent made were important, the consultant nevertheless told him why people tuned out: “You didn’t build any bridges to those who didn’t immediately agree with you.”

Years later, Kent understood what had gone wrong. “I had a vision,” he recalled, “and I was waiting for everyone else to agree. I was not going to put my vision out for revision—it would fly as it was, or not.”

Kent hadn’t realized that the quality of a leader’s idea is not the only thing people consider when making up their minds about whether to engage with the leader. Naive leaders act as if the idea itself is the ultimate selling point. Experienced leaders, on the other hand, understand that the process is just as important, if not more so. How they develop and implement their ideas, and how leaders interact with others in this process, determine whether people become engaged in the leaders’ efforts.

A simple formula summarizes what I have concluded are the three key components for success in leading change:

Process is hugely important not because results are unimportant but because most change efforts have long-term horizons and because results take time. People make up their mind about whether they want to buy in much earlier, while the initiative is still in progress and the jury is still out on its ultimate success. Consciously or unconsciously, they are looking for clues about whether the initiative will succeed and what success means for them, and they use those clues to place their bets.

So, the bulk of people’s attention is devoted to the process the leader uses to come up with and implement the idea: Was the leader inclusive or exclusive, participative or directive? Did he or she involve the right people and enough of them? What levers is the leader using, and are they the right ones? Table 2-2 shows how all the classic steps involved in leading change involve personal choices that are based on the leader’s stylistic preferences.

All of these “how” facets of the leader’s behavior increase (or erode) people’s willingness to give the leader the benefit of the doubt and increase (or erode) their faith that eventually the results will follow. In other words, people create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if they have faith in the leader, then they will cooperate and commit, thereby increasing the likelihood of success. Inexperienced leaders don’t just overly focus on the idea; they often try to jump directly from the idea to a new structure to support it without passing through the necessary phase of showing what their initiative looks like and what its desirable results may be. The sidebar “A Tale of Two Chief Diversity Officers” shows the drastically different outcomes that can result when leaders either engage their people or fail to do so.

A big part of stepping up to leadership is recognizing that of the three components of my formula (the idea + the process + you), the you part always trumps the idea and is the filter through which people evaluate the process. Your subordinates, peers, and bosses will decide whether your process is fair, whether you have the best interests of the organization in mind (as opposed to simply working to further your career), and whether you actually walk the talk.

What goes into that critically important you? Most people have been taught to think that it’s all about your management style. But style is only one manifestation of who you are, and many styles can be effective within the same sort of situation. What people are gauging instead has to do with your passion, conviction, and coherence—in other words, your charisma, the magic, indefinable word often used to describe great leaders.

Years ago, management professor Jay Conger set out to unveil the mysteries of charisma by getting people to name leaders they found charismatic and then observing what these charismatic leaders did.¹⁶ The leaders were a highly diverse lot in appearance, personality, and leadership style. Some of the charismatic leaders were authoritarian types; others much more collaborative. Some were personable; others, like Steve Jobs, were not. As it turns out, Conger and other researchers who have built on his work found that charisma is less a quality of a person than a quality of a person’s relationships with others.¹⁷

People were seen as charismatic, Conger and others found, when they had compelling ideas that were somehow “right for the times.” Because charismatic leaders tend to bridge across organizational groups and external constituents, they are excellent at sensing trends, threats, and opportunities in the environment and therefore able to generate sounder, more appealing ideas. But as we saw above, the idea is only one part of the equation and often the least important. The other attributes of charismatic leaders, Conger and others learned, were all about the process and the leaders themselves. These attributes had to do with how and why charismatic leaders engaged followers and what the leaders found inspiring about who they were as people. Specifically, charismatic leaders have three other things in common:

Take Margaret Thatcher, for example. She is still controversial today, and many people certainly disliked her.¹⁸ But she changed the course of British history by espousing a clear and simple message that she believed in passionately and that was entirely coherent with her formative experiences and personal story.

Thatcher’s signature was her legendary skill in the art of political debate. No one could marshal the facts and figures like she did. But all her knowledge and analytical mastery wasn’t enough to explain how she managed first to stand out from the pack to break into the highest levels of government and then, as prime minister, to lead her nation through a dramatic turnaround.

What distinguished her from all the other gifted politicians around her was how she used her personal experience to crystallize a powerful political message that she personally embodied. How did she inspire people to act? How did she convey what really mattered to her? She told stories about herself. About how she learned to be thrifty and stick to a budget. About how she was taught not to follow the crowd, but rather to stick to her guns. And she, a grocer’s daughter, and a woman at that, attracted a large following of people who believed what she believed.

Did you know that she grew up in a home that had no indoor plumbing? Her father believed in austerity and made no concessions for anything not essential. This and many other formative experiences profoundly shaped Thatcher’s beliefs as a politician. She used herself as a metaphor for what she felt was missing in the United Kingdom: a sense of self-determination and redemption through hard work and delayed gratification. She made meaning of her life in a way that aligned with what she wanted the British people to understand and buy into, and it was the meaning she infused into her policies, and not the policies themselves, that got them through.

Simon Sinek, whose TED talk on leadership is one of the most viewed, calls this behavior “working the golden circle.” As he explains it, most of us attempt to persuade by talking about what needs to be done and how to do it. We think the secret of persuasion lies in presenting great arguments. Through our logic and mastery, we push our ideas. This doesn’t work very well, because we follow people who inspire us, not people who are merely competent. Instead, leaders who inspire action always start with the why—their deepest beliefs, convictions, and purpose. In that way, they touch people more deeply. Thus, the why lies in the center of the golden circle of inspiration.

Among leaders who have managed to step up, this learning process is nothing like the simpler skill-building process you might employ, say, to improve your negotiation or listening skills. It’s a more complex process that involves changing your perspective on what is important and worth doing. So, the best place to begin is by increasing your outsight on the world outside your immediate work and unit by broadening the scope of your job and, therefore, your own horizons about what you might be doing instead.

No matter what your current situation is, there are five things you can do to begin to make your job a platform for expanding your leadership:

Let’s return to Sophie, whom we met earlier in this chapter. She got into trouble because her nose was so close to the grindstone that she had no idea what was going on in her company or its markets. Nor was she privy to the political fights being played out above her, the discussions about integrating manufacturing and supply, and the factions that formed around different ways of proceeding.

The more senior you become or the more widespread your responsibilities, the more your job requires you to sense the world around you. Consider the point of view expressed by David Kenny, currently the CEO of The Weather Channel:

How does a more junior leader develop sensors? Salim, who had worked as an assistant to the president of a large division of a multinational consumer-goods company before his current assignment as the general manager of a small country in an emerging economy, attributed his success to his capacity to understand the big picture:

Of course, Salim had the benefit of a stint as assistant to the CEO, a perch from which he could observe how all the dots connected.²⁰ For those of us whose past experience has been limited to one function or business unit, the next order of priority is to find a project that broadens our vision and increases our capacity to connect the dots. Another method, as we’ll see in chapter 3, is to start working on expanding our networks.

François, for example, worked in sales for a multinational pharmaceutical firm. Although he found his job exciting, it was not so different from his previous job in another company, and he looked forward to a promotion as business unit director in sales and marketing management. Because there were no such positions available in his company, François crafted for himself three small projects that increased both his leadership skills and his reputation with his bosses. First, he organized a business meeting for peers in France, where he was based, and in Belgium. As a result, he gained the attention of the area vice president. Next, he created and led a competitive intelligence group for the French affiliate, increasing his visibility at the European level. His work on these two projects raised his profile. Finally, the European medical director named him to a cross-functional group tasked with creating a handbook on how to identify and manage key opinion leaders. His country, France, became a pilot site, and François ran the project.

Many people hesitate to take on extra work. After all, we all struggle to claw back time for our personal lives, and project work almost always comes on top of our day jobs. But when it comes to stepping up to leadership, getting experience across business lines is a better choice than further deepening your skill base within a functional or business silo. One of my students had a great piece of advice for her classmates: “We all managed to make time for our executive MBAs while still doing our day jobs. When the program ends, don’t let the day job reabsorb the learning time. Keep that time aside, and use it to evolve your work.”

The new skills, the big-picture perspective, the extra-group connections, and the ideas about future opportunities that you gain from temporary assignments like these are well worth the investment. One of my students signed up for a project to rethink best leadership practices at his company, part of an effort to increase engagement and reduce turnover of key employees. Working across the lines showed him how to have influence without formal authority and how his former work habits had stymied talent development. The experience helped him discover an interest in consulting, and he moved into an advisory position two years later.

Indeed, in a world in which hierarchical ascension is being replaced by “jungle-gym careers” consisting of lateral moves, people will progress and develop through their involvement in “hot projects.”²¹ Such projects involve you in different facets of the business and in new problems that need solving and, ideally, expose you to people who see the world differently than you do.

Robert, a senior policy expert, passionately wanted to run one of his company’s businesses and to be held accountable for its P&L. But he wasn’t sure he was ready, and he fixated on his own lack of cross-functional experience and limited finance expertise. While his boss, Steve, agreed in principle to find Robert a bigger assignment, Steve shared the same doubts. He had mentored Robert for years, and like many well-intentioned bosses, Steve maintained an outdated view of Robert as the “junior guy.”

To prove his merit, Robert only worked harder. It was a busy time for his function as the company prepared to launch an important new product. The birth of his second child had already put a big dent in his external activities, and the new push virtually eliminated any discretionary time for things like the industry conferences he had relied on earlier to stay current. But as he became more and more frustrated about his prospects, he finally changed tack. He decided to get active again to learn about and create alternatives to an internal promotion.

At first Robert wasn’t sure where to begin, as many of the external activities he had invested in before would only lead him, at best, to a bigger staff job. One thing he hit on was an industry group focused on innovations in a product niche that his company was also exploring. Leveraging what he knew about what his firm was doing, Robert volunteered to organize a panel. One of the people suggested to him for the panel was an entrepreneur named Thomas, who held the patents for a rapidly growing new product line but who lacked the big-company experience in which Robert was so well versed. They struck up a friendship, and over time, the entrepreneur came to rely more and more on Robert as a sounding board for his organizational dilemmas.

As their relationship developed, Robert came to a newfound appreciation of the extent to which his own knowledge and experience extended beyond the confines of his daily functional responsibilities. This new awareness also had a big effect, indirectly, on how Robert did his job. He became more curious about what other groups in his company were doing, started to ask different questions, became more confident about making suggestions, and reallocated the way he was spending his time to make room for the increasing scope of his external interests. The shift was noticeable to everyone around him, and with time, his boss and peers also came to value Robert’s perspective.

No amount of introspection about his strengths and preferences could have given Robert the outsight he gained, thanks to his relationships with Thomas. Ultimately, the self-image that Robert saw reflected in the entrepreneur’s eyes helped Robert build the confidence he needed to go after a line role more aggressively and more convincingly.

David, who made the transition from his job as a specialist in project finance and leveraged finance to a leadership position as country manager for a European commercial bank, is another good example of how extracurricular activities can help you grow. His management was happy with the status quo for the foreseeable future, and the recessionary environment in Europe limited his possibilities. Fearing a career plateau, he took two steps. First, he volunteered for a large project at the head office in Frankfurt. The project required him to spend one or two days a week away from his daily work (forcing him to delegate some of the more routine aspects of his job to his team) and connected him with a handful of senior managers he hadn’t known before. Second, he joined the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), where he made some connections that helped him think more creatively about possible next moves. Like Robert, David was ignorant about what kind of curriculum vitae he needed to shift in a different direction, as most of the people in his company had followed a more traditional path. That wasn’t the case at the YPO, where he also learned how to frame and sell his expertise in a way that expanded rather than limited his options.

If you are feeling stuck or stale, raise your outsight by participating in industry conferences or other professional gatherings that bring together people from different companies and walks of life. Build from your interests, not just your experience. One of my students, for example, routinely looks for opportunities to speak at conferences on topics related to his experience. He recently gave a talk at his company on life in Nigeria, where he had worked for a number of years, showing a movie about daily life in Lagos, followed by a question-and-answer session with potential candidates for expatriation. These activities have been even more worthwhile than he anticipated: “I found that building your personal brand increases your chances of getting proposals to join strategic initiatives and step out of your day-to-day job for a while.”

Teach, speak, or blog on topics that you know something about, or about which you want to learn. And if there isn’t something out there that meets your needs, create your own. A sector manager for an internet commerce organization, for example, created her own community of marketing experts from different organizations by starting a monthly breakfast group. These extracurricular activities can help you see more possibilities, increase your visibility with people who can later help you land the next role or project, and, in the process, as Robert found, motivate you to shed some of the time-consuming tasks and responsibilities that no longer merit so much of your attention. The sidebar “Sheryl Sandberg’s Side Project” describes another good example of a fruitful extracurricular activity.

TED talks have a recipe that anyone can follow. It often starts with a story from the speaker’s personal experience; the story illustrates and motivates the main point the person wants to make. Once the audience is hooked by the story, the main points—the technical or scientific bits—are easier to follow and retain. The talk usually ends with the moral of the personal story, reminding the audience that the message, no matter how arcane, is personal. It’s embodied.

For example, author Elizabeth Gilbert begins her talk about the nature of creative genius by talking about the predicament in which she found herself after the unexpected success of her book, Eat, Pray, Love. Everyone told her, and she herself believed, that she had reached the pinnacle of success in her thirties. It would only be downhill from there. How would she motivate herself to do her job as a writer for the decades to come? She set out to answer that question for herself by researching the creative process. She learned that beliefs about creativity have changed over the centuries, from an archaic view of genius as something that visited a person, to today’s view of genius as an innate personal trait. The research helped her understand that we can’t set out to produce great creative work directly, because we don’t always have control over our inspiration. All we can do is our own part, and that’s to work daily and methodically so that we’re in place when inspiration comes.

According to psychologist Jerome Bruner, a message is twenty times more likely to be remembered accurately and longer when it is conveyed through a well-constructed story than when it is based on facts or figures. I am not sure what I would have remembered from Gilbert’s talk had she simply cited the studies and presented a model about conditions under which creative genius is manifest. But I remember well her story about her daily struggle to write after the literary world declared her an international hit. Seldom is a good story so needed as when we want others to believe what we believe so that they will act as we want them to act. From ancient times the world over, good stories like Gilbert’s relate the challenges that test, shape, and reveal the leader’s character or purpose.²³ The sidebar “Elements of a Good Story” lays out the very basics that help the storyteller engage the audience.

What do you believe, and how did you come to believe it? The answer lies in your personal story: how you grew up, the experiences that shaped you, the challenging moments when you had to rise to the occasion, the personal failures that taught you important lessons.²⁴ When we want someone to know us, we share stories of our childhood, our families, our school years, our first loves, the development of our political views, and so on. Why do we buy famous leaders’ biographies and autobiographies? We want to know more about their life growing up, about their exploits, triumphs, traumas, and foibles—not the five-point plan they put in place to increase margins. At work, though, it doesn’t occur to many of us to reveal our personal sides, and that is a lost opportunity.

You probably already know which stories are your best ones. What you need to learn now is how and when to tell them in the service of your leadership. One way to learn is to pay attention to people who are good at telling stories. What do these storytellers do? It helps even more to practice. One great advantage of the different job-expanding methods outlined above is that they also provide ready-made, live audiences for practicing telling your story.

Any context will do in which you’re likely to be asked, “What can you tell me about yourself?” or “What do you do?” or “Where are we going?”²⁵ Start with your clubs and associations: volunteer to speak at every occasion that comes up. Or, if this is too radical a step, join an organization like Toastmasters, or take a storytelling seminar that will have you practicing in front of a safe audience of strangers. As you get better, seize opportunities inside your organization: a farewell party or the annual off-site. One of my managers happened to take a storytelling class, by serendipity, the week he was scheduled to give a big presentation to his organization. He threw out the PowerPoint presentation he’d assembled and told three stories instead. He told me he had never had such positive feedback on his speaking.

Tell and retell your stories. Rework them as you would work on draft after draft of an epic novel until you’ve got the right version of your favorites, the one that’s most compelling and feels most true to you.

Much of their work didn’t take place in planned meetings or even inside offices or conference rooms. Often, the work didn’t even look like work. Instead they walked around, bumping into people serendipitously, wandering into their offices, hashing out deals in the airport lounge with key customers, and so on. These chance “meetings” were usually very short and often seemed random. But each manager made good use of these impromptu encounters to get information, mention or reinforce an important priority, or further develop his (they were all men at the time) relationships with the people whose paths he crossed. This seemingly unsystematic approach, rather than filling out reports or giving formal presentations, was the successful manager’s day job.

Kotter also filmed the managers’ agendas. As you might expect, the contrast between the diaries of the more effective managers and those of the less effective ones is striking. But it’s not what you might expect. The most effective managers had plenty of slack in their schedule: lots of unscheduled time. The less effective managers had diaries overflowing with meetings, travel, conference calls, and formal presentations.

The new ways of thinking and acting involved in stepping up to leadership require a precious and scarce resource—time. If you’re like most of the managers and professionals I teach, routine and immediate demands crowd out the time you need for the more unstructured work of leadership. When you are stretched to the hilt, it’s hard to ask yourself, “Am I focusing on the right things?” We fail to build in the necessary slack, precisely because time is short and there is so much to do.

In a recent book titled Scarcity, economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir make an interesting parallel between poverty of money and poverty of time.²⁷ Both, they show, produce “tunneling,” a narrow focus on the short term and a seeming incapacity to delay short-term gratification for the sake of future rewards.

To make the point, Mullainathan and Shafir tell a story about an overstretched acute-care hospital that was always fully booked. With the operating rooms at 100 percent capacity, when emergency cases arose—and they always did—the hospital was forced to bump long-scheduled but less urgent surgeries: “As a result, hospital staff sometimes performed surgery at 2 a.m.; physicians often waited several hours to perform two-hour procedures; and staff members regularly worked unplanned overtime.” Because the hospital was constantly behind, it was constantly reshuffling the work, an inefficient and stressful way of operating.

As most organizations in trouble are apt to do, the hospital hired an external consultant who came up with a surprising solution: leave one operating room unused, set aside for unanticipated cases. The hospital administrators responded as most of us would: “We are already too busy, and they want to take something away from us. This is crazy.”

Much like the overcommitted person who cannot imagine taking on the additional and time-consuming task of stepping back and reorganizing, let alone giving up a precious resource for something that might or might not occur, the hospital’s managers were skeptical. But the operating-room gambit worked. Having an empty room allowed the hospital staff to react to unforeseen emergencies much more efficiently, without having to reschedule everything. It reduced overwork, and the quality of operations improved.

So it is for the overextended manager. It’s when we are at our busiest that we most need to free up time so that we can use it for the nonroutine and the unexpected. In this way, we increase our capacity to lead, as Kotter’s effective general managers did.

The only way to tackle this second problem is to get involved in activities that will make you think differently about what you should be doing and why: boundary-spanning roles that make you more attuned to the environment outside your team, projects outside your main area of expertise, and activities outside your firm. These are medium-term investments without immediate payoff, so as you add them, you won’t be able to subtract much of what you used to do-just yet. The sidebar “Getting Started: Experiments with Your Job” offers ways for overextended managers to step out of their unproductive routines. Only when the new roles start to pay off will you be motivated and able to start letting go of the old ones.