6.

Leading Yourself

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.

—Peter Drucker

Because leadership creates significant impact through the work of others, we’ve devoted much of this book to what you need to do with and for your organization. That’s not to say, though, that a focus on yourself is unimportant. Indeed, organizational impact ultimately rests with you, and if you are not equipped to handle it, success will be hard to find. To lead others successfully, you must also lead yourself.

In this chapter, we thus turn our outward focus inward, squarely at you, the developing leader, to help you build your own personal impact in your organization and in the world. As you progress in your career, what do you need to know about yourself to lead? How best to learn the things you need to know or practice the skills you need to master? What new opportunities should you accept? In what ways do you need to change and adapt to take more responsibility, while still remaining true to who you are? What relationships do you need to build? And how do you take care of yourself through it all? These are not onetime questions for you. Such challenges will evolve and become even more important as you step up to bigger and bigger roles throughout your career.

Successful leaders exhibit a wide range of skills and traits, and follow many different routes to developing themselves: there isn’t one right way to guide yourself down the leadership path. In each section, we’ll provide questions to ask yourself and to help you make the right decisions for your own personal journey. This practice involves four elements:

• Knowing yourself: the bedrock of leading yourself, understanding who you are and what you stand for, what you’re good and not so good at, and how the world sees you
• Growing yourself: pursuing the most effective paths toward growth, especially those that help you learn by doing
• Sharing yourself: contributing your energy, knowledge, and skills to develop others
• Taking care of yourself: managing the physical and emotional aspects of your own welfare

Knowing yourself

The call to first and foremost “know yourself” is as old as Socrates. The philosopher’s famous dictum remains as relevant as ever for leaders in today’s organizations.

Knowing yourself is fundamental to forming a vision for your organization that reflects your own values and to giving the right priority to the work you care about. It allows you to understand and motivate others; your colleagues and associates will have an easier time following your lead when they sense that you know who you are. People want to understand the person they’re signing up to work with, which is always easier to grasp when you’re clear about that, too. Developing self-knowledge also means recognizing how you still need to grow to be more effective as a leader and that you’ll know how to take care of yourself in your job, especially as you gain more responsibility and step up to ever more complex challenges.

But knowing yourself is legendarily difficult. We never see ourselves 100 percent objectively. Holding up the mirror can be painful because we too often imagine ourselves as what we want to be, not who we are. And achieving self-knowledge is even more difficult as you grow as a leader. As your responsibility and power increases, others will often tell you only what they think you want to hear. A former foundation executive provided us with his own small case study: “I never had the slightest hint that I was difficult to deal with until I resigned from my job and stopped giving out grants.”

Knowing yourself requires persistent listening and reflection. You must keep probing for input and perspectives from others, using both formal and informal means. We discussed earlier in the book how developing people and operational performance requires a constant commitment to offering (often tough) feedback; you too need to commit yourself to receiving the same. That requires real humility, listening to criticism you may not want to hear, having the patience to reflect on it, and then summoning the courage to act on the right suggestions for how to improve.

Self-knowledge, like all forms of knowledge, best begins with questions. Ask yourself about three areas of self-knowledge:

• Your character
• Your personal style and habits
• Your knowledge and skills

Let’s look at each in more detail.

Your character

What is your sense of purpose? What do you believe, hold true, and care about? What are you aiming at in your life overall? What are your aspirations? What inner strength do you call upon to win at what you do and to be resilient in the face of challenges?

Your answers will help you define your character: the more personal, intangible, and ethically oriented aspects that define who you are. Character tends to form through childhood and early adulthood, and many aspects of it will remain constant throughout your life. But people do change and evolve over time and grow in their self-understanding, which may reshape certain aspects of what they believe and care about. As a leader, you’ll find it helpful to keep reflecting on the values and beliefs that are your inner North Star, the core that guides your decisions and actions as a member of human society and that your followers will use in committing themselves to your leadership.

Consider more deeply the following aspects of character in yourself.

Purpose

Why do you do what you do? What impact do you want to have on the world?

Your deeply held personal beliefs will directly inform and shape the work you do with your organization. As we saw in chapter 1, when leaders develop a vision, it must honor the broader purpose of the organization itself, and they’ll be most effective when their personal sense of purpose aligns with that. For example, PBS president Paula Kerger has had a lifelong commitment to educating and improving American society through media. She’s been a revered leader at PBS because she so authentically aligns and believes in the mission of the system, as seen in her support of a new children’s channel strategy. Stanley McChrystal, born into a family tradition of military service, inspired followers far and wide with his patriotic purpose of developing a new approach to countering the terrorism of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Your purpose may be constant, or it may evolve over your working life. After years in different companies, John Lundgren became CEO of Stanley Black & Decker at the end of his career because of his personal desire to turn around an iconic brand headquartered in New England where he grew up.

Values

What are the principles and standards you aim to follow in working with other people? What truths are worthy of preservation and defense, and fostering in others? Your values might be such things as “integrity and truthfulness in all my dealings,” “customer interests always come first,” “commitment to gender equality,” “decisions based on facts, not personal preference,” or “creating value by embracing prudent risks.” You will also have values about your nonworking life—about the importance you attach to family, community, patriotism, broader social causes, and so on.

As we saw in earlier chapters, leading vision, people development, or cultural change will necessarily reflect your values. So will most of the kinds of strategy development and transformational work you undertake. Values confer credibility and build trust—people know what you stand for. Anne Mulcahy’s turnaround of Xerox was successful because she was a longtime employee who deeply believed in the values of the company, so her people knew the changes she demanded were in service of protecting Xerox itself. Similarly, Roger Ferguson’s personal commitment to the welfare of people serving those who serve others gave him the credibility to evolve TIAA so its business model could adapt to external financial pressure yet provide its customers with the financial security that the company has provided them for 100 years.

Aspirations and personal resilience

How high do you want to reach for success? How brave will you be, and how hard will you work to get there? When you fall short or suffer a setback in your job, do you have the heart and stomach to work through defeat and the humility to learn, change course, and try again? Do you believe the prizes—tangible and intangible—are worthy and worth what you’re willing to endure? Do you have the courage to answer yourself honestly?

Bumble Bee Seafoods CEO Chris Lischewski summarized succinctly what we’ve heard many times from executives: “Probably the single most important thing for a leader is to have the drive to win and the grit to keep going.” Mulcahy recalls that she had to take criticism from all sides at every step of the way, even as she worked as hard as she ever did in her life. Her success in the venture was as much about her personal resilience as any specific strategy. McChrystal reflected how the devastating loss of troops to Al Qaeda terrorism drove him to make personally painful decisions about his leadership identity and to take the gut-wrenching risk of letting go of centralized control so his frontline operatives could strike back faster.

Memories of defeats and bad decisions always loom large in a leader’s mind. But the most successful leaders learn profoundly from those, build personal capacity to recover, and then reach higher the next time. As one experienced executive we know reflected, “If you want to be a CEO, you have to endure at least a few really bad days every month. And then learn from them. If you can’t handle that, take your ambitions down a few notches.” As you strive for higher levels of leadership, keep reflecting on the character you are building through the toughest tumbles of your everyday work. Understand your willingness and ability to rise to the challenges you are setting for yourself.

Your personal style and habits

Are you a take-charge kind of leader? Or are you more reserved and collaborative in getting things done? Are you a people person who readily picks up on others’ feelings and emotions, or are you more analytical, using concepts to build relationships? How about your mode of working? Are you supremely organized in all that you do or more situation-dependent in planning and structure?

The answers to these and similar questions will define your style and habits as a leader. If your character represents your inner drive and values, style and habits are the outward signals you send to others. They shape how other people see and work with you; thus, they too are things you must understand about yourself. We see a lot of leadership books, blogs, and seminars focusing on the right ways for a leader to act. But we believe that there’s too much human variation in the world to define any simple menu for excellence. Different, very successful leaders often have very different external styles and habits (compare, for example, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi).

Instead of prescribing a must-have list, we would encourage you to discover your own list by reflecting on what’s made you successful thus far. If you’re reading this book, you already have some level of accomplishment (and we also know you are looking for more). As you look ahead, consider what attributes of your current style and habits will keep helping you succeed and which might be holding back your future growth.

Holding the external mirror up to yourself

Organize your reflection by again probing with some well-targeted questions, for example, asking yourself and people you work with about the style and habits you bring to your leadership. Many leaders work with a coach or external consultants, using established assessment tools (e.g., Meyers-Briggs, DISC, 360-degree feedback, etc.) to help uncover their workplace behaviors and style. These can be helpful, but you can also structure a basic inquiry for yourself—for example, by adapting Peter Drucker’s self-diagnostic from his landmark HBR article “Managing Oneself.”

Drucker suggested that all leaders should seek to understand—and then manage and improve upon—self-knowledge in several domains. One of these domains, captured in the question “What are my values?” is part of character, which we’ve already discussed. But some of his other questions can help you understand critical dimensions of your leadership style and habits.

As you pursue such a diagnostic, what you hear from other people may be different from what you currently believe about yourself. But you have as much to learn from those differences as from the findings themselves.

WHEN AM I MOST EFFECTIVE? Start your self-analysis by simply asking others, “When do you think I’m at my best as a leader?” The intent of this question is to identify specific situations in which you excelled in your recent work.

Listen for patterns in the specific examples your colleagues provide when they think you have been “hitting on all cylinders” as a leader, and then step back and reflect on why they said that and what seems to have made your actions so powerful to them. Also consider if these situations seemed as productive and lively to you as to them. If not, are you missing something about a particular style you brought to the task or some repeatable approach that others apparently found so helpful? For example, did you model the kind of work you expected of others in a tough situation? Did you stop and draw a picture or chart for everyone that suddenly made your argument clear? Did you stage a debate of opposing views before making a good decision?

Once you’ve identified patterns of actions that made you excel, ask yourself how you can perform those actions more regularly and deliberately.

WHEN AM I LEAST EFFECTIVE? Inquire also about the opposite case: in leading others, when did I behave in a way that was counterproductive? What stylistic manner or habits do I practice that may put people off, slow progress in a team, or lessen trust for our organization?

You may have to press people to be candid, as you ask them to take on the uncomfortable task of giving you negative feedback. Here again, a third-party-administered survey or set of interviews is sometimes needed to surface the hard truths. But there is often more learning for leaders on this side of the coin, so don’t shy away from the opportunity. The feedback you get should prompt your own reflection about your patterns of action and how you can modify them to become more effective.

HOW WELL DO I HANDLE RELATIONSHIPS? Asking about your style and habits of dealing with people is worth its own separate question, even if the topic has already come up in your self-inquiry. Interpersonal relationships are such a large part of leadership that there’s value in gaining whatever additional detail you can discover.

In recent years, research on leadership has increasingly highlighted the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership, which we talked about in chapter 3 in reference to building a team. Emotional intelligence, however, also applies to you; it is a major aspect of effective relationship management as first detailed in Daniel Goleman’s HBR article “What Makes a Leader?” As you probe others to understand how well you handle relationships, ask about Goleman’s component themes: Am I self-aware in a way to understand how my behavior affects others? Do I self-regulate impulses and emotions that are disruptive? How well do I inspire others? Do I bring empathy to bear to understand other people’s emotional makeup? Do I have skills and style to build rapport with others and positively influence action? Where am I strongest, and less strong? Why?

HOW SHOULD I BEST POSITION MYSELF TO DO THE WORK? Given what you have learned about when you are most and least effective and how you handle relationships, how should you shape the role that you play, and the context you operate in, so you can be your best? Leaders will usually have some choice in their roles and work arenas—or better yet, will create some choice for themselves—so they can be as productive and effective as possible.

What kinds of contributions play to your strengths? Can you delegate responsibility in others to complement your efforts, especially where you have less skill or energy? Can you create the kind of working environment—both around you and more broadly in the organization—in which others can thrive to support or add to what you do? Can you take on different roles from time to time so that you can learn and renew yourself or see the business from different perspectives over time?

Authenticity—or not?

Examining your style and habits will likely lead you to the concept of authenticity. In today’s workplaces, many people praise leaders who seem authentic, meaning that they seem comfortable in their own skin or don’t act at odds with who they really are. Sometimes, people simply mean someone who has a relaxed style or is informal in a personable way. Sometimes, authenticity can also be invoked as an excuse for an objectionable manner, as in “he’s rude and very emotional, but hey, at least he’s authentic,” or to justify various kinds of unfiltered behavior by a leader, even one who can be abusive or uncaring for others.

The original definition of the concept was more nuanced and organizationally constructive. In their classic HBR article “Discovering Your Authentic Leadership,” Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean, and Diana Mayer insisted—as we do, too—that it’s not helpful to stipulate some cookie-cutter ideal of leadership behaviors that might not fit who you are as an individual. Instead, the authors argue that the best leaders—authentic leaders—demonstrate a consistent passion for their purpose, build long-standing personal relationships, and know who they are and what makes them unique. We similarly believe that no leader benefits by presenting an artificial and unnatural persona to their organization. Doing so hampers trust and saps motivation of others to collaborate and follow.

At the same time, leadership always requires sensitivity to context; over time, the best leaders also evolve and grow into larger responsibilities, as they take on bigger and more complex challenges. As Herminia Ibarra wrote in an HBR article “The Authenticity Paradox,” if as a leader, you are too rigid in allegiance to authenticity, it can stifle the personal growth you’ll need to achieve even more significant impact in your career. Leaders must find a middle ground, staying true to who they are, but also be willing to go “beyond one’s comfort zone to keep learning and adapting to . . . complex and new situations.”

Indeed, many leaders we’ve talked to endorse authenticity but also stress that they have adapted their own style and habits as conditions required. Stanley McChrystal, in building the empowered network of Special Operations units to fight terrorists in Iraq, “had to unlearn the habit of demanding approvals before all lethal actions, because our strategy depended on giving more authority to our front line.” Jeanne Crain, CEO of Bremer Financial Corporation, headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, recalls how artificial she felt when, earlier in her career, she was trying to fit into a male-dominated banking culture by wearing mannish suits and accessories such as a pink knit tie, but “also realized being authentic is not about sharing everything you feel inside or showing all aspects of your individuality. It does mean acting in ways that are true to who you are. I had to learn to find those aspects of my own style that would best shape the culture of performance I was trying to build at the bank.”

Your knowledge and skills

What are the concrete things you need to know to do your job today? And to do the job you’d like to have after that? What skills will help you take that knowledge and convert it into action? How will they change in the future? Where do you excel and where do you have gaps?

Somewhat more tangible than character, but less visible than style and habits, is knowledge: the understanding—of facts, technical information, industry context, and drivers of performance—that you gain through life and work experience or more formal study. Knowledge is usually passively held in your mind, whereas skills are more hands-on, reflecting how you apply knowledge in practice. For example, as a medical student, you can have the knowledge to do heart surgery—understand how the organ is structured, the patterns that indicate health or disease, and so on—but the skills to work as a cardiologist lie in how you wield the scalpel, make the right kind of incisions, or take emergency action if things go wrong.

In business, you can acquire a lot of knowledge through study, observation, or storytelling by others, but you might still lack the analogous skills to put such knowledge into action. For example, in strategy making, you might have learned lots of different frameworks in business school, but you can’t really claim to be skilled at the practice unless you’ve led a strategy-development process and had to make and live with the kind of tough choices it demands. As you self-assess your knowledge and skills as a leader, remember the differences between those and be honest in evaluating how good or not so good you are at each.

The practices we’ve introduced in the previous chapters require certain knowledge and skills to perform well. In table 6-1, we summarize some of the most important. The list is a good starting point, but you can add to it as you reflect on your own organizational and developmental context. You can use this rubric as a basis for your self-assessment as you consider your relative strengths and gaps.

Many of the skills and knowledge listed will apply to more than one of the core practices; others will weave through all of them, like emotional intelligence, communications and influence skills, general knowledge of business and the industry you work in, relevant trends shaping competition for your company, and so on. Develop a list of knowledge and skills you think are most important for success in your job and then use that to start assessing what you have, what you lack, and what you need to strengthen or build upon.

Getting the outside perspective

Even more than for your character and personal style, soliciting regular outside feedback is a critical step in gaining self-awareness about where you need to build your skills and knowledge. Whereas informal suggestions about adjusting your style are often brief and nonthreatening (“It would be helpful to be more patient when listening to objections from subordinates”), comments about your knowledge and skills might seem to cut directly to your competence as a leader (“You really need to improve your understanding of finance”). Colleagues may be much less likely to speak up about these organically. Furthermore, one of the greatest dangers you face as a leader is not knowing what you don’t know, and a gap described in writing can be more specific and powerful than relying on informal spoken feedback.

To organize more formal and written feedback for yourself, arrange for an anonymous and consultant-guided 360-degree feedback survey or a more open-ended set of interviews. Or take steps to ensure that any formal business review of performance also includes constructive assessment of your personal contributions and shortfalls so you can learn and do better in the future.

In any case, whether via informal or more formal feedback, leader after leader whom we interviewed stressed the critical value of hearing constructive suggestions from others to improve their effectiveness. For example, Ferguson of TIAA built a strong working relationship with his top team, which ultimately had the confidence to advise him to shift more of his time and attention to strategic direction versus digging into operational details. John Martin of Innography listened to some trusted subordinates who convinced him that his strong analytical skills as a leader disappeared when he lost his temper. Bob Proctor, both a venture investor and technology CEO, listened to both subordinates and customers say in various private conversations that he needed to get more specialized help in building processes to complement the strategic thinking he was providing as a leader. Paula Kerger of PBS looked forward to hearing “the often strong medicine” of her annual leadership review by the company’s board of directors, because, as she commented, “that kind of feedback was the only way I could really understand what I had to do to get better as a leader.” She remembers, for example, how the “board gave me a candid assessment of my options when it was time to replace my COO, who had been ill for almost six months. It was a hard personal decision for me, but I had to learn more about managing institutional risk, for example, the institutional vacuum if I were suddenly hit by a bus. While the board encouraged me to act, they also made it clear that the decision was mine.”

Growing yourself

You have now examined who you are and what you’re good at and not so good at as a leader; the next step is to think about how to keep improving.

New skills and complex bodies of knowledge can be difficult to master, but the first challenge for you is to take the time to intentionally work on self-improvement. Many leaders brush aside learning opportunities because they feel as if they distract from their real work. Successful leaders can also fall prey to overconfidence; their achievements of the past trick them into believing more will keep coming, on autopilot. It’s a dangerous and false hope.

As you rise in your career, winging it simply won’t be enough to meet the level of performance that more senior roles require. The greater the impact you want to have, the more complex the challenges you’ll face and the wider the range of knowledge and skills you’ll have to develop. You may also need to think more deeply about your willingness to evolve some of your values or to adapt your authentic self, if that’s what it takes to succeed in a different kind of organization, or in a bigger and more difficult leadership role.

Because they eagerly confront these challenges, the best leaders are intellectually curious, continually expanding their horizons so that they can think differently about problems. They can reshape their goals, values, and aspirations, as needed. They can open up new opportunities for themselves and their businesses. Being purposeful about further development—and at least a little humble that, yes, you do have new things to learn—is a necessary step to achieving higher personal performance. And though continual learning is very demanding, it also provides renewal and personal satisfaction.

Furthermore, part of your role as a leader is to keep raising the bar of performance for others across your organization. To keep pushing for higher performance all around, you have to set an example of performing and learning yourself—and to keep getting smarter about what “better” means for the whole business—even if you don’t become an expert in each domain.

Choosing an approach for learning

There are many different tools, programs, and educational products for learning and professional development, variously suited to different objectives for building your leadership capabilities. What’s most important, before you begin, is to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve in any course of self-improvement. That will help you choose the most appropriate and cost-effective approach.

In broad terms, we can divide the world of professional development into two major categories: formal learning and informal or on-the-job learning. We’ll discuss these in turn and highlight the kinds of knowledge and skills each can best help you develop.

Formal learning

Formal learning has historically meant classroom-style instruction and lecture, supplemented with reading and discussion. Recent evolutions in education have expanded and blurred the category, which now also encompasses computer-assisted content delivery and engagement, online video instruction, role-playing and simulations, and so forth. But the heart of the approach remains the same: someone experienced in a discipline presenting well-codified knowledge to students looking to learn and assimilate what’s being offered.

Training and classroom teaching in business are often derided for being too academic and burdensome, but both still have their place, particularly when now enhanced with participatory and individualized experience of technological enhancements. Formal learning can be especially cost-effective for any topic where the facts and practices are well established, or where the knowledge you need to master is sufficiently detailed or technical to make learning on your own, or through episodic experience, less effective (or even impossible). These topics include essential business basics or technical knowledge like accounting, corporate finance, marketing, or different legal topics such as intellectual property or labor law. Formal learning can also be a good way to get up to speed on established best practices in such topics as talent management processes, workplace diversity, compensation policy, and so forth.

Workshop-style programs, which are more participative and facilitated, can help you hone behavioral and stylistic skills such as communicating for influence, giving performance feedback, resolving conflicts, or developing interpersonal strategies for negotiation. The safe space of a workshop or classroom, combined with a program of simulation or case-study learning, can be an excellent way to develop and practice such skills, without the risk of what could become punishing failure in an actual workplace setting.

Participating in university programs or other research-oriented institutions (think tanks, business consortium institutes, etc.) can help build your knowledge and awareness of future trends in industry, society, global economics, and similar areas, critical inputs to inform your company’s strategy. Most forward-looking leaders also find time to participate in selected industry or media-sponsored conferences that bring together thought leaders, pace-setting executives, and key policy makers to hear their visions of major emerging issues, emerging innovation, and the shape of leading practice. These, too, can help you shape strategies, performance benchmarks, and plans for your own business.

Informal or on-the-job learning

Despite the potential benefits of formal learning, most of your development as a leader will come—as it should—more informally, from experience you gain on the job. We generally share the bias of learning by doing voiced by the many successful executives we’ve spoken with for this book. Gary Rodkin, former CEO of ConAgra Foods, attributed his professional rise not to “the thousands of books” on leadership that he was exposed to, but rather specific experiences in which he had to stretch himself, starting early in his career.

While classroom and book learning are particularly effective for acquiring codified information, facts, and well-established practice, we believe that leadership requires something different: more nuanced and contingent skills, judgment, and situation-specific agility that leaders must bring to complex and often unique challenges. This kind of know-how is best honed through personal experience, observation, and reflection.

Learning by doing will be best, for example, in helping you discover—as you articulate and explain to others or must demonstrate through action—your own values and purpose. People will see and you will affirm different aspects of your character for them and yourself. You’ll test, refine, and confirm, through practice and reflection, the behaviors and habits that seem to be the most effective for you and that you want to model to others around you.

Similarly, only through trial and application will you appreciate the differences between book-explained versions of a particular strategy or innovation approach, and what it takes to implement them and make them real and understood across a large organization. And only through actual practice can you make abstract theories and ideas of cutting-edge business part of how you think—for example, what a platform strategy really looks like, how to develop a product co-created with customers, how a workforce diversified in its thinking can really perform better. Similarly, only through actual practice can you build the judgment of decision making or develop the emotional intelligence of hearing and accommodating tough feedback about what you do. Only through practice can you develop resilience and grit when you are forced to overcome failure. The daily work you do is a living laboratory that teaches you who you are and who you are trying to become.

What and where to learn on the job

Because on-the-job learning is such a powerful opportunity to grow your leadership capability, you need to leverage that experience intentionally. By simply doing whatever job you have, you are acquiring new insights about yourself and what you need to perform better, but the learning is most effective if you can be conscious about that and not simply accept it as a background benefit of drawing a paycheck.

To be more intentional and productive about on-the-job learning, consider first the “what” and “where” of the experience you are building up: what you need to learn and where you plan to learn it. In terms of the “where,” consider two types of arenas: when you are stretching yourself in your current job and then also when you take on different or new responsibilities, whether in your current organization or somewhere new. Such opportunities, properly embraced, can stretch you even further and build deeper and broader skills as you face unfamiliar and more difficult challenges.

LEARNING IN YOUR CURRENT JOB. Every role has the potential to teach you new things. If you’re a midlevel manager or rising executive, take full advantage of what you can learn from your boss or supervisor (even the negative lessons or tough feedback about how you performed). Do the same with peers, customers, and people who report to you. If you are a CEO or are already a senior leader, look to your company’s board or other external partners who work with you for constructive feedback about what you do. Use performance reviews to keep assessing where you need to improve, and always discuss how you might work on what the findings report. In general, you should make a habit of seeking opportunities to collect feedback from a wide range of people you work for and work with about your performance, style, strengths, and gaps, and generally how you can be more effective as a leader. Listening and keeping yourself open to feedback are your most precious learning tools.

Look also for opportunities to gain specialized learning from, for example, high-profile company initiatives that you have a chance to join in your current functional capacity. Work with your manager to be placed on, say, a new strategic problem-solving task force or a board-sponsored initiative to open up a new market or product development process. If there’s some particular knowledge or skill you want to get better in, reach for the appropriate team assignment. Similarly, if you become involved in setting a vision and developing strategy for your company, see that as an opportunity to get smarter about industry trends, changes in the operating environment, market and customer shifts, and so forth. Your time is precious, but don’t outsource all that learning to the consultants. Doing some of the research and trend analysis yourself will only add to your own professional knowledge and insights.

Take advantage also of any broader organizational learning initiatives in your company, for example, after-action reviews staged at the end of a major initiative, product launch, or merger. If you’ve been a decision maker in some corporate initiative under review, have the courage to hear and learn from what you yourself might have done better.

Sometimes learning experiences find you, whether or not you’re ready for them. Facing and handling a crisis that comes your way can become what Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas describe in their 2002 HBR article “Crucibles of Leadership” as a “crucible experience”—a major shock, an external catastrophe, or a plunge into bankruptcy, or similar—where a leader must rapidly acquire the knowledge and skills to conquer adversity. Great leaders embrace such challenges as a source of personal development and a way to make themselves stronger for future opportunities.

If you’re serious about learning by doing, you also have to be prepared to fail, just like the skier who falls on the slope and then readies herself to do better in the turns and moguls that lie ahead. If you only put yourself in situations where you succeed, you won’t learn resilience and adaptability. You won’t learn how to get up, brush yourself off, reflect on what went wrong, and then try a different approach. (See the box “Learning from failure.”)

LEARNING FROM EVERY NEW JOB. Leaders we’ve worked with emphasize how much they learned throughout their careers by taking different assignments and facing various kinds of problems and challenges. Whether in new positions in different functions within their existing companies or other responsibilities in other organizations (usually bigger jobs), effective leaders use job rotations and external moves as learning opportunities and then stepping-stones to even greater growth in the future. Xerox’s Mulcahy leveraged the skills, people relationships, and cultural credibility she earned by doing years of sales and also a stint in human resources. Ferguson brought sophistication about asset management and market risk to his job leading TIAA from his years at the US Federal Reserve. In her 2010 book The Corporate Lattice, Deloitte researcher Cathy Benko summarized this trend of development through different kinds of roles and positions. Her research demonstrated how the traditional practice of moving up a well-established corporate ladder is now giving way to leaders pursuing a zigzag career along something more like a “corporate lattice” across the organization. So seek out opportunities to take on very different kinds of functional roles when you can to broaden your skill set and exposure to different classes of problems.

Keep pursuing this kind of learning, even in the later stages of your career. For example, when biopharmaceutical companies Merck and Schering-Plough merged in 2009, Adam Schechter, who was the head of Merck’s global pharmaceutical marketing and the US pharmaceutical business at the time, agreed to take on the role of integration leader. He volunteered, not knowing what this new job would entail, but he saw the new assignment as a personal stretch and a chance to develop his skills for a broader leadership role. As he told us, “I remember going home that night and taking out a blank sheet of paper and saying, ‘What do I do tomorrow?’” (see Ron’s HBR article, with coauthors Suzanne Francis and Rick Heinick, “The Merger Dividend”).

No matter where you are in your career, you can put yourself in stretch situations that foster leadership learning. For example, whatever your role, you can volunteer to assemble a team to tackle a recurring problem, offer to take the lead in resolving a customer or supplier issue, or plan and orchestrate the agenda for a visiting executive. If you can’t readily find a business issue, then lead a fund-raising campaign in your office or organize a social event. You also can look outside your current organization for leadership roles in community, religious, or civic groups. All these situations are microcosms of leadership responsibility, requiring you to rally a group of people around a common objective. So they are great laboratories where you can learn how to lead or lead better and differently than you do today.

But in choosing your opportunities, take care that the learning will be robust, that the situations you’ll take on will be making you at least a little bit uncomfortable—where you’re not quite sure what to do, and where you have to figure it out as you go along. Exposing yourself to well-chosen but new functional and industry challenges will always bring some constructive stretching, but so will taking on a lot more responsibility in areas you’re already familiar with. Look for both kinds of settings along the way.

How to learn on the job

Maximizing the benefit of different assignments is, however, not just about the diversity, depth, and breadth of exposures. It also comes from the way you assimilate the experience. So consider not just what you’ll learn and where, but also how you’ll do it.

In simple terms, this should center on the timeless cycle of human learning that is core to our concept of leadership as a continuing practice: taking action, followed by observation and reflection about results and why you delivered (or failed to deliver) a particular outcome, and then planning and integrating the necessary personal change into your habits to improve the next time.

Our most fundamental advice is to be intentional: whatever your job, be mindful about the decisions and actions you are taking to perform your work. Take time periodically to observe, analyze, and think about how a particular initiative worked out. Synthesize and put into words what succeeded or fell short, and why. Resolve, based on what you see and understand, what you should do differently or better the next time. Hold yourself accountable to that.

The most obvious actor in all this is you. Your observation and reflection can be greatly helped by listening for feedback from others or engaging in after-action reflection with people you trust, for example, an informal mentor or an executive coach. Many professionals also find it is valuable to keep a journal or, for less personally sensitive experience, to write a blog or share thoughts with a more public audience through other forms of social media. Many executives also develop informal learning relationships with a volunteer group of peer practitioners (typically from noncompetitive organizations in the same industry) and engage in regular exchange about each member’s professional experience, learning from one another in the format of a so-called community of practice (see Etienne Wenger and William Snyder’s HBR article “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier”).

LEARN FROM OTHERS. In addition to self-observation and reflection, there’s also plenty to learn secondhand—by watching and analyzing the practices and style of other leaders. Begin with your own boss or other senior people in your organization: look beyond the direction they are setting or the work they might be creating for you, and think about their skills or mistakes as leaders per se. If one delivers an important speech to the organization, how did it go? Why? When you’re hearing feedback from your boss, apart from the content of what they told you, how did they handle the overall situation? Did they leave you feeling more or less energized? When you have to do the same thing with more junior people, what would you do differently—and why? Looking through a self-improvement lens, you can start to see your whole organization and the earlier stages of your career as one big learning laboratory. As John Lundgren at Stanley Black & Decker thoughtfully remarked, “A lot of what I learned about leadership came from watching and learning from a couple of terrific bosses in my earlier career and also vowing never to act like one very bad one whom I also once had.”

THE VALUE OF AN EXECUTIVE COACH. We’ve mentioned the potential value of working with an executive coach. If you’ve never had the opportunity to do so, here are some suggestions to help you get started.

First, as John Baldoni explains nicely in his HBR article “Before Working with a Coach, Challenge Your Self-Assumptions,” deliberately articulate for yourself why you’re looking for some outside help and what specifically you hope to get out of the relationship. Recognize and manage the engagement as a growth opportunity, as Ron describes in his HBR article “If Your Boss Tells You to Get a Coach, Don’t Panic.” Understand also that not all executive coaches are the same. Beyond the chemistry of a relationship you might want to find, realize that different coaches bring different approaches and have different kinds of expertise. For example, some may focus on interpersonal skills, others on strategic thinking, still others on personal productivity, and so on. Be clear with yourself—and your potential coach—on what you expect and need.

Second, a more subtle point, understand that an executive coach is only one part of a larger system of personal growth (see Marshall Goldsmith and Gardiner Morse’s HBR article “Behave Yourself”). A good coach will help you reflect and recognize things you may not see or realize about yourself, and may also help you synthesize and plan how to improve against specific professional or personal challenges. But remember, the coach is not the only one who is going to offer feedback to you and will sometimes be more of an aggregator than originator of relevant insights. Often the most important feedback for you will come not from the voice of the coach but from the words of colleagues, supervisors, partners, and customers. Similarly, don’t expect the coach to do the work of changing you for the better. Improvement only comes through your own actions and commitment; the coach may guide and challenge you, but real leadership transformation starts and ends with you.

A summary of general learning principles

As you weigh—and then participate in—different opportunities for growth and self-improvement as a leader, follow some general principles:

• Balance building on strengths and shoring up weaknesses. Much research shows that the payback for professional development is higher when you focus less on remediating weaknesses and more on leveraging your strengths, especially those that drive the most value for your organization. But as Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser have also shown in their HBR article “Stop Overdoing Your Strengths,” your strengths can be overdone, and you can become a lopsided and ineffective leader if you keep developing and pushing them to excess. It’s much better to work on creating a balance between what you do well and not so well, and continue to solicit feedback about “what should I do more of, what less of, to be effective?”
• Go beyond your comfort zone. As we’ve said, learning and growth come from being stretched and confronted with new and difficult challenges. Be willing to engage in professional development where you may not be the boss, where you hear things that might criticize your style and performance, or where you are in unfamiliar situations.

  There are limits, however: beware joining programs to build a skill clearly far beyond your current capability. You need to be stretched, not broken or humiliated, to learn. Also beware of would-be development programs that promise some kind of mystical self-understanding or that pose significant physical risk with a false promise, for example, “walking on burning coals at our company retreat will truly teach you about self-control” (this was once a real trend in team-building circles).

• Be intellectually humble and listen, listen, listen. Unless you are open to new ideas and challenges, you will never grow. Too many leaders suffer from overconfidence that closes their minds to acquiring new skills and knowledge. So develop the habit of erring on the side of listening to others and not always speaking first.

  Throughout your career, you will constantly be engaging with employees, customers, board members, partners, and other stakeholders. See each as a source of potential learning about trends, innovations, and problems to fix and about ways of working as a leader where you’ve excelled or fallen short. You will hear challenges to how you work, critiques of how you think, and a steady stream of suggestions for why and how you can do better. See those discussions as a resource, not an attack on your prestige.

• Practice the traditional learning cycle. We stress again that time-tested research has shown that people learn and develop by following an iterative cycle of acting, then assessing the results, reflecting on why those happened, and then taking steps to improve from the learning. Whenever you are trying to develop new skills or knowledge, structure a process that honors the cycle.
• Match the learning opportunity to the need and to your learning style. Different programs and experiences are suited to different professional challenges, as we’ve described. But as you engage in any opportunity, be mindful of your own learning preferences. People with more introverted personalities often prefer to read or study on their own; extroverts enjoy group conversation and engagement. Visual tools and experiences are very important to some people, less to others. You may insist on analytical presentation or prefer more experiential or intuitive learning. Know what works and doesn’t work for you, and make that part of your development planning.
• Prefer learning and development that pertain to real work and your current challenges. As a general rule, learning that is more directly relevant to the actual work you are doing and satisfies immediate skill or knowledge needs will be more meaningful and impactful for you. And it’s the kind of learning that most leaders make time for.

Sharing yourself

Leading yourself is actually not all about you. Your growth will also benefit from contributing to the growth and welfare of others—potential leaders or other people in your organization, stakeholders, and beyond—and also volunteering for civic or community organizations, or other causes in which you are personally interested. To lead well, you sometimes need to share yourself. At first glance, this might seem like a distraction from your everyday priorities. But smart leaders reap tangible rewards from sharing themselves with others, and it’s a critical part of how they create significant impact.

Opportunities for growing others

An important strategy for leaders to increase the scale and performance of their organization is to develop other leaders, whether a top team or other key players (as we discussed in chapter 3). Coaching, advising, and helping other executives, including rising younger staff in your organization, adds to your company’s overall skill and knowledge base. More and stronger leaders pulling together magnifies what any organization can achieve—whether a team, individual unit, division, or the whole enterprise. Even if you are the CEO, you can’t do it all. The sooner you identify and enable great help, other leaders who can join you in pursuing the goals you are striving for, the better the long-term results. And other great leaders working with you will help make you personally more effective, too.

Some leaders may be reluctant to develop others around them. They may hold back because of their insecurity, a worry that someone they mentor may someday become more valuable than they are. Or they’re simply being selfish in the short term, not wanting to lose valuable professionals who may move on to other opportunities once they develop additional skills. Or it may simply be the result of poor prioritization, not wanting to take the time away from doing everyday real work. But the longer-term dividends of growing others, as well as building more extended networks of relationships for the future, more than justifies the effort and apparent risks. Good leaders never fear helping others grow.

The strategic benefit of mentoring and developing other professionals holds equally true for partners or other members of the value chains on which your company depends. Instead of seeing them only as transactional providers, consider whether helping partner leaders improve their companies’ performance wouldn’t help you also succeed, too. For example, in the 1990s, Toyota famously invested in training its manufacturing partners, so that working together, they could all make major leaps in quality.

Broadening horizons

Many leaders we have worked with are confident people, motivated by a broad sense of obligation to advance the common good and generally help others. But their volunteer service also enhances their leadership: helping them build skills and extend their personal networks. For example, Dominic Barton of McKinsey keeps himself sharp—and also in touch with interesting people, ideas, and innovations beyond his daily work—by serving as a volunteer at buildOn, an initiative to help inner-city students graduate from high school, along with being a trustee for the Brookings Institution and a director of Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and other social and research institutions. Ferguson demonstrates his personal commitment to the educational and research sectors core to TIAA’s mission by giving some of his own advisory time to the Smithsonian Institution, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Such service also builds his relationships with key decision makers across various domains that TIAA serves.

Even a personal interest, properly chosen, can positively redound to your own growth as a leader. John Lundgren, of Stanley Black & Decker, is an inveterate golfer and a director for the golf equipment company Call-away. As he told us, “I love the sport, but it’s also instructive for me to help that company wrestle with some pretty challenging business issues.”

Guiding principles for sharing yourself

Successful leaders like Dominic Barton, Roger Ferguson, and John Lundgren are in constant demand to advise or serve as volunteers for other organizations, just as they are in their own organizations to help younger leaders with their own development. As you advance in your career, you will experience increasing demand for help from others, too. You’ll be forced to keep deciding when and how to step in and lend a hand to other people and institutions, which you may consider for your own short- or long-term interest, or because of some general sense of responsibility of giving back or contributing to a societally valuable institution. Or, all of the above.

How should you make these kinds of decisions as a leader? Where and how much of your precious time should you give to others, beyond your normal day-to-day work? Once again, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but here are a few guiding principles to help you decide:

• Be selective, based on value. You’ll have to constantly weigh when to say yes and when to say no to a sharing opportunity, but structure your decision making around some clear and intentional criteria. Evaluate the personal and professional value that you might derive in making the contribution, whether learning, developing new networks, or undertaking some other developmental experience, both short and long term. If there is no immediate benefit for you and you still want to say yes, understand why you think this is still a worthy investment (there’s no harm in helping some greater good, but just recognize that’s what you’re really trying to do). Be clear, also, about whether this opportunity calls on your particular knowledge, skills, or relationships, and whether offering those can really make a positive difference.
• Be focused enough to have impact. Unless you can give serious attention to what’s being asked of you, it’s not worth surrendering your time. It’s better to concentrate on a more limited group of people and institutions where you can meaningfully contribute than spread yourself too thin or simply pad your résumé with a list of token volunteering.
• Diversify your sharing portfolio. Consider, as many successful leaders do, coaching not just key employees in pivotal roles, but also a sprinkling of more-junior people or people with very different backgrounds than yours—simply to broaden the experience of what you might learn as you contribute. Similarly, consider diversifying the kind of external organizations for which you volunteer or on whose boards you serve to enrich the range of problems and different networks you might potentially encounter.
• Don’t shy away from the occasional open-ended contribution. As much as you should assess the value you bring and what you also might derive from a sharing opportunity, sometimes it’s worth volunteering without a predetermined ROI. Trust your gut if a person or organization calls you in need and answering the request “just seems like the right thing to do.” Realize also that helping others and taking yourself into new situations often leads to unexpected and sometimes unrelated opportunities, far beyond anything you would have guessed when you first began. Be a bit speculative with the investment of your time, but don’t overdo it.

Taking care of yourself

Executives we know speak openly about the challenges of preserving their own sense of well-being through the stress and turmoil of their challenging jobs. Many touch on the difficulty of finding time to think amid the day-to-day issues at work. Others concede that their diets, health, and physical stamina suffer from constant travel and too many late nights of constant deadlines or client demands. Others voice frustration that they can’t give back as much to society as they want, due to time pressure. And it’s common to hear from leaders how hard they find it to spend the right kind of time with family and on other personally meaningful pursuits.

You bring an enormous effort to the tasks of building your organization and your people. So who’s taking care of you to make sure you don’t burn out, get sick, or get so fragmented that everything personal and professional falls to pieces? If you are exhausted, frustrated, ignoring who you are and what you care about, the people and performance you are trying to lead will suffer. You may have a loving partner at home who supports you emotionally and a crackerjack assistant at work who keeps you on schedule, but they can’t do it all for you. To be an effective leader, you have to take care of yourself too.

Personal strategies

What kind of personal strategies do you have—or do you need to develop—to be both self-protective and energized as a leader? As the word “personal” suggests, the kind of strategies you develop and follow must be at least somewhat suited to your own preferences and needs. Here again, there’s no simple, universal paradigm. But we can identify a few general working approaches that leaders we know have developed to increase their own wellness. In these and many other cases, the solutions for finding wellness in some regard were devised by leaders themselves—understanding what was important to them, setting goals, and problem-solving ideas about how to achieve them (sometimes with peers, family members, an able assistant—or all of the above), and then putting in place mechanisms and rules that they committed themselves to follow. They were intentional about what they did, but often followed certain behaviors intuitively, which is why knowing yourself—where we began this chapter—is so important. If you can truly understand who you are, what your personal priorities are, what matters to you, and what you want to improve about yourself, self-care becomes just one more goal to achieve, adding further to your growth as a leader.

To help you design your own regime, let’s look at a few principles leaders employ to preserve and renew themselves.

Routinize common interactions

To avoid duplication and minimize the inevitable frustrations of daily management, don’t reinvent processes or assemble time-consuming details repeatedly for tasks that recur throughout your work. For example, to maintain focus and manage demands on her time, Jane Kirkland of State Street Corporation schedules regularly standardized reviews for every initiative she’s overseeing (much as in the operational reviews discussed in chapter 4). Kirkland also insists on handling contentious issues or questions that come up only in the meetings dedicated to those, so they don’t intrude later and distract from the critical focus of other working sessions. Stan McChrystal created a well-structured and consistent agenda for the daily online global intelligence briefing for the thousands of members of his terrorist-fighting network. The template allowed all participants to prepare to share the kind of information needed and to what end, and the structure also enabled McChrystal to play an appropriate leadership coaching role without having to adjudicate the process as commanding officer.

Partition your time at work

Many successful leaders intentionally partition their schedules to reduce fragmentation and start-and-stop problem solving. Rune Olav Pedersen, president and CEO of PGS (a petroleum geo-services company in Norway), handles requests from junior colleagues in dedicated office hours and declines any meetings that he doesn’t absolutely have to attend. Many leaders we know also regularly block their calendars and don’t take calls or meetings before 9 a.m. to give themselves needed time to think, write, or engage in personal productivity, such as planning their day or reflecting on progress toward key operational goals.

Partition your time outside of work

Like many others who want to contribute to society beyond their jobs, McKinsey’s Dominic Barton allocates regular time working for selected organizations outside of McKinsey and simply has his assistant build his annual schedule around that specific allocation. Others take a similar approach to preserve family bonds. Anne Mulcahy taught her peers and subordinates at Xerox that unless it was a true emergency, they shouldn’t call her on weekends at home when she was with her husband and children. Over time, she successfully enforced those boundaries, though it often meant she had to become comfortable with more delegation as her responsibilities became more complex. Tamara and John Lundgren, spouses who are both CEOs of different organizations, optimize every weekend together by making every effort to schedule all face-to-face business meetings with subordinates and clients during the week, including over dinner and sometimes late into the evening.

Simplify and prioritize your decision making

Brains that face too many choices and excessive inflows of information get tired, just as your arm muscles do if you try to do too many push-ups in an hour. In the HBR article “Boring Is Productive,” Robert Pozen summarizes that research and recounts the story of Barack Obama, who always wore either a gray or blue suit so he could “pare down his decision making” to focus his thinking on the truly substantive choices he would face during his day. Listen to other effective executives confronted with this or that issue, and you’ll frequently hear them say, “That’s not a decision I need to make,” because either someone closer to the problem can handle it or the stakes of the outcome don’t merit the trouble required to make a good judgment. Try bringing the same discipline of appropriate prioritization to other decisions and demands. Just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean you need to decide everything yourself.

Seek energy-renewing work and activity

In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on the importance of personal energy in leadership and also the collective energy of organizations more broadly. Though such things may seem intangible, the vim and vigor—both physical and psychological—that you bring to a task, and that you create among others, can dramatically affect the results you achieve, as Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy describe in the classic HBR article “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.” Not surprisingly, most effective leaders work to build rituals or activities into their schedules that renew their energy and set a tempo for others to follow.

For many leaders, that might begin, for example, by pursuing a discipline of daily exercise, regardless of one’s agenda or travel (that’s the case for John Martin, Stan McChrystal, Anne Mulcahy, and many others we’ve worked with), or something more simple, such as meditating in the first hour before your office officially opens, practicing regimes of mindfulness, or a regularly taking a walk in the sunshine at lunchtime.

Some strategies that build and renew energy for leaders stem from choosing—or designing—your work. If certain tasks or kinds of meetings especially drag you down, consider if you can delegate them or move them out of your schedule (admittedly, the answer is sometime no, but at least ask yourself). Roger Ferguson of TIAA gave up some senior administrative tasks, not only because he knew he wasn’t as good at those as he was at more strategic work, but also because it directed too much of his energy away from the areas where he felt he could have the biggest impact. Consider also building a schedule that always allows you to do at least some of the work that you love. Dominic Barton, even during his jam-packed tenure as global managing partner of McKinsey, insisted on serving a few clients “because it both kept me in touch with the heart of our strategy and allowed me to keep doing challenging problem-solving that I really enjoy.”

Achieving broader balance

As much as these strategies can serve to improve a leader’s personal wellness and effectiveness, most executives also acknowledge that self-care involves much more than just improving job productivity. Ultimately taking care of yourself as a leader must also be about recognizing how your work fits into the rest of your life. How do you prioritize between your differing spheres of things personal, professional, and social? How can you best fit them together and achieve some kind of holistic harmony among them?

As we’ve said, being clear about your personal priorities is always a good first step. Understanding what really matters to you and how, on the margin, you might choose to allocate different segments of your time is a discipline that any leader should adopt. If you think and act as if everything is equally important—work, family, personal growth or interests, spiritual life, and so on—you are essentially saying you don’t have any real priorities.

As Ron wrote in the HBR article “How Trivial Decisions Will Impact Your Happiness,” the inevitable pull of work once you start achieving success in your job will constantly force you to keep making one small compromise after another versus your nonwork life—missing a child’s school recital, forgoing a church or family event you had vowed to be part of, and so forth. That’s OK, but only if that’s the way you want to intentionally allocate your time on this earth. But maybe constant and shifting compromises are not OK for you. Can you honestly answer what you believe about such choices? Can you be more intentional about identifying and acting on your most meaningful preferences?

Many leaders fail to be explicit with themselves about what their real priorities are. As a leader, you have the right—and obligation—to choose what kind of balance you have in your life. But you need to be clear about what you want. Whether you’re looking in a mirror, talking with an executive coach, or writing down goals for your own life plan, be honest enough to confront the following questions: (1) What’s the balance I want to have between personal and professional success? (2) If I really had to choose between one or the other, which one do I see as most important? Why? (3) What specific goals do I have in each of these arenas? (4) How do I think about intentionally trading them off?

Once you’re formed your answers—and can authentically say they are both true and will be visible in how you will actually act—you can then start to develop pragmatic strategies to reach those goals. In some cases, your strategies might be some simple rules about the core situations when family comes first versus, say, when work comes first—and the rationale for when (and only when) you will make an exception. In other cases, you might institutionalize your priorities with a structured schedule or a set of commitments that you make and review those regularly with your executive coach or mentor. Whatever your approach, the critical step is understanding your goals and having a concrete plan, however simple, to hold yourself accountable to those goals.

Not surprisingly, many smart people have explored questions about finding the right balance or fuller integration among different goals throughout life and work. If you want to be more ambitious in your planning than simply charting a basic work-life balance, you’d be well served to tap into some of the recent thoughtful research. Two frameworks from HBR articles are good options to consult, described in the next section.

Integration: total leadership

In the HBR article “Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life,” Stewart D. Friedman identifies a framework of four “domains” of life—work, home, community, and self (meaning mind, body, and spirit); these accord well with the cluster of issues we’ve heard about repeatedly from leaders we’ve worked with.

Friedman argues that rather than achieving a binary work-life balance, leaders should strive for “total leadership” by creating dynamic integration across all four domains. He recommends that leaders follow a problem-solving and “experimental process.” First, talk with key stakeholders in each domain (e.g., at work, with peers and subordinates; at home, with members of your family; and so on). Use the discussions to learn from them about who you are and what matters to you. Then define personal objectives and assess your level of satisfaction against that. Then, over time, develop new rituals, undertake new opportunities, or create other life changes that help you progress toward objectives you have defined in each of the four domains.

As your experiments become more successful, you’ll find more opportunities to unify the activities and goals across the four and start to achieve greater harmony in your personal and professional life. Friedman underscores that success in any one of the domains can foster success in any of the others: by practicing your leadership with diverse talents and constituencies in a community setting, for example, you can prime yourself to achieve similar competence at work.

Andrew Géczy, CEO of Terra Firma whom we met earlier in the book, described a similar approach that he has used to take care of himself over the years:

Once a year I sit down and look at the five dimensions of my life—personal health, relationships with family, relationships with friends, contributions to the community, and achievements at work. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and each year I try to make conscious decisions about where I want to put more or less of my time and energy, and what trade-offs might be needed. I then share and discuss the five topics with a couple of trusted friends and mentors. It’s never a perfect pentagon, and it changes year to year, depending on what’s happening with the family, or the job, or my own health. It’s not a perfect framework, but it gives me the discipline of reflecting and adjusting among all my priorities at different times.

Setting course: measuring your life

In his landmark HBR article “How Will You Measure Your Life?” renowned Harvard strategist Clayton Christensen proposes a different but comparable framework. Christensen suggests that as a leader, you should identify a handful of essential metrics that define success for your life overall. He focuses on three questions: How can I be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationship with my family is an enduring source of happiness? And how can I live my life with integrity? By setting and then pursuing deliberately a strategy for each, much as you would for an organization, Christensen argues that you can achieve the highest possible outcome in each sphere.

_________

Whatever your aspiration and preferred level of work-life integration, taking care of yourself is no less important than other elements of leadership we’ve discussed in this chapter. Don’t neglect it! We close now with one more set of questions to help you get started on this element of the practice.

The practice of leading yourself will at times be a very solo and even lonely journey for you. But it is fundamental to both your personal success and everyone else your leadership will touch. Many leadership books begin—and go no further than—where this volume ends: focusing on self-understanding, critical habits, and other personal aspects of leading yourself. We hope that you see these aspects of the practice as means to an end rather than ends unto themselves. By developing yourself, you develop your ability to achieve collective organizational effectiveness, once again, to deliver greater impact by working with others toward common goals.