Conclusion: Putting It All Together

Let’s look back to the three rising leaders we met in the introduction of this book. If you were like Linda, the marketing head, and you wondered if becoming a leader required a mystical personality transformation, you now know that it doesn’t; it builds on the work you’re already doing as a manager. If you were like Linda’s friend Sam, the newly appointed COO of a nonprofit who had been assuming that leadership meant just working harder, you now know that, too, is not true. It’s about learning how to call upon others, finding ways to mobilize and leverage the efforts of your team and the broader organization. And if you were like Natalie, anxious about launching her own startup, you now understand that you can break the complex challenge of running a big organization into manageable practices, and that you can prioritize those by where you can have the biggest impact. Leadership is something you can do.

To close, we highlight a few major themes that cut across this book and that might help you as you reflect on (and begin practicing) the practices.

Leadership matters

Obviously, human progress doesn’t just happen automatically. Yes, some initiatives may be self-organizing, and serendipity and fortune play a role in any outcome, but without leadership, big and important things just don’t get done. Without the push and drive of Seraina Macia, XL’s North American P&C business would never have started growing again. It took Stanley McChrystal to transform a military organization into an effective network to fight the terrorism of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Jim Smith had the vision, experience, and sense of purpose to guide Thomson Reuters toward a greater focus on growth and innovation.

We are not saying that no one else might have achieved similar results, nor that success for any of these leaders was guaranteed. Instead, we want you to understand, as our case examples and discussions of practices have shown, that large and complicated challenges require lots of people working together on solutions. Leadership is needed to motivate and align that kind of effort. Such challenges are your opportunity to make the fundamental difference that defines a leader. Don’t wait to be anointed by someone else. Seize the moment to make yourself a leader.

Think big and bold and look around the corners

Seizing the leadership opportunity and making the leadership difference in fact requires courage and also an ability to look beyond the everyday and near-term tasks of basic management. Remember Dominic Barton, the global managing partner of McKinsey whom we’ve met throughout the book? In our conversation, he said that managers take care of the railroad tracks, but leaders shift the tracks, change the boundaries, and redefine directions. In other words, the leader’s thought process is bigger and bolder and much more forward thinking. To be a leader, you need to anticipate like a great chess player who looks ten moves ahead and also quickly adjusts to the opponent’s play.

This doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore the current challenges of your organization and focus only on the future. On the contrary, your customers, clients, employees, investors, and partners are all counting on you to keep your eye on the present and ensure that you’re doing what’s needed to get results. As you do this, however, you can move into leadership by looking at what’s next, and what’s next after that.

You can apply this thought process to many aspects of management and, in so doing, demonstrate the leadership difference. For example, as you work on setting yearly (or quarterly or monthly) goals for yourself and your team, go beyond ordinary and incremental improvements. Think about what’s needed to accelerate progress toward the organization’s vision and how your area can contribute. Then challenge your people to get to a whole new level of performance that will not only stretch their capabilities, but also make others take notice. And as you work with your team to achieve these goals, help them prioritize what’s important and what’s not, facilitate collaboration with other areas, and teach everyone how to work as a team. As you’re doing all that, start thinking about the next wave of improvement and beyond. In other words, grasp the leadership opportunities already in your reach and then keep looking beyond.

But also have the courage to let go

Leadership requires guts to seize opportunity but, in that pursuit, also the guts to trust others and not try doing it all yourself. Busyness creates its own sense of psychological comfort, but also an artificial sense of always being needed—and that will leave you with too little time for real leadership.

Tackling any major challenge will overwhelm you if you insist on facing it alone. Learn to delegate to others, for example, investing team members with key tasks that must be done and sharing the burden with—and then not micromanaging—other leaders and professionals committed to the same big goals.

Learn, also, to reach deep into your organization for good ideas and fresh approaches to problems; be open to solutions that come from the bottom up or even from beyond your organization. More and more leaders are embracing “the wisdom of the crowd.”

Yes, you’ll be taking on some risk as you venture into letting go; the colleagues you trust to help with the work may not do it as well as you think you could. Yes, some people may see your delegation as a sign of your own weakness or inability. Yes, you may feel some twinge of an identity crisis if sharing power or trusting more junior employees or talented outsiders leaves you feeling like you’re not really in charge. But achieving big impact always involves some risk, and as a leader, you must consider the opposite—and usually worse—risk of not leveraging the best possible ideas, of demotivating colleagues because they have no chance to make their own contribution, of becoming a bottleneck because you want to control everything yourself.

As a leader, you must know yourself, steel yourself, and trust in the best organizational approach you can arrange. It’s why Anne Mulcahy was happy to add a few strong strategic thinkers with skills she lacked when she was leading the Xerox turnaround, why Jim Wolfensohn went beyond his executive team and engaged the broader community of the World Bank when developing a new vision, and why Roger Ferguson gave up some operational jobs that could take his attention away from his focus on the evolution of TIAA.

Inspire and demand

Dreaming big and having the courage to pursue those dreams—despite the risk—is essential for leaders. But you also need to get others to share your dream, vision, and purpose. Leadership is about creating significant impact through others, but those others have to be motivated to perform. You can’t just tell your people what to do and walk away. They need to understand what you are trying to accomplish, how their work contributes to the broader goal, and how the broader goal will make a difference for them, for your customers, and perhaps for the world. The people you lead need to be inspired, excited, and challenged or they won’t follow, and they won’t make good decisions in support of the vision when you’re not around. “BHAGs” (big, hairy, audacious goals) and “stretch goals” are not just clever terms; they’re essential leadership tools for getting your team and your organization to the next level.

Getting everyone charged up is not enough, however. Once your team realizes that the goal isn’t easy and that it will take hard, inventive, and persistent effort, you’ll also have to provide ongoing encouragement. Leaders believe in their people, that they can achieve even more than they themselves thought possible. The “Pygmalion Principle” made famous in the 1950s musical My Fair Lady is worth remembering here: if you expect your people to succeed, they are more likely to live up to your expectations. Conversely, if you constantly second-guess and doubt them, your people will lose their confidence.

Still, you need to temper encouragement with strong demands. You have to make it clear to your people that they have to get results along the way and that there are no rewards for effort alone. Finding the right balance between inspiring and demanding is a constant tension for leaders, and one that you’ll probably have to work on throughout your career. It’s always tempting to be the good guy, the cheerleader, and the nice leader whom everyone likes. It’s tougher to do what Darren Walker did at the Ford Foundation and look people in the eye and tell them that their performance is unacceptable or that they need to upgrade their skills, and that they will be held accountable if they don’t change. But if you don’t do both, you’ll end up with a happy team that doesn’t get anything done, which won’t make you, your customers, and your investors happy at all.

Learn from your failures

Courage and risk taking, along with inspiring and demanding, are certainly key virtues for leaders, but so is a certain amount of humility. Big, bold moves and trusting others sometimes don’t work out, or worse, turn into disasters.

All leaders have their share of setbacks; the key is adopting a mindset of learning from failures and having the resilience to bounce back, wiser and more experienced for the next challenge. Over time, if you just keep working at it, you become a better leader. Thus, Dom Barton’s successful collaborative strategy to transform McKinsey was shaped by the trial-and-error approach he took as he was learning to build the firm’s practice in Korea. John Lundgren’s growth strategy for Stanley Black & Decker went on to even bigger success after he and his team learned from a major setback they had in a badly failed European acquisition. Stan McChrystal’s idea about the new network approach to his Middle East command grew out of several initial defeats suffered at the hands of his more nimble terrorist enemy.

Create an organization of one mind

For all the personal boldness, risk taking, challenging, and learning you must embrace as a leader, you must also build a collective organization of people who are as passionate, committed, and dedicated to performance as you are. Your goal, stated more simply, is to create a one-minded pursuit of excellence. Great leaders work tirelessly to motivate and align large masses of people to achieve the kinds of goals that no individual can accomplish on their own.

Leaders work on this in many ways: by creating a common and motivating vision that all can see and believe in, as Wolfensohn did with the World Bank; by modeling the kind of thinking and behavior of, say, knowledge sharing and collaborative behavior, as McChrystal did every day in the video briefings he moderated with thousands of Special Ops forces; by telling stories and putting into context the performance challenges an organization faces, so that everyone understands the urgency of change, as Walker of the Ford Foundation did in championing to his people the need to bring social justice to the digital world, or as Mulcahy did, explaining again and again to different employee groups how they could specifically work in new ways to save Xerox.

Successful leaders will also create broad-based cultural expectations for performance behaviors and expectations, to build “one mind.” Recall, for example, Mark Benjamin, former president of NCR, who insisted on giving brutally honest but constructive feedback to his direct reports so that those managers could in turn give the same to their people, and so on down the line.

Great leaders synthesize, contextualize, and help create meaning for everyone in their organization. They also infuse the enterprise with the energy and passion to win.

Make e pluribus unum your leadership agenda

Throughout this book, we have examined various practices and other elements of leadership, often—for the ease of learning—in an isolated manner. And some of the things we proscribe may seem at odds with each other; for example, the importance of inspiring and motivating people but also not shirking from giving them tough performance feedback; to be relentless in delivering results and near-term performance, but also to embrace future experimentation and opportunities; to be bold and personally courageous but also to step aside sometimes and let others take the lead. We’re not the first to suggest that leadership must embrace both/and thinking.

Ultimately you must strive to find—and continuously translate for others—some meaningful and actionable unity among many different pieces of everything you do and see as a leader: different practices, different ideas, and changes in situation between yesterday and today.

In the end, leadership must be an act (to borrow from the motto of the United States) of e pluribus unum: “out of many pieces, one overall.” You aren’t meant to take on the six practices and many steps within them separately. You must combine all the practices to succeed as a leader. But how you combine them is up to you: it will depend on the context of your organization, your skills, and your aspirations. The way you combine them will change by the day and over the long term as you grow as a leader, as you practice, learning and refining as you go.

But leadership is not only an aggregate of creating vision, building strategy, and getting great people on board. As you lead your organization, you are, both implicitly and explicitly, constructing a system of people that reflects you, your values, and your aspirations. Doing so allows you to make, in iconic leader Steve Jobs’s term, “a dent in the universe.” Recognize that for all it’s worth and your leadership practice will become the best way for you to create your impact on the world.