Introduction

Linda ran marketing for a midsize online retailer and was thriving: her team had helped drive six straight quarters of growth, and she was praised by sales for her strong partnership and performance. Linda was also a member of the company’s customer council and well respected by the CEO and other managers.

But she felt stuck in second gear. Her ideas for more innovation were politely listened to in executive meetings, but never seemed to go any-where—“Yeah, interesting concept, Linda, but way too blue-sky right now.” She raised her hand for bigger jobs in her company, but repeatedly lost out to more experienced outsiders. She wanted to have more impact and occasionally thought about outside opportunities. But when recruiters called, she wasn’t able to picture how she could grab the new job and be successful in it.

Linda was frustrated in her quest for a more significant role but had twinges of confusion and insecurity: “Is becoming a leader some mystical transformation? Do I have to be some Sheryl-Sandberg-in-the-making to fulfill my professional dreams?”

Linda’s business school friends, Sam and Natalie, also ten years into their careers, wrestled with similar questions. Both were also eager for more opportunities for leadership but were struggling with the transition.

Sam, known for quick learning and hard work, had risen from fund-raising manager to chief operating officer at a growing community nonprofit. “I’m totally jazzed by the work here and have 100 people reporting to me,” he told Linda proudly. “But I keep waking up at 3 a.m., wondering if I can do this.”

Natalie, a rising tech star in Silicon Valley, was itching to found her own startup. She had good management experience and now also some venture backing and a slate of potential employees eager to join her. But she didn’t want to launch the business only to have investors force her to hand it over to a more seasoned executive. She sensed that running an entire company would be a bigger—and scarier—challenge than anything she’d done so far.

Linda, Sam, Natalie: this Leader’s Handbook is for you. If you’re hitting a leadership wall like many midcareer professionals, this book will help you break through. It’s also for you if you’re an established manager wanting to take your career to the next level or to increase the scope of your current job, if you want to start your own business, or if you just want to generally reach for more impact in whatever you’re doing. It’s for you whether you’re at a traditional company, startup, nonprofit, or government organization, or even looking to lead in a more informal or networked enterprise.

Breaking through to a higher level of leadership will require you to think differently and may even be an identify shift for you. You’ll have more privileges but also more risk: your daily actions will be much more exposed. But most of all, this shift will require you to do different things. You’ll be moving from a role where you’re focused on your own learning, collaborating with colleagues, and executing on a direction set by someone else, to a role where success depends more on the direction that you set and mobilizing many other people to get the job done. This book will describe the areas you need to excel and how to build those abilities.

Focus on the fundamentals

Today’s world desperately needs more and better leaders. Intensifying global competition, rising performance expectations, and proliferating social and economic problems everywhere have put an unprecedented premium on leadership. Furthermore, organizations continue to change (as always); they are now less hierarchical, more networked, more nimble, and more technology-enabled than a generation ago.

These changes are driving demand for guidance that has resulted in an explosion of books, articles, and other methods for building leadership skills and knowledge. There are thousands of leadership titles available on Amazon, with many more appearing every year. Much of it is helpful, but there’s also a growing stream of gimmicky quick solutions flooding and confusing the market.

But despite all the change that swirls around us and the cacophony of advice, in its fundamentals, leadership has not changed: it is still about working with other people to achieve common goals.

Given that reality, we believe the best way for any aspiring leader to succeed and to navigate turbulent times is to tune out the noise and refocus on these fundamentals. By mining the wisdom of the most enduring ideas published in Harvard Business Review, our own expertise, and the experience of some of the world’s top leaders, this book will cut through the noise and provide you with grounding in those fundamentals so you can break through the kinds of barriers that Linda, Sam, and Natalie are facing.

In doing so, this book will bring you some of the most important research and leadership lessons published in the Harvard Business Review in the last four decades. Much has changed over these years, but many areas of leadership have remained consistent. Many of the same time-tested frameworks and ideas apply as much today as they did when they were first published. We describe many of these carefully selected HBR articles in the chapters that follow and list them in a Further Reading section at the end of the book (if you see an HBR article mentioned in the text, you can find more information about it there).

To shape these concepts into the approach we describe in this book, we’re also drawing on a combined sixty years of our own collective experience working as thought leaders, consultants, or colleagues with leaders of organizations ranging from Fortune 50 corporations, to professional service firms, to nonprofits and startups worldwide. During that time, we’ve seen hundreds of leaders in action. We’ve also coached them and partnered with them through transformations, crises, and breakthrough achievements. We’ve stood side by side with them as they confronted their own shortcomings, grew, and learned.

Last, we interviewed nearly forty working senior leaders who graciously shared their perspectives on the core practices and included many of their insights and stories along the way as well.

Let’s begin with some context—by simply defining “leadership.” You can’t develop and get good at something if you don’t understand what it is and why it matters. Once you understand the context, we’ll give you a snapshot of what’s in the book and how it will help you advance as a leader.

What is leadership?

If you want to become a leader or grow your leadership capability, what does that actually mean?

The term “leadership” has never had a precise definition. For some, it simply means the uppermost segment of an organizational hierarchy. For others, it’s a set of competencies that are totally distinct from those of a manager, at whatever level, akin to how professor Abraham Zaleznik described them in a landmark 1977 HBR article “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?,” in which he said that managers tame chaos with controls and process, while leaders thrive on ambiguity, creativity, and discovery in order to spur change. For still others, a leader might be a hero whose almost mythical success feels beyond reach, like Steve Jobs or Sheryl Sandberg. And at the opposite extreme, the term “leader” is also often applied to the star on a kids’ soccer team or the more junior manager with a large following on social media.

We believe that just about everyone has some potential for leadership, and that organizations—and society more broadly—win when more people develop relevant skills and take more initiative to solve problems.

For this book, though, we define leadership as:

Achieving significant positive impact—by building an organization of people working together toward a common goal.

Achieving significant positive impact

“Achieving significant positive impact” means creating results such as a major business transformation, growth at scale, or a new offering that moves markets. The kind of leadership we describe is not just running a big project; it’s about the scale of the results that you achieve when you do. This book will help you achieve that kind of large-scale impact in what you do by encouraging and enabling followers, and creating more value over time than those followers could achieve on their own.

We want you to aim big and understand what achieving it takes. Our chapters are illustrated with examples of successful leaders who have in some way or other really made a difference in their market or competitive arena (for more on these stories, see the box “More on the cases”). For example, one leader we profile, AIG’s Seraina Macia, tells how, in a previous job, she led a transformation of XL’s North American Property and Casualty business that generated huge returns for the company. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, explains how he’s been transforming global philanthropy by bringing traditional social justice programs into the digital sphere. Paula Kerger, president of PBS, provides another example of major impact based on dramatically expanding the system’s educational offerings to children and local communities nationwide. (For full disclosure, note that we’ve worked with a number of the leaders we describe in the book in coaching or consulting capacities.)

Of course, CEOs and presidents are not the only leaders that we cite, and we don’t want to suggest that they are the only role models that you should emulate or the only ones who can create significant positive impact, particularly since it may be a while before you are running an entire organization. However, the steps that these senior executives have taken and the challenges that they have overcome provide lessons for leaders at all levels and in all types of organizations. For example, even if you aren’t at the stage of your career where you’re developing strategy for the entire enterprise, you might need to figure out a strategy for growing a particular product or for a particular initiative. Similarly, while you might not have the responsibility for creating a people capability plan for your whole organization, you will have to build a top-notch team for your area.

Why “positive” impact?

Emphasizing the word “positive” in our defining phrase about leadership impact is not accidental.

We believe the term “leadership” carries with it a responsibility to create not just any impact, but impact that makes a positive difference toward socially or economically responsible goals rather than a blueprint for effecting some kind of dubious or even evil outcomes. True enough, many of the practices we highlight in this book could be applied to increase performance of criminal or terrorist organizations, too. But we hope you will harness the practices to generally advance people’s welfare, and the fair and open creation of wealth and human capital in market economies.

Building an organization of people

Leadership is not about making this kind of impact alone; it depends on doing so through others. Leaders must be masters of building and developing collective work, inspiring and organizing others toward a common goal or goals. Since time immemorial, organizations have been the way that people have coordinated and scaled the effectiveness of human talent. And leaders we have worked with over many years have said that building and motivating an organization is the hardest—and most critically important—part of their jobs.

We use the term “organization” to mean not only traditional corporations like Procter & Gamble or Cisco Systems, but also nonprofit enterprises, startups, divisions within larger companies, government agencies, or even more loosely coupled groups of people operating as informal communities or virtual networks, such as professional associations, social activist alliances, research collectives, and similar. As long as people can be brought together and motivated to work toward a shared goal, there is an opportunity for a leader (or many leaders collaborating) to create large-scale positive impact.

But aligning and motivating that collective effort is deeply challenging. For leaders to succeed, they must address fundamental dilemmas about the human aspects of getting people to work together: differing strengths, attitudes, experiences, ambitions, beliefs, and limitations. And those must be somehow rationalized and aligned with an overall strategy and commitment to achieving collective performance.

For example, Seraina Macia created impact by developing and aligning different groups at XL Insurance, many of whom had conflicting views about how to meet customers’ insurance needs. Darren Walker had to shape a new culture and make some tough people choices to shift the Ford Foundation toward addressing digital justice challenges. Paula Kerger and her team achieved success in transforming children’s television by artfully mobilizing the locally owned and operated network of local public television stations around a new strategic set of service offerings.

The difference between leaders and managers

We use the terms “managers” and “leaders” in this book, and like Zaleznik, we don’t think they mean the same thing. In our view, what sets leadership apart is the “impact” piece of our definition—leaders are able to have greater impact over time than managers.

But that’s not to say that leaders don’t need managerial skills or that they don’t do the work of management. Early in their careers, leaders need to master basic managerial skills and hone them through repeated application. Eventually, however, they add more of the unique leadership capabilities and ways of thinking. People who don’t make the leap will remain managers and continue to contribute. But those who can add leadership abilities to their management repertoire will multiply their value many times over.

As an analogy, consider how great musical conductors have to stay close to—and will often know how to play—the instruments of key soloists in their orchestra. However, they also learn to go beyond their own instrument and bring together the entire ensemble.

While leadership can be defined differently from management, it also emerges out of it, and when done well, it delivers a leap in impact (see figure I-1). Leaders achieve their difference—their significant impact—by deeply understanding, continuously learning from, and actually practicing management—and then adding unique leadership actions to the mix.

How to develop as a leader: the six practices

If you aspire to become a leader, how do you develop the skills and knowledge it takes? The best way is by live practice—doing and learning on the job. Anyone can and should work on these capabilities beginning in the earliest years of his or her career. We’ve seen this in our work: that all of the conceptual frameworks, training programs, personal assessments, experiential exercises, and war stories from others begin to truly sink in only when leaders have to apply them in real time, with real people, and real consequences. Of course, coaching, instruction, and reading can be helpful along the way, but there’s no substitute for wrestling with, and learning from, actual practice.

In our back-to-fundamentals approach, we have identified six essential and timeless practice areas for aspiring leaders, with each of these constituting a chapter of the book. These represent not an encyclopedia of leadership (see the box “What about soft skills?”), but rather the specific must-do areas that differentiate those who have the strongest impact:

• Building a unifying vision (chapter 1). Successful leaders use vision to build and motivate an organization and kick-start innovation and aspirational performance. By setting out broad goals and a picture of success, a vision is the critical first step to achieving distinctive impact through people.
• Developing a strategy (chapter 2). After vision, the next step toward major impact is developing a coordinated set of actions so the organization can win—create distinctive value, exceed customer expectations, and beat out market rivals. Leaders do that by challenging their enterprise to answer—and then execute successfully upon—critical questions about where and how to compete.

• Getting great people on board (chapter 3). Nothing matters more to great leaders than people. They recruit, engage, develop, and align the members of an organization with a dual proposition: “if you can give your all to help us thrive collectively, we’ll do our best to help you thrive personally.”
• Focusing on results (chapter 4). Once hired and engaged, the people of an organization must deliver the results that will create impact. Savvy leaders build the processes that enable people working together to focus on and reach continuously higher performance.
• Innovating for the future (chapter 5). Winning strategies and performance results are not guaranteed forever. Leaders have to look at both the present and the future, and build resilience and creativity into their organizations to keep ahead of changes in markets, industry, and business models of competitors.
• Leading yourself (chapter 6). Though the collective effort of an organization is needed to achieve impact, leaders themselves are also part of that organization. The critical role leaders play demands that they also invest in themselves—developing self-understanding, ongoing renewal, and enough self-preservation to keep their own performance high.

The first five of these chapters follow a logical sequence: leaders begin with a vision, progressively turn it into action by developing strategy, managing people, and processes, innovating for the longer term, and so forth.

But these practices are by no means necessarily sequential; they are interdependent, often overlapping, and iterative. For example, vision, strategy, and innovation must be closely related, and you must manage people and results at all stages of your work. Moreover, the sixth practice (leading yourself) is foundational to everything else. While it could have been the first chapter in the book, we chose to end with it, as a way to reinforce the need for leaders to continually learn about all of these areas. In addition, we wanted to counter the increasingly common belief that leadership is all about developing inward-facing skills. In our view, leaders need to build their organizations and achieve sustaining results, while simultaneously developing themselves.

Every leader puts their spin on these practices and adjusts them based on their own personalities, proclivities, passions, and situations. But their essence, as captured in the chapters that follow, remains the same.

Practicing the practices

Repeatedly trying, reflecting, and then improving how you apply yourself to create impact through the organization is what’s required, and it’s why we call these areas of development “practices.” Successful leaders constantly do these things and work to improve them.

This journey is different for everyone. It might begin, for example, early in your career, when you’re first working as a manager with a more accomplished leader, and joining him or her in doing some of the practices. Over time, you will likely get an opportunity to take charge of some of the practices we describe (creating vision, strategy, etc.). You’ll have varying degrees of success as you take these areas on for the first time—that’s normal. But by reflecting on your successes and failures at every step, you’ll keep making positive adjustments and keep looking for more opportunities to learn.

As you progress, you will reach a level of capability in these six areas that will enable you to achieve increasingly significant value through the people who work for your team, division, or company. As you succeed, these results will begin to build upon one another—you oversee a new product that becomes a runaway hit, or take charge of a transformational initiative that redefines a major market or puts your company on a new path to growth.

As you reach new levels of competency in each practice, you will experience a magnitude change in performance and more followership in your organization, also accompanied perhaps by a growing personal reputation in your industry. More and more people now want to sign up and work with you. Clients or customers ask for you by name. You’re invited to represent the company at major industry conferences. Whether you use this momentum to take over a new initiative or to start your own company, you’ve begun to truly deliver major impact at scale. You’ve become a leader, capable of rallying an organization of people around a meaningful collective goal and delivering the results to reach it.

A simple map to help you on your way

For a conceptual map of this book, see figure I-2. We treat each practice of leadership distinctly, but as a leader, you’re practicing them all at once. You’re combining them in the ways that are unique to you and your particular organization and context. And as they come together, you will begin to achieve significant positive impact through others—that’s leadership. But it doesn’t end there: to keep moving ahead, you will keep practicing, constantly doing, reflecting, and learning to make an impact, inspire your organization, and get to the next level.

So let’s get started!