Page 108 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

98 HBR Leader’s Handbook

of the program to ensure that his views about what leaders needed to do to
make Merck successful were incorporated. But Frazier didn’t stop there. In
addition, he personally attended the two-day programs from beginning to
end as a full participant, engaging in small-group and plenary discussions
throughout. This gave him direct exposure to dozens of potential leaders
whom he hadn’t known before and gave him a platform to share his vision
for the company and what it needed to do strategically. His participation
also sent a strong signal to the participants, and the thousands of people
who reported to them, that Frazier was committed not only to Merck’s
long-term success, but to theirs as well, which is the essence of the social
contract.
Leaders don’t need to spend all their time sitting through leadership
development programs. But you should take a hard look at your calendar
and at how much time you are devoting to the review and development of
your department’s or team’s talent. For many leaders, business, customer,
and competitive pressures often squeeze out the time for direct involve-
ment in the development of their people. If you let this happen, however,
you may end up with people who won’t be able to help you reach your goals.

Stretch your high potentials
Another way that you can personally give your team members opportu-
nities to grow is to force people into assignments and projects that will
stretch their abilities beyond what they think might be possible.
Most research on talent development shows that leaders learn much
more from real situations in which they are forced to get things done than
they do from case studies, simulations, and training sessions. Harvard
Business School professor Michael Beer and his colleagues have pointed
out for years that leadership training on its own—roughly a $350 billion
business (as of 2015)—has little impact on real leadership performance (for
more, see their HBR article “Why Leadership Training Fails, and What to
Do About It”). As a leader, you can create challenges for your direct re-
ports, and if you are a senior leader, you can make sure that these kinds of
opportunities are available to high-potential people throughout the
organization.