Page 109 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level
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Getting Great People on Board 99

                 You can create these kinds of experiences for your team members by:

                 •  Giving your direct reports tougher and broader goals. For exam-
                   ple, McKinsey Global managing partner Dominic Barton describes
                   what happened when he was tossed into the deep water early in his
                   professional life:

                       The key to my career was when I was asked to head up the
                       McKinsey office in Korea. We had eighty people but weren’t
                       considered to be a prominent firm in Korea and didn’t really
                       have a way to grow. The orthodox wisdom, I was told by my
                       predecessor, was to keep a low profile, not be in the media, and
                       not talk to newspapers. But if we were so quiet, how would any
                       Korean companies know about us? So I took a risk and started
                       to write a short newspaper column every week about business
                       and management issues. It was published in Korean, so I knew
                       that nobody at McKinsey outside of Korea would read it and I
                       couldn’t get caught. Eventually, these columns helped me get
                       to know the fifty people who really matter in Korea, build rela-
                       tionships with them, and grow our practice. In essence, I had a
                       small playground to work in and try new stuff.

                 •  Asking your people to work together to achieve something. For
                   example, the president of a large academic medical center asked
                   his top twenty leaders to jointly address the changing health-
                   care landscape and find ways to put the institution on more solid
                   financial footing. These leaders, who ran various clinical depart-
                   ments, research areas, and operational functions, were all experts
                   in their fields, but had little experience leading strategic change,
                   nor had they developed their skills at working across disciplines.
                   They tended to be protective of their own areas and budgets. By
                   taking on this joint assignment, however, the leaders were forced
                   to take an institutional perspective and think about trade-offs
                   between areas. They brought in experts on health-care trends to
                   educate them on the external environment and learned how to do
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