Page 127 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

116 HBR Leader’s Handbook

performance, you need to focus on results specifically. When you absolutely
have to achieve results, it forces you and your team to work differently and
discover new opportunities that you never would have seen if you were not
under the gun to deliver.
Focusing on results is not a sequential step that happens separately,
after you have done the other practices. Rather, you can approach many
aspects of your work—including the rest of these practices—with a results
focus. For example, to get results, you have to make smart decisions about
how to execute your strategy, and having a results focus can also inform the
strategy itself, as we’ll see in one leader’s story. Focusing on results can also
help you determine what people capabilities you need, while at the same
time helping you develop those capabilities. And for a leader, your results
should always be calibrated against the vision that you and your people are
trying to bring to life.
In this chapter, we’ll walk through the four elements that create a focus
on results:

• Establishing high expectations for measurable business outcomes
and holding people accountable for achieving them

• Reducing the organizational complexity that gets in the way of
producing results

• Building your people’s capabilities to get results, particularly when
it requires new ways of working

• Maintaining execution discipline through regular metrics report-
ing and operational reviews

None of this is easy, of course. For many leaders, the skills necessary
for the achievement of results don’t come naturally, especially rigorously
holding people accountable for their numbers and asking tough questions
about operational performance. For anyone who is conflict averse, getting
results involves mastering anxieties about confronting others and resolv-
ing differences. And to sell a set of high-performance goals, you need to be
good at using a challenge to motivate people. Mastering this area, however,