Page 129 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

118 HBR Leader’s Handbook

She then required each member of her senior team to create specific,
measurable, strategic growth plans showing how they would deliver their
portion of the stretch goal. Some team members struggled with this; they
were so focused on thinking about how the core business already worked
that they simply weren’t able to think creatively about how to redeploy XL’s
assets to meet a specific growth target. When they failed to deliver a work-
able plan, Macia held them accountable, and in a compassionate but tough
way, she took some of the actions we described in the last chapter for replac-
ing senior team members who weren’t the right leaders for the organization.
Early in her tenure, Macia also recognized that there were some as-
pects of the organization’s structure that made little sense for a group fo-
cused on improving business results: for example, the staff functions were
more powerful than the business leaders whose units would do the work of
reaching the stretch goal. She reorganized the structure of the business to
have the business leaders report directly to her rather than through others,
which allowed her to better focus on the growth plans that they were de-
veloping and would be held accountable for.
Macia also knew that the growth she was demanding would require
many parts of the business to work in new ways. For example, one part of
XL’s growth plan indicated that new business would come in part from a
change to a more proactive approach to finding new business rather than
simply assessing proposals that brokers sent them. But that was a signifi-
cant shift for underwriters and others. So to help them develop new pat-
terns, she created five small teams (including underwriters) and charged
them with winning new business in geographic markets that XL had not
previously penetrated within 100 days, with thirty-day check-ins for all the
teams. Through the process of trial and error, the teams learned about this
new way of doing business and about the new geographical areas them-
selves. By the end of the 100 days, they had won their first new business
and were well on their way to winning more.
Finally, Macia set up a disciplined system to monitor the ongoing op-
erational performance of the organization. She identified the metrics to
measure not only top-line results, but also aspects of the business that
pointed to the health of her new initiatives and of the businesses’ growth