Page 130 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Focusing on Results 119

in particular. She set up employee progress updates, senior team meetings,
and one-on-ones with her direct reports to hold candid discussions about
these numbers on regular schedules.
Macia’s focus on business results drove substantial growth. When she
left XL after three years to take on a next challenge at AIG, the business
already had climbed to around $1.8 billion in profitable revenue from pre-
miums. Equally important, Macia had changed the culture of XL’s busi-
ness so that striving for the next level of performance was something that
every manager was expected to do. A year after Macia had left, the leader
who succeeded her (one of her previous direct reports) brought the busi-
ness over the $3 billion threshold, an incredible achievement for a business
that just a few years earlier had been underperforming and shrinking.

Setting high performance goals and
holding people accountable

The first element of focusing on results is to set aggressive goals for your
unit’s performance, and to hold your team accountable for those goals.
Whether you’re setting a vision or a strategy, or executing on those ini-
tiatives, focusing your people on a specific, tangible goal creates a more
immediate sense of urgency, especially if they know that failing to meet
that goal has consequences. By focusing your team members on a stretch
goal—rather than keeping their thinking embedded in how the business
currently operates—you also free them up to think creatively about what to
do differently to achieve it. And you’ll learn quickly if they just don’t have
the ability to deliver.
Pushing those performance expectations ever higher meanwhile is one
of the key ways that leaders can drive their teams toward more significant
impact. As the late professor C. K. Prahalad once told us, the job of the
leader is not to be a “caretaker” who maintains a steady level of perfor-
mance, but rather a disruptor who pushes the organization to deliver more.
If the leader doesn’t play that role, according to Prahalad, they run the risk
of becoming an “undertaker” for an organization that may not survive. Let’s
look more closely at how you can do this.