Page 132 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Focusing on Results 121

could pull it off. This combination of empathy (“We know it’s a stretch”)
along with encouragement is important to get people charged up and
motivated.
Along these lines, Macia also pointed out that XL had a lot going for
it—a good reputation in the market, solid products, a large network of bro-
kers, and strong technical expertise. So it had a lot of assets to work with;
they just needed to figure out creative ways of using them in the service of
growth. Macia emphasized, however, that she was not talking about just
any growth, but rather targeted opportunities that would meet XL’s
underwriting and risk standards and would improve the all-important
combined ratio.
On the surface, it sounds perfectly logical, even simplistic, that in order
for people to achieve exceptional results, you have to ask for them explic-
itly. But as Robert Schaffer pointed out in a classic HBR article “Demand
Better Results—and Get Them,” the ability to establish high-performance
expectations may be “the most universally underdeveloped” leadership
skill in organizations. This is because human behavior often causes leaders
unconsciously to shy away from making tough demands on their people for
fear that they might be unable to succeed and you’ll have to fire them, or
that they might argue with you about the goals, or that they might want to
trade off one goal for another. Indeed, as Macia told us of her initial con-
versation arguing for the performance goal she set, “My direct reports and
my peers thought that I was entirely mad.”
But making these tough demands can transform your organization or
team. For Macia, the process of challenging her people to create a
multibillion-dollar, profitable, and secure growth business was a seminal
moment in the pursuit of results: if she had not pushed them to the next
level with this seemingly crazy goal, the team would likely have continued
doing what they had done before, with more or less the same results.
Making these types of results-focused demands also applies to leaders
of functions or teams throughout the organization, not just to CEOs like
Macia. Every group has the potential to be more productive and create
greater value, but it won’t happen unless they are challenged to step up
their game by a demand-making leader.