Page 141 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

130 HBR Leader’s Handbook

never done those things? It actually requires the sales teams to develop
new capabilities.
The third element of leading with a results focus is to create opportu-
nities for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people in the organiza-
tion to learn how to work differently in order to get better results. Many
leaders are tempted to dictate capability-related changes from the top
down, which may sound like a logical approach. You can launch training
programs to teach everyone new ways of working, and you can change
compensation and promotion plans to provide the proper motivation, as
you learned in the last chapter. Because you’re the boss, you might assume
that they will do what you say.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, even in top-down organiza-
tions like the army. For example, General Stanley McCrystal, former head
of Special Operations, emphasized, in the HBR interview “What Compa-
nies Can Learn from Military Teams,” that effective operations in the army
require clarity of mission, trust, and the continual development of team
capabilities. It’s not just about top-down direction. That doesn’t mean that
leaders can’t provide resources and tools for learning. As we saw in the last
chapter, Darren Walker gave his Ford Foundation program managers
access to technology fellows to help them learn about the digital world. But
the program managers themselves had to figure out how to take what they
were learning from the fellows and apply it, in their own unique ways, to
the social justice challenges in their programs. Building capabilities is not
a paint-by-numbers exercise.
This is all the more true in nonmilitary settings. After years of re-
search, Russell Eisenstat and colleagues concluded, in the HBR article
“Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change,” that the most effective
change in organizations comes from bottom-up experiments in which
managers and their people learn new capabilities and experience success,
and then spread the new approaches to others. The leader, however, can
stimulate the bottom-up experiments by demanding the achievement of
stretch goals. When teams realize that they can’t reach those goals by con-
tinuing to do what they did in the past, it forces them to search for new
approaches.