Page 145 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

134 HBR Leader’s Handbook

effective operational cadence, and holding candid discussions about the
results.
These activities may seem like standard managerial fare, but in a
results-driven environment, they are particularly critical for leaders to
attend to. Demanding adherence to high goals, removing complexity, and
giving staff freedom to experiment and build their own capabilities can
create a lot of energy and initiative. But without regular, disciplined atten-
tion to operational performance, you may find that individuals are reach-
ing for their high goals in destructive ways, or that simplified processes
aren’t actually working as expected, or that changes to the strategy from
the results of early experiments are getting out of control. A regular and
rigorous system of diagnostic activities will help you monitor and maintain
the health of your unit and make course corrections along the way.

Get the right metrics
At XL, as we saw, Macia and her team developed growth strategies for the
eight P&C businesses. Metrics, however, made those strategies oper-
ational. As Macia described to us, “Behind the strategies we put specific
plans in place and then we measured everything—old business, new busi-
ness, cross-sell, and much more. What gets measured gets done.”
Macia’s comment about measuring everything is a bit of an exaggera-
tion. Your real challenge as a leader is to make sure that the right things
get measured, not everything. Organizations create lots of data: numbers,
reports, trend lines, heat maps, graphs, spreadsheets—and these are com-
plemented by external resources on call to produce onetime studies and
answer specific questions. Most of the time, however, it’s not clear that all
this data is worth the cost and indeed leads to better business decisions and
better tracking of performance progress. An important part of your job as
a leader is to provide guidance about which measures and which data will
make it possible for you and your team to know what’s happening in your
part of the business at any given time, while also acknowledging that there
are times when you just won’t have all the data and will still need to act
anyway (see the box “Making decisions when you don’t have all the data”).