Page 151 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

140 HBR Leader’s Handbook

refresh. As the company kept going around the track, everyone involved
shared learning and discussed and agreed on improvements to keep rais-
ing the collective performance and impact of GE. Based on this corporate
cadence, each business unit and subunit throughout the company created
cadences that matched and supported the overall rhythm.
Consider some of your team’s own processes: can they be more tightly
linked, with the learnings and decisions of each feeding directly into the
next? If so, as your unit goes around the track, more and more managers
and leaders will practice and learn about vision, strategy making, people
recruitment and development, sustainable growth, and so on. And if you
are not the CEO and don’t control the enterprise cadence, think about how
you integrate the cadence of your team into the broader framework. When
do you need to prepare for reviews with your bosses, and how do you be-
come confident that everyone is ready?

Lead candid dialogue at operational reviews
As a leader, you can’t just set up reviews at which your team reports on
metrics and results: you must use those meetings as opportunities to push
on every aspect of your team’s work—often brutally. By having regular, ag-
gressively candid dialogues with your team about the business, you’ll be
able to quickly respond to performance misses and determine quickly what
to do about barriers, problems, and opportunities that inevitably emerge.
In the XL case, we saw that Macia had candid discussions with her
business leaders and direct reports. She extended that behavior to her re-
views with project teams and on overall performance indicators, with the
intention of modeling this candid dialogue so that it would become part of
what had been an overly polite culture.
Unfortunately, encouraging and modeling this kind of dialogue can be
difficult. You must avoid letting the candor lead to blaming, cover-ups, or
distortion. To address any challenges standing in the way of delivering
results, your team must confront the realities of the organization, not an
airbrushed ideal.
To make your reviews fruitful, your questions should be tough and di-
rect, but always clearly in the spirit of accelerating progress, illuminating