Page 153 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

142 HBR Leader’s Handbook

about the connections with these groups all the time—can spur this kind
of thinking.
For example, a few years ago, one of us was working with the senior
leadership team of a major hospital network. Its regular reviews included
updates about all of the organization’s individual projects related to oper-
ating results, patient outcomes, technology introductions, and other crit-
ical shifts in the health-care landscape. But there were so many of these
updates in each review that it was hard for anyone involved to tell which
projects were most critical and where to designate the most resources. The
team was so deep into the weeds that it had lost sight of the garden.
After several months of this, the president asked the team to create a
diagram of all the projects included in the review and how they mapped
against the organization’s strategic priorities. This stark question forced
the team to put the projects into context, and it was quickly apparent that
many of the initiatives didn’t advance the overall strategy. The president’s
question also encouraged the team to see just how little sequencing or
sense of prioritization it had assigned to these efforts. Because everything
was deemed important and had to be done right away, everyone, particu-
larly the top 100 managers of the hospital network, was stretched thin and
struggled to bring almost anything to completion. By asking these con- text
questions, the president forced the leadership team to prioritize and
streamline its efforts, which allowed it to better focus on the most impor-
tant efforts to deliver results.
Of course, not every question you ask in a review will be a game
changer. But if you have the courage to challenge assumptions and put
initiatives in context, chances are that some of them will indeed make a
difference, sometimes in surprising ways. And if you avoid asking tough
questions, you’ll start simply making assumptions about why projects may
be off course or results different than expected. And when those assump-
tions are wrong, you’ll create all sorts of dysfunctional patterns. In a finan-
cial services firm, for example, a major product upgrade was delayed for
months because the product and IT managers had different assumptions
about what was to be delivered by when, and kept blaming each other for
delays. It took a senior sponsor finally stepping in to help them ask each