Page 17 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Introduction 7

for effecting some kind of dubious or even evil outcomes. True enough,
many of the practices we highlight in this book could be applied to increase
performance of criminal or terrorist organizations, too. But we hope you
will harness the practices to generally advance people’s welfare, and the
fair and open creation of wealth and human capital in market economies.

Building an organization of people
Leadership is not about making this kind of impact alone; it depends on
doing so through others. Leaders must be masters of building and devel-
oping collective work, inspiring and organizing others toward a common
goal or goals. Since time immemorial, organizations have been the way
that people have coordinated and scaled the effectiveness of human talent.
And leaders we have worked with over many years have said that build-
ing and motivating an organization is the hardest—and most critically
important—part of their jobs.
We use the term “organization” to mean not only traditional corpo-
rations like Procter & Gamble or Cisco Systems, but also nonprofit enter-
prises, startups, divisions within larger companies, government agencies,
or even more loosely coupled groups of people operating as informal com-
munities or virtual networks, such as professional associations, social ac-
tivist alliances, research collectives, and similar. As long as people can be
brought together and motivated to work toward a shared goal, there is an
opportunity for a leader (or many leaders collaborating) to create large-
scale positive impact.
But aligning and motivating that collective effort is deeply challenging.
For leaders to succeed, they must address fundamental dilemmas about
the human aspects of getting people to work together: differing strengths,
attitudes, experiences, ambitions, beliefs, and limitations. And those must
be somehow rationalized and aligned with an overall strategy and commit-
ment to achieving collective performance.
For example, Seraina Macia created impact by developing and align-
ing different groups at XL Insurance, many of whom had conflicting views
about how to meet customers’ insurance needs. Darren Walker had to
shape a new culture and make some tough people choices to shift the Ford