Page 19 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Introduction 9

While leadership can be defined differently from management, it also
emerges out of it, and when done well, it delivers a leap in impact (see
figure I-1). Leaders achieve their difference—their significant impact—by
deeply understanding, continuously learning from, and actually practicing
management—and then adding unique leadership actions to the mix.

How to develop as a leader: the six practices

If you aspire to become a leader, how do you develop the skills and knowl-
edge it takes? The best way is by live practice—doing and learning on the
job. Anyone can and should work on these capabilities beginning in the
earliest years of his or her career. We’ve seen this in our work: that all of
the conceptual frameworks, training programs, personal assessments, ex-
periential exercises, and war stories from others begin to truly sink in only
when leaders have to apply them in real time, with real people, and real
consequences. Of course, coaching, instruction, and reading can be helpful
along the way, but there’s no substitute for wrestling with, and learning
from, actual practice.
In our back-to-fundamentals approach, we have identified six essen-
tial and timeless practice areas for aspiring leaders, with each of these
constituting a chapter of the book. These represent not an encyclopedia of
leadership (see the box “What about soft skills?”), but rather the specific
must-do areas that differentiate those who have the strongest impact:

• Building a unifying vision (chapter 1). Successful leaders use vision
to build and motivate an organization and kick-start innovation
and aspirational performance. By setting out broad goals and a
picture of success, a vision is the critical first step to achieving
distinctive impact through people.

• Developing a strategy (chapter 2). After vision, the next step
toward major impact is developing a coordinated set of actions so
the organization can win—create distinctive value, exceed cus-
tomer expectations, and beat out market rivals. Leaders do that by