Page 20 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

10 HBR Leader’s Handbook

What about soft skills?

As you look at this list of practices, you might wonder why we did not
include one about creating a winning culture or a section about the inter-
personal aspects of leadership. Aren’t these important? The answer is a
resounding yes: these softer elements of leadership are critical for cre-
ating positive organizational impact. Just about every leader we talked
to or have worked with over the years has emphasized this view, as does
much of the HBR literature.
However, creating culture and building strong interactions with oth-
ers don’t stand alone; they are deeply embedded into all six of our prac-
tices. The way that you, as a leader, conduct yourself as you engage in
these practices—the behaviors and values that you model and encour-
age—will have a profound impact on the culture that you create through-
out your team, division, or company. But these behaviors are part and
parcel of how you go about creating a vision, shaping strategy, getting
great people to join you, delivering results, innovating for the future, and
growing yourself. As a leader, you are always creating culture. In each
practice chapter, we’ll highlight ways that you can do this.
At the same time, culture doesn’t just happen by itself as an out-
come of your behaviors. As a leader, you should be intentional about
what you want the culture to be and the extent that you need to change
it in some way. There are specific levers you can use to nudge it in the
right direction over time. We have included an explicit discussion of how
to do this in chapter 3—getting great people on board—because many of
the levers involve people: whom you recruit; whom you reward, recog-
nize, and promote; how you measure performance; and how you develop
people so that they internalize the values and behaviors that are impor-
tant to winning. There also is a section on how to create a culture that
embraces innovation in chapter 5—innovating for the future.