Page 206 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Leading Yourself 195

because they feel as if they distract from their real work. Successful leaders
can also fall prey to overconfidence; their achievements of the past trick
them into believing more will keep coming, on autopilot. It’s a dangerous
and false hope.
As you rise in your career, winging it simply won’t be enough to meet
the level of performance that more senior roles require. The greater the
impact you want to have, the more complex the challenges you’ll face and
the wider the range of knowledge and skills you’ll have to develop. You may
also need to think more deeply about your willingness to evolve some of
your values or to adapt your authentic self, if that’s what it takes to succeed
in a different kind of organization, or in a bigger and more difficult lead-
ership role.
Because they eagerly confront these challenges, the best leaders are in-
tellectually curious, continually expanding their horizons so that they can
think differently about problems. They can reshape their goals, values, and
aspirations, as needed. They can open up new opportunities for themselves
and their businesses. Being purposeful about further development—and at
least a little humble that, yes, you do have new things to learn—is a nec-
essary step to achieving higher personal performance. And though con-
tinual learning is very demanding, it also provides renewal and personal
satisfaction.
Furthermore, part of your role as a leader is to keep raising the bar of
performance for others across your organization. To keep pushing for higher
performance all around, you have to set an example of performing and
learning yourself—and to keep getting smarter about what “better” means
for the whole business—even if you don’t become an expert in each domain.

Choosing an approach for learning
There are many different tools, programs, and educational products for
learning and professional development, variously suited to different ob-
jectives for building your leadership capabilities. What’s most important,
before you begin, is to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve in any
course of self-improvement. That will help you choose the most appropri-
ate and cost-effective approach.