Page 21 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Introduction 11

challenging their enterprise to answer—and then execute success-
fully upon—critical questions about where and how to compete.

• Getting great people on board (chapter 3). Nothing matters more
to great leaders than people. They recruit, engage, develop, and
align the members of an organization with a dual proposition: “if
you can give your all to help us thrive collectively, we’ll do our best
to help you thrive personally.”

• Focusing on results (chapter 4). Once hired and engaged, the
people of an organization must deliver the results that will
create impact. Savvy leaders build the processes that enable peo-
ple working together to focus on and reach continuously higher
performance.

• Innovating for the future (chapter 5). Winning strategies and per-
formance results are not guaranteed forever. Leaders have to look
at both the present and the future, and build resilience and creativ-
ity into their organizations to keep ahead of changes in markets,
industry, and business models of competitors.

• Leading yourself (chapter 6). Though the collective effort of an or-
ganization is needed to achieve impact, leaders themselves are also
part of that organization. The critical role leaders play demands
that they also invest in themselves—developing self-understanding,
ongoing renewal, and enough self-preservation to keep their own
performance high.

The first five of these chapters follow a logical sequence: leaders begin with
a vision, progressively turn it into action by developing strategy, managing
people, and processes, innovating for the longer term, and so forth.
But these practices are by no means necessarily sequential; they are in-
terdependent, often overlapping, and iterative. For example, vision, strat-
egy, and innovation must be closely related, and you must manage people
and results at all stages of your work. Moreover, the sixth practice (leading
yourself) is foundational to everything else. While it could have been the