Page 214 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Leading Yourself 203

stand, what you should do differently or better the next time. Hold yourself
accountable to that.
The most obvious actor in all this is you. Your observation and reflec-
tion can be greatly helped by listening for feedback from others or engaging
in after-action reflection with people you trust, for example, an informal
mentor or an executive coach. Many professionals also find it is valuable to
keep a journal or, for less personally sensitive experience, to write a blog or
share thoughts with a more public audience through other forms of social
media. Many executives also develop informal learning relationships with
a volunteer group of peer practitioners (typically from noncompetitive or-
ganizations in the same industry) and engage in regular exchange about
each member’s professional experience, learning from one another in the
format of a so-called community of practice (see Etienne Wenger and Wil-
liam Snyder’s HBR article “Communities of Practice: The Organizational
Frontier”).

LEARN FROM OTHERS. In addition to self-observation and reflection,
there’s also plenty to learn secondhand—by watching and analyzing the
practices and style of other leaders. Begin with your own boss or other
senior people in your organization: look beyond the direction they are
setting or the work they might be creating for you, and think about their
skills or mistakes as leaders per se. If one delivers an important speech to
the organization, how did it go? Why? When you’re hearing feedback from
your boss, apart from the content of what they told you, how did they han-
dle the overall situation? Did they leave you feeling more or less energized?
When you have to do the same thing with more junior people, what would
you do differently—and why? Looking through a self-improvement lens,
you can start to see your whole organization and the earlier stages of your
career as one big learning laboratory. As John Lundgren at Stanley Black
& Decker thoughtfully remarked, “A lot of what I learned about leadership
came from watching and learning from a couple of terrific bosses in my
earlier career and also vowing never to act like one very bad one whom I
also once had.”