Page 224 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Leading Yourself 213

suggests, the kind of strategies you develop and follow must be at least
somewhat suited to your own preferences and needs. Here again, there’s no
simple, universal paradigm. But we can identify a few general working ap-
proaches that leaders we know have developed to increase their own well-
ness. In these and many other cases, the solutions for finding wellness in
some regard were devised by leaders themselves—understanding what was
important to them, setting goals, and problem-solving ideas about how to
achieve them (sometimes with peers, family members, an able assistant—
or all of the above), and then putting in place mechanisms and rules that
they committed themselves to follow. They were intentional about what
they did, but often followed certain behaviors intuitively, which is why
knowing yourself—where we began this chapter—is so important. If you
can truly understand who you are, what your personal priorities are, what
matters to you, and what you want to improve about yourself, self-care
becomes just one more goal to achieve, adding further to your growth as a
leader.
To help you design your own regime, let’s look at a few principles lead-
ers employ to preserve and renew themselves.

Routinize common interactions
To avoid duplication and minimize the inevitable frustrations of daily
management, don’t reinvent processes or assemble time-consuming de-
tails repeatedly for tasks that recur throughout your work. For example, to
maintain focus and manage demands on her time, Jane Kirkland of State
Street Corporation schedules regularly standardized reviews for every ini-
tiative she’s overseeing (much as in the operational reviews discussed in
chapter 4). Kirkland also insists on handling contentious issues or ques-
tions that come up only in the meetings dedicated to those, so they don’t
intrude later and distract from the critical focus of other working sessions.
Stan McChrystal created a well-structured and consistent agenda for the
daily online global intelligence briefing for the thousands of members of
his terrorist-fighting network. The template allowed all participants to
prepare to share the kind of information needed and to what end, and the
structure also enabled McChrystal to play an appropriate leadership