Page 239 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

228 HBR Leader’s Handbook

they had in a badly failed European acquisition. Stan McChrystal’s idea
about the new network approach to his Middle East command grew out of
several initial defeats suffered at the hands of his more nimble terrorist
enemy.

Create an organization of one mind

For all the personal boldness, risk taking, challenging, and learning you
must embrace as a leader, you must also build a collective organization of
people who are as passionate, committed, and dedicated to performance
as you are. Your goal, stated more simply, is to create a one-minded pur-
suit of excellence. Great leaders work tirelessly to motivate and align large
masses of people to achieve the kinds of goals that no individual can ac-
complish on their own.
Leaders work on this in many ways: by creating a common and mo-
tivating vision that all can see and believe in, as Wolfensohn did with the
World Bank; by modeling the kind of thinking and behavior of, say, knowl-
edge sharing and collaborative behavior, as McChrystal did every day in
the video briefings he moderated with thousands of Special Ops forces; by
telling stories and putting into context the performance challenges an
organization faces, so that everyone understands the urgency of change, as
Walker of the Ford Foundation did in championing to his people the need
to bring social justice to the digital world, or as Mulcahy did, explaining
again and again to different employee groups how they could specifically
work in new ways to save Xerox.
Successful leaders will also create broad-based cultural expectations
for performance behaviors and expectations, to build “one mind.” Recall,
for example, Mark Benjamin, former president of NCR, who insisted on
giving brutally honest but constructive feedback to his direct reports so
that those managers could in turn give the same to their people, and so on
down the line.
Great leaders synthesize, contextualize, and help create meaning for
everyone in their organization. They also infuse the enterprise with the
energy and passion to win.