Page 88 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

78 HBR Leader’s Handbook

staff as they pursue their professional and personal aspirations. People join
organizations voluntarily, with the assumption that their participation is a
two-way street. If they give their best efforts to achieve the collective goals
that you lay out, they expect to be rewarded, in terms of compensation,
growth, job satisfaction, relationships, and more. This is the basic social
contract of organizational life, and when it works, your team is more likely
to perform at a high level with committed, loyal, and motivated people.
As a leader, you are the creator and steward of this social contract,
whether for the whole organization or your part of it; thus you need to
honor both sides as you make decisions about staffing, organizational
structure, development, and compensation. Good leaders don’t obsessively
drive for performance goals in ruthless ways that leave a trail of bodies (or
unhappy people) in their wake. But they also aren’t so concerned about
making everybody happy that they avoid conflicts and hard decisions and
end up not achieving the needed results. Good leaders thread the needle
between these extremes so that the organization has the right people on
board to execute strategy and get results—and they feel good about being
part of the collective endeavor.
But threading this needle can be challenging. Frequently, the individ-
ual’s and the organization’s interests can seem misaligned. What happens
if, in order to achieve your strategic goals, you need to lay someone off or
fire them? What if they want to be paid more than you can give? And de-
veloping people by giving them tough feedback can be in the best interest
of both the individual and the overall company, but it still isn’t pleasant or
easy. Engagement is hard to pin down; not everyone is motivated by the
same things. Convincing people to change or grow can be difficult; cul-
ture is deeply rooted in organizations. And managing the social contract
for your whole department or unit is challenging when most of your inter-
actions are primarily with your direct reports, and it just seems that so
many of these things might be easier to hand off to human resources.
To confront these challenges, your particular focus as a leader needs to
be on building your direct reports into a strong team of results-producing
leaders and managers who also understand and honor the social contract,