Page 89 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Getting Great People on Board 79

and can multiply your commitment to it through the rest of your organiza-
tion. Doing this includes five elements:

• Finding the right mix of leaders and managers to work directly
with you to execute the strategy and helping those people work
together effectively, across functions and silos

• Ensuring that your direct reports get the feedback they need to
either get better at their jobs or make the decision to go elsewhere,
and that they do the same with their people

• Creating opportunities for great people to learn, grow, and develop

• Articulating an explicit incentives philosophy that motivates your
direct reports and all of your people to do the right things, for both
the organization and themselves

• Combining these steps into an organizational or team culture that
can enable strategic change

To start, let’s look at a case that illustrates the tension between achiev-
ing organizational objectives and honoring individual aspirations.

Managing the social contract through
strategic change at the Ford Foundation

When Darren Walker became president of the Ford Foundation in 2013, he
identified a new strategy for achieving the organization’s vision of reduc-
ing inequality and injustice, strengthening democratic values, promoting
international cooperation, and advancing human achievement: the foun-
dation would have to take a more digitally focused approach to its work.
Walker explained: “The rise of the digitally connected world presents a
threat to social justice that we hadn’t been aware of, such as internet free-
dom and net neutrality, the creation of open and free access platforms, and
the challenge of a single lane internet vs. fast lanes given to the wealthy. In
addition, all of the things in an analog world that are discriminatory