PDF Summary:Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook, by Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville
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Being an influential, impactful leader in today's rapidly changing environment requires a rare blend of skills. In Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook, authors Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville offer a comprehensive guide to effective leadership.
They emphasize the dual importance of defining a compelling vision while formulating robust strategies to achieve it. Additionally, the authors outline how leaders can assemble high-performing teams, foster innovation, and instill an organizational culture primed for success. Drawing from their deep expertise, Ashkenas and Manville provide a roadmap for cultivating your personal leadership abilities alongside driving organizational transformation.
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It is essential for leaders to take decisive action in forming a team equipped with the skills required to attain the desired results.
Gathering the right people is merely the initial step in forming a leadership team. It is equally important to focus on identifying and removing team members who no longer harmonize effectively with the collective. Ashkenas and Manville underscore the importance of resolutely and compassionately separating from a team member who does not fulfill their responsibilities or integrate well with the group. Opting for inaction, however, should not be mistaken for an act of compassion. Permitting a person who obstructs progress and shows no commitment to your vision of achievement to fail can have a detrimental effect on team spirit and harm the collective health of the company.
Organize and coordinate various teams.
It is incumbent upon leaders to cultivate a team atmosphere where collaboration is paramount, by establishing clear frameworks, aligning goals, and nurturing a shared identity.
Merely overseeing a collection of skilled individuals is not enough. To foster a sense of collaboration effectively, a leader must ensure that their endeavors in recruiting and developing skilled individuals do not go largely to waste. Exceptional outcomes are the result of the team's synergistic efforts, not just the sum of individual inputs.
Leaders must proactively tackle a minimum of four fundamental obstacles to cultivate a group that functions at its peak capacity, the authors elucidate.
1. Shared Objective: Ensure that all team members share a commitment to and actively engage in striving for a few common and inspiring objectives. Without a shared objective, team members may pursue individual goals, resulting in internal disputes and a lack of harmony with the wider aims of the organization.
2. Explicit Structure: Discuss with the team, and agree on, how it will go about the work that it has to do. The configuration should encompass elements like: What are the steps in the process of making decisions? Who is responsible and accountable? What method should be used to effectively spread information? How are the meetings structured and planned? What will be the established protocols and methods of interaction? How will the team ensure ongoing alignment?
3. Support: Guarantee that the team functions within a setting that promotes open communication and constructive feedback, and also ensure they are provided with the necessary personnel, finances, and resources essential for success. Create an environment that enhances the team's abilities by expanding their knowledge and skills.
4. Mindset/Identity: Develop a strong sense of camaraderie and dedication within the group, which ensures that members are dedicated to their responsibilities and enjoy active participation. To cultivate personal bonds based on trust, it's essential to encourage formal and informal exchanges between team members, as this helps to develop a sense of intimacy.
They ought to foster a spirit of collaboration and maintain unity across the organization, which is seen as a network of interlinked teams.
Ashkenas and Manville highlight that every organization has multiple teams, and that any particular team within that universe of teams has to effectively collaborate and coordinate with many others in order for the organization to succeed. These other teams could include not just other departments and functions in your company, but also external partners and key players in your value chain, as well as other supporting players like your legal firm, investors, or funders.
When putting together your group, consider the needs of other departments and clearly define the shared responsibilities they are agreeing to, which should include the following:
Every team member should be aware of the significance of their work in supporting broader organizational objectives and how it aids other teams throughout the company. Their efforts should be uniformly steered by a distinct and coherent strategic direction.
Equip teams to efficiently share insights and information within the organization, as well as with external entities, to support the best decision-making processes.
Focus on the team's practical goals, which are crucial for supporting the company's wider strategic objectives. This will minimize cross-team conflict and encourage a teamwork-oriented atmosphere where shared objectives are prioritized above personal ambitions.
Other Perspectives
- While having a clear vision and strategy is important, it's also crucial to remain flexible and adaptable to unforeseen changes that may require shifts in strategy.
- Assembling a suitable group is key, but overemphasis on group cohesion could potentially stifle diversity of thought and innovation.
- Emotional intelligence is important, but it should not overshadow the need for technical expertise and critical thinking skills in a leadership team.
- The idea of swiftly removing team members who do not harmonize could create a culture of fear, which may inhibit risk-taking and creativity.
- Collaboration is essential, but there should also be room for individual accountability and autonomy to encourage personal growth and responsibility.
- Establishing clear frameworks and aligning goals is important, but overly rigid structures can limit flexibility and the ability to respond to dynamic market conditions.
- While shared objectives are important, individual team members' personal goals and motivations should also be acknowledged and aligned with organizational objectives to ensure engagement and retention.
- The focus on internal team dynamics is crucial, but external customer and market perspectives should also be a primary consideration in decision-making processes.
- Providing support and resources is necessary, but it should be balanced with encouraging teams to be resourceful and self-sufficient to foster innovation and problem-solving skills.
- The emphasis on unity and collaboration across the organization is important, but it should not come at the expense of healthy competition and critical evaluation, which can drive performance improvement.
Fostering and improving the competencies within a team.
It is crucial for you as a leader to engage in diverse practices related to human capital to build a strong team and organizational structure. You must nurture development, provide clear direction, and inspire individuals across your organization. Chapter 3 underscores the importance of nurturing your team, which fosters a shared commitment that inspires their highest level of commitment to achieving the goals you set.
Foster development and progress among individual team members as well as the whole organization.
Leaders should continuously provide feedback and simultaneously cultivate opportunities for individuals to grow and embrace novel responsibilities.
Ashkenas and Manville stress the significance of deeply integrating ongoing learning and development into the fabric of the company's culture. As a leader, you have the opportunity and responsibility to foster an environment of ongoing education and the integration of innovative methods in both operational and cognitive practices, which enhances the capabilities of your team and the entire organization.
As a leader, you have the opportunity and duty to design experiences that push your team to broaden their current abilities and gain new skills through direct involvement and practical learning. There are several techniques at one's disposal for this objective:
Encourage your team members to broaden their perspectives and reassess their methods for tackling business obstacles by setting goals that are intricate and comprehensive. Allocate specific projects to teams or individuals to encourage collaboration with colleagues outside their usual network and to foster the acquisition of new skills within different functional domains. Rotate team members across various roles within the company to enhance their understanding of diverse business sectors and to deepen their insight into the industry's multiple facets.
Leaders should also exemplify the importance of continuous self-improvement and the commitment to learning throughout one's life.
By participating in these developmental activities, leaders convey a strong signal to everyone involved. If your team notices that you habitually delegate all training duties to either specialists in the human resources division or outside experts, their dedication might wane.
Leaders can nurture development and proficiency in their organization by creating formal programs or seminars aimed at improving their team's skills and understanding, especially through focused teaching of particular tactics or innovative approaches for tackling complex issues in the company.
Leaders must not only support these initiatives but also actively strengthen and engage with them. Ashkenas and Manville say that leaders have to model their own commitment to learning and development by actively participating in training sessions, asking lots of questions, and making clear their own ongoing commitment to self-improvement.
Establish a clearly articulated approach to implementing incentives.
Leaders must clearly define which specific actions and achievements will be recognized and incentivized to ensure their teams remain driven and concentrated.
The authors emphasize the factors that drive the growth and advancement of teams and organizations. The responsibility of a leader is to guarantee that the systems governing staff remuneration, rewards, and perks, which are overseen by the appropriate department, align with and bolster the goals of their particular team, division, or the whole company, encompassing its vision, strategy, and performance, while also nurturing a cooperative atmosphere where teams work in unison across various departments and borders. To cultivate an atmosphere that emphasizes teamwork, the leader must establish a system of incentives that values group accomplishments over personal successes, particularly when individual achievements hinder the exchange of ideas or backing for innovative endeavors.
Leadership is not focused on determining the particular compensation, incentives, or career progression of an individual. You must, however, make clear and convey your criteria for incentivizing individuals, which Ashkesnas and Manville describe as a method for recognizing achievements. To ensure success and advancement, it is crucial to clearly establish the behaviors and standards that will be acknowledged and promoted, which will steer your team members towards positive outcomes and simultaneously inform them of behaviors that might compromise their standing.
Foster an environment that promotes substantial transformation.
Leaders play a key role in defining the cultural attributes needed to support their vision and strategy, and in reinforcing those attributes through their actions.
Ashkenas and Manville highlight the importance of nurturing the shared spirit and cultural elements, including attitudes, beliefs, traditions, and behaviors, within a company to boost performance and sustain positive outcomes over time. They consider the cultural framework of the organization to be a pivotal factor that sparks significant positive outcomes, setting apart the core of effective leadership and management.
Even with a daring vision and a strategic plan designed to realize it, a company might still fall short of success if it doesn't foster an organizational culture that endorses and propels that plan forward. To meet an organization's goals, it is crucial for managers, leaders, and team members across different departments to persistently uphold and embody the core principles and conduct necessary to bring the vision to fruition in a competitive landscape. To achieve a shared dedication to outstanding results, it is crucial to foster an environment characterized by a deep concentration.
Developing a suitable organizational culture is a gradual endeavor that cannot be expedited, nor will it spontaneously arise from directives given by upper management. Leadership requires you to engage continuously in a series of interlinked and recurring steps. To successfully mold the culture you envision for your organization, it is essential to not only hire people who will embody this culture but also to consistently emphasize the preferred behaviors by providing opportunities for progression and assessing performance accordingly.
Other Perspectives
- While continuous feedback is valuable, there is a risk of feedback fatigue where too much feedback can overwhelm or demotivate team members. It's important to balance feedback with autonomy.
- The emphasis on ongoing learning and development must be balanced with the need to deliver immediate results. Sometimes, the pressure to perform can overshadow the time and resources needed for learning.
- Pushing team members to broaden their abilities and gain new skills is important, but it should not come at the cost of overburdening employees or pushing them beyond their limits in a way that is counterproductive.
- Allocating specific projects to encourage collaboration is beneficial, but it must be done with consideration for the existing workload and the individual's career aspirations and strengths.
- Rotating team members across various roles can be disruptive and may lead to a loss of deep expertise in specific areas if not managed carefully.
- Leaders exemplifying continuous self-improvement is important, but it's also necessary to acknowledge that leaders, like all individuals, have limitations and may not always be the best role models in every aspect.
- Creating formal programs or seminars is useful, but these can sometimes be disconnected from real-world challenges. Informal learning and on-the-job training can be equally, if not more, effective.
- Defining specific actions and achievements for recognition is good, but it can lead to a narrow focus where only certain types of contributions are valued, potentially overlooking other important but less visible work.
- Incentivizing group accomplishments over individual successes is generally positive, but it can also demotivate high performers who may feel their individual efforts are not adequately recognized.
- The focus on cultural attributes and vision can sometimes lead to a rigid corporate culture that resists necessary change and can stifle innovation.
- Upholding and embodying core principles is crucial, but there must be room for questioning and challenging the status quo to foster innovation and adaptability.
- The process of molding organizational culture is complex and leaders must be cautious not to impose a culture that does not fit the diverse values and beliefs of all employees.
- Continuous engagement in interlinked steps to mold culture is important, but it should not lead to micromanagement, which can undermine employee autonomy and creativity.
Cultivating leadership skills alongside encouraging innovation.
It's essential to strike a balance between your personal growth and the needs of your organization. To excel in leading a premier team, business, or initiative, it's essential to prioritize your personal growth with the same vigor you apply to fostering your team's advancement, consistent with the approaches outlined in this guide. In order for you to be effective in pushing the organization toward a bold vision, in crafting and building a strategy for achieving that vision, and then in managing the organization's performance, you must also work on yourself as a leader.
Continuously enhance your own capabilities through learning and personal development.
Leaders must deeply understand their own character, personal style, knowledge and skills in order to play to their strengths and address their weaknesses.
To guide others successfully, one must first demonstrate the ability to lead oneself. To optimize your sway in a leadership role, it is crucial to consistently assess both your personal and professional self-conception, acknowledge your strengths and areas needing enhancement, and identify the growth needed to bolster your leadership effectiveness, with a focus on reinforcing your strong points, reducing your shortcomings, and increasing your beneficial influence.
The authors suggest initiating the process by assessing your personal characteristics, individual approaches, and competencies.
Ponder these inquiries:
- What is the fundamental objective that motivates you? What motivates your actions? How do your actions aim to influence the world?
- What are the core values and beliefs that hold the utmost significance for you? How will those values shape the way you lead?
- What is the level of your commitment to realizing your ambitions, and in what ways do you persist in the face of obstacles?
- Are you comfortable in your role as a leader while still dedicated to your ongoing development?
- What words would you use to characterize your distinct style of leadership? When do you achieve your highest level of effectiveness?
- How do you engage with others to achieve tasks?
- Do you have complete knowledge of your strengths and the areas where you could enhance your effectiveness?
- Do you understand the traits that characterize your leadership style and how others perceive your role as a leader?
- What strategies will you employ to improve your future capabilities, and what is your plan for their advancement?
- Are your current skills and knowledge in sync with the existing and future needs of the organizations or groups you manage?
Leaders should proactively pursue a range of formal and informal opportunities to bolster their leadership skills.
The writers stress the necessity for leaders to continuously seek self-enhancement. Always strive for growth in both your personal and professional life, regardless of where you are in your career.
When investigating opportunities for educational development, it is wise to consider the following factors:
1. Focus on bolstering your strengths while simultaneously addressing and refining the areas where you have less expertise. Focus on leveraging your unique abilities to attain higher levels of success. If you notice a shortcoming in your team or organization, it's wise to confront the issue head-on, improve the relevant skills, or assign those tasks to colleagues who possess the necessary knowledge.
2. Welcome the discomfort associated with confronting fresh challenges. It is generally easier to adhere to tasks that are in harmony with your existing abilities. As a leader, it is both your duty and your advantage to seek out and take on new challenges. Initiating the creation of a new product, undertaking a complex project, or rising to a leadership role in a distinctive organization is essential.
3. Practice Humility. Individuals who possess the capacity to implement decisions often do so, whereas those who do not are more inclined to offer advice; this adage is occasionally employed in a negative context to critique leaders, educators, or others who are perceived as dispensing counsel without personally following it. In the leadership journey, it's essential to persistently cultivate a mindset of ongoing education and remain receptive to the perspectives of others, without assuming that their input is without value.
4. Remain actively involved throughout the ongoing process. To maximize personal development and the improvement of abilities, it's essential to identify the specific skills and knowledge you want to improve, then deliberately pursue learning opportunities within a specific context, evaluate the effectiveness of your educational endeavors, contemplate both the positive outcomes and setbacks, and adjust your approach accordingly before embarking on the next learning challenge. Organizations develop proficiency by applying their firsthand experiences in practice. Learning progresses into a formalized method focused on self-management.
5. Customize your learning experiences to suit your unique needs. Choose from a range of growth opportunities that will best improve your abilities in areas important to you and align with your present position or future professional goals. For example, if your primary responsibilities involve crafting long-term plans or guiding principles, participating in an extensive Python programming class might not yield significant advantages.
6. Adapt the learning approach to suit your personal preferences. People employ diverse strategies to acquire wisdom and advance individually. Some prefer engaging in classroom activities and exchanging ideas; others favor solitary reading and contemplation. While some individuals lean towards visual methods, others prefer to scrutinize numerical information. Choose learning opportunities that align with your distinct preferences and methods, rather than depending exclusively on the programs your company offers.
Contribute to the growth and success of other individuals.
Leaders leverage their own experience and networks to help develop other leaders, within and outside their organization.
Ashkenas and Manville propose a more subtle strategy for personal growth: engaging openly with colleagues within your organization and extending beyond it. You might support a reputable person or organization through their supervision, offering advice or mentorship, evaluating their strategies or initiatives, or by simply offering a listening ear.
The authors recommend considering these questions, irrespective of the diverse types of inputs:
Will you create a significant difference? Reflect on the potential impact and value your participation could bring to the individual or organization you're considering committing your time to.
Is your focus adequately directed? Do you possess the necessary concentration and vigor to achieve excellence in your present pursuits? Ensure you don't take on too many tasks by carefully controlling your commitments. Concentrating on a select number of crucial aspects where your impact can be significant is preferable to taking on every task and merely finishing them without genuine engagement.
How will you grow? Seek out chances for growth in spheres that transcend traditional limits, including aspects within and beyond the organization's scope, in both individual and career-related areas. When considering a request for your time, reflect on whether it offers chances for you to gain fresh insights. For example, suggest mentoring someone from a different discipline to discover trends and ideas that can refresh and expand your viewpoint.
Are you pushing beyond your personal boundaries? Embrace various challenges and situations to enhance your range of abilities. By encouraging the advancement and influence of others, you also cultivate your personal development. As your comfort grows across diverse settings, your ability to drive change and be effective will also expand.
Engagement with community and regional groups can broaden a leader's perspective and solidify their network of relationships.
Ashkenas and Manville advise seeking leadership roles that extend beyond the confines of your job or company. Entities within the community such as committees focused on education, local chapters of aid organizations, partnerships between parents and teachers, and religious congregations serve as illustrations. Consider looking for volunteer work that allows you to apply your current expertise, like creating a website for a non-profit or offering strategic business planning guidance to emerging businesses.
Encourage an environment that nurtures unique thinking.
Leaders need to strike a balance between meeting the immediate operational needs and allocating resources for future innovative initiatives.
Ashkenas and Manville emphasize the importance of innovation as a key element for leaders to sustain organizational success. The organization needs to persistently evolve and change to maintain its long-term success in a constantly changing landscape. In your role as a leader, it is imperative to both maximize the efficiency of your primary operations to secure necessary resources for upcoming initiatives and to actively identify and capitalize on new ideas, technological progress, emerging markets, or significant changes to prepare your enterprise for forthcoming obstacles.
Maintaining balance among these elements is a considerable task. The authors observe that focusing too intently on the tasks directly before you might lead to missing crucial opportunities that are key to adjusting to the evolving future. Concentrating too much on novel ideas can harm an organization if its core elements are not well-established, resulting in financial drain and ultimately causing the business to falter.
Leaders should develop a diverse strategy for innovation encompassing both minor improvements and radical overhauls.
Executives at high-achieving companies adeptly handle obstacles by executing a strategy that balances attention and resources to sustain and improve current operations, while wisely discontinuing support and funding for non-viable business segments, and nurturing and directing resources towards emerging areas that offer growth and chances to engage with new markets or customer demographics. Portfolio managers utilize a variety of approaches to distribute investments across different asset classes, balancing the potential for risk with anticipated returns.
Leaders are also tasked with cultivating an organizational culture that prioritizes learning from failures, underscores the necessity for continuous improvement, and cherishes a readiness to innovate.
Leaders play a key role in fostering this organizational learning, Ashkenas and Manville stress. Leaders ought to employ a variety of tactics to cultivate an environment that nurtures creativity:
Guide the educational process. Foster a culture of continuous improvement and education that is embraced by your team and permeates the entire organization.
Foster chances for growth. Equip team members with the essential expertise and comprehension required for the effective creation and execution of novel ideas, which encompasses technical skills, methodologies for product innovation, design insights, and market trend analysis capabilities.
Provide Time and Resources for Experimentation. Let your people dedicate some of their time and effort to exploring new ideas and opportunities—and then make sure they have funding available to do that. Safeguard the continuity of initiatives aimed at innovation, even when faced with fiscal limitations.
Incentivize and acknowledge creative efforts. Establish motivational frameworks and acknowledgment programs that bolster the contributors to the organization's advancement, including granting performance incentives to groups focused on innovation, presenting creative concepts to top executives, elevating in-house innovators to positions with more authority and reach, and leveraging organizational communication networks to celebrate these trailblazers as models for their peers.
Welcome challenges as opportunities to gain insights. Leaders must take an active role by engaging in creative activities, including idea generation gatherings, coding marathons, and quick model development initiatives. They must also be open with employees about the times when their own ideas do not succeed. This approach is particularly effective as it fosters an environment where team members and leaders are encouraged to embrace risks and learn from the outcomes of their endeavors that don't pan out, all within a safe space.
Embracing these tenets is crucial for a genuine dedication to the art of leadership. Embark on your journey with the support this volume offers!
Other Perspectives
- While understanding one's character and personal style is important, overemphasis on self-analysis can lead to excessive introspection and hinder decisive action.
- Proactively seeking opportunities for enhancement is beneficial, but leaders must also ensure they are not overextending themselves and neglecting their current responsibilities.
- Welcoming discomfort and seeking new challenges is valuable, but leaders must balance this with the need to maintain stability and consistency within their teams and organizations.
- Practicing humility is crucial, yet leaders must also display confidence and assertiveness to inspire trust and motivate their teams.
- Engaging in the learning process is important, but leaders must also be mindful of the potential for information overload and the need to apply new knowledge effectively.
- Customizing learning experiences is useful, but leaders should also be adaptable and able to learn in various settings, not just those that suit their preferences.
- Developing other leaders is a noble goal, but leaders must ensure that they are not creating dependency or failing to hold others accountable for their own development.
- Engagement with community and regional groups can be enriching, but leaders must be cautious not to spread themselves too thin or prioritize external activities over internal organizational needs.
- Balancing immediate operational needs with future innovation is critical, but leaders must also be careful not to neglect the core business activities that ensure the organization's survival.
- Developing a diverse strategy for innovation is wise, but leaders must also be aware of the risks associated with innovation and ensure that new initiatives align with the organization's strategic goals.
- Cultivating a culture that learns from failures is important, but leaders must also foster an environment where high standards are maintained and repeated failures are not tolerated.
- Providing time and resources for experimentation is necessary for innovation, but leaders must also ensure that these resources are not misused and that there is a clear return on investment.
- Incentivizing and acknowledging creative efforts is beneficial, but leaders must balance this with the need to recognize and reward the consistent, day-to-day contributions that keep the organization running.
- Welcoming challenges as opportunities for insight is valuable, but leaders must also manage the risks associated with new ventures and ensure that the organization is not exposed to unnecessary dangers.
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