There’s an old
story about a tourist who asks a New Yorker how to get to the storied concert
venue Carnegie Hall and is told, “Practice, practice, practice.”
Obviously, this is good advice if you want to become a world-class
performer — but it’s also good advice if you want to become a top-notch
leader.
Over the past
year we have been writing the HBR Leader’s Handbook — a primer
for aspiring leaders who want to take their careers to the next level. As part
of our research for the book, we interviewed over 40 successful leaders of
large corporations, startups, and non-profits to get their views about what it
takes to become a leader. We also explored several decades of research on that
subject published in HBR; and we reflected on our own experience in the area of
leadership development.
Our research and
experience have shown us that the best way to develop proficiency in leadership
is not just through reading books and going to training courses, but even more
through real experience and continual practice.
Take the case of
Dominic Barton, who served as the Global Managing Director of McKinsey & Company
from 2009-2018. In an interview with us, reflecting back on his own development
as a leader, he didn’t cite education programs or books he had read, but rather
described several “learn-by-doing” experiences that would shape his successful
career.
As the office
leader of McKinsey Korea, for example, he realized he had “a small playground
to… try new stuff” — and against all advice of local colleagues to be cautious
and follow cultural norms, started writing a provocative newspaper column that
challenged traditional ways of working among local businesses as their markets
continued to globalize. “I took a risk, and it helped put us on the map, as
never before.” His tenure in Korea
also taught him that he was better at some things than others: “My performance
evaluator used to beat me up regularly during those days, because I was better
at opening up new initiatives than bringing them to completion. When I later
became head of McKinsey Asia, he helped me see that I had to hire a solid COO
to work with me—which substantially increased my leadership effectiveness in
that bigger role.”
Our research
also pointed to six leadership skills where practice was particularly
important. These are not mysterious and certainly aren’t new. However, the
leaders we talked with emphasized that these fundamental skills really
matter. Aspiring leaders should focus on practicing these essential basics:
- Shape a vision that is exciting and challenging for your team (or division/unit/organization).
- Translate that vision into a clear strategy about what actions to take, and what not to do.
- Recruit, develop, and reward a team of great people to carry out the strategy.
- Focus on measurable results.
- Foster innovation and learning to sustain your team (or organization) and grow new leaders.
- Lead yourself — know yourself, improve yourself, and manage the appropriate balance in your own life.
No matter where
you are in your career, you can find opportunities to practice these six
skills. You’ll have varying degrees of success, which is normal. But by
reflecting on your successes and failures at every step, and getting
feedback from colleagues and mentors, you’ll keep making positive adjustments
and find more opportunities to learn. Research by Francesca Gino and Bradley
Staats published in HBR shows how important this
reflection can be to your improvement: they found that workers were able to
improve their own performance by 20% after spending 15 minutes at the end of
each day writing reflections on what they did well, what they did wrong, and
their lessons learned. Leaders often have a bias for action that keeps them from
stepping back in this way — but it is the reflection on your practice that will
help you improve.
Don’t wait for
learning opportunities to be handed to you. Seek them out and volunteer to take
them on. And if you don’t see the opportunities in your own organization,
find them outside your professional work in a community group, a non-profit, or
a religious organization, which are often hungry for leaders to step in and
step up. For example, Wharton’s Stew Friedman has described how one young manager who
aspired to become a CEO joined a city-based community board, which allowed him
to hone his leadership skills; three years later, he was on a formal succession
track for CEO.
Eventually, as
you progress, you’ll reach a level of capability in these areas such that
you’ll start seeing results: you’ll successfully make things happen through the
people who work for you on your team or in your division. As you succeed, these
results will begin to build upon one another—you’ll oversee a new product that
becomes a runaway hit or take charge of a transformational initiative that
redefines a major market. More and more people will want to sign up and work
with you. Clients or customers will ask for you by name. You’ll be invited to
represent the company at major industry conferences. Whether you use this
momentum to guide a new initiative or to start your own company, you’ll have
begun to truly deliver major impact. You’ll have become a leader, capable of
rallying an organization of people around a meaningful collective goal and
delivering the results to reach it.
Source : www.hbr.org