Hbr what makes a good leader

And so on. Too often, the superior is entirely unprepared for these interpretations, and they seem to him stupid, dishonest, or perverse—or all three. But the successful leader will have been prepared for such responses. The other side of the same situation is as bad. The habit of acting like a boss can be destructive, too.

For instance, much resistance to modern concepts of industrial relations comes from employers who think such ideas pose too great a threat to the long-established picture of themselves as business autocrats. Their image makes progress in labor relations difficult. But another and still more subtle factor may intervene between employer and employee—a factor that will be recognized and dealt with by successful industrial leaders.

That factor is the psychological difficulty of being a subordinate. It is not easy to be a subordinate. If I take orders from another, it limits the scope of my independent decision and judgment; certain areas are established within which I do what he wishes instead of what I wish.

To accept such a role without friction or rebellion, I must find in it a reflection of some form of order that goes beyond my own personal situation i. These two possibilities lead to different practical consequences.

For one thing, it is harder to take orders from one whom I do not consider in some sense superior. It is true that one of the saddest failures in practical leadership may be the executive who tries so hard to be one of the boys that he destroys any vestige of awe that his workers might have had for him, with the consequence that they begin to see him as a man like themselves and to wonder why they should take orders from him.

An understanding leader will not let his workers think that he considers them inferiors, but he may be wise to maintain a kind of psychological distance that permits them to accept his authority without resentment. When one of two people is in a superior position and must make final decisions, he can hardly avoid frustrating the aims of the subordinate, at least on occasion. And frustration seems to lead to aggression. That is, thwarting brings out a natural tendency to fight back.

It does not take much thwarting to build up a habit of being ready to attack or defend oneself when dealing with the boss. The situation is made worse if the organization is such that open anger toward the boss is unthinkable, for then the response to frustration is itself frustrated, and a vicious cycle is started. Suggestion boxes, grievance committees, departmental rivalries, and other such devices may serve as lightning rods for the day-to-day hostility engendered by the frustrations inherent in being a subordinate.

But in the long run an effective leader will be aware of the need to balance dependence with independence, constraint with autonomy, so that the inevitable psychological consequences of taking orders do not loom too large.

Better yet, he will recognize that many people are frightened by complete independence and need to feel the security of a system that prescribes limits to their freedom. He will try to adjust the amounts and kinds of freedom to fit the psychological needs of his subordinates. Generally this means providing a developmental program in which the employee can be given some sense of where he is going within the company, and the effective leader will make sure that the view is a realistic one.

Here an analogy may be helpful:. Nothing is more destructive of morale in any group situation than a phony democracy of the kind one finds in some families. Parents who announce that the children are going to participate share-and-share-alike in all decisions soon find that they cannot, in fact, let them, and when the program fails, the children are especially thwarted.

They come to perceive each of the necessarily frequent decisions that are not made by vote or consultation as arbitrary. They develop a strong sense of injustice and rebellion.

In industry the same conditions hold. It is no good to pretend that certain decisions can be made by subordinates if in fact they cannot. To make dependency tolerable, the lines must be clearly drawn between those decisions that are the prerogative of the superior and those that can be made by or in consultation with the subordinate. Once those lines have been drawn, it is essential not to transgress them any more often than is absolutely necessary.

Ideally, the subordinate should have an area within which he is free to operate without anyone looking over his shoulder. The superior should clarify the goals and perhaps suggest alternative ways of achieving them, but the subordinate should feel free to make the necessary choices. If the worker knows that the boss likes plan A, he is not going to try plan B and risk his job if it fails.

But that makes him an automaton who can bring no additional intelligence to the organization nor free his superiors from any decisions.

He earns the respect of no one—not even the boss who helped make him that way. The successful leader knows that many workers have been brought up to consider their employers as their natural enemies.

No decision is worth the name unless it involves the balancing of risks and returns. If it were a sure thing, we would not need a man to use his judgment about it.

Mistakes are inevitable. What we must expect of employees is that they learn from their mistakes, not that they never make them. A few years earlier, the firm had overhauled its performance management system. The centerpiece of the new solution was a system that prompted managers to enter performance goals and ratings for their direct reports, schedule performance review meetings, and complete the annual performance appraisal process within a specified time period.

When managers completed performance appraisals on time and the ratings they gave fit the target distribution, its sponsors claimed that the system had increased precision and accountability in performance management. Many were on the lookout for new opportunities elsewhere.

For their part, managers felt that the organization made performance management cumbersome. They were also blind to their own contributions to a workplace climate that weakened commitment and accountability.

In my work with the organization above, I helped leaders learn that their greatest leverage to improve the commitment and accountability of their employees lay not in tracking their goal completion, but in creating and sustaining a motivating interpersonal environment. Leaders learned to recognize how their assumptions shaped their behavior and learned to consciously adopt mindsets and behaviors that produced better leadership outcomes.

Instead of hoping in vain for a magic tool to come along to help you manage your team, think of creating practices to increase your leadership proficiency.

This involves taking an idea or research finding and translating it into behaviors that you can repeat systematically to create the desired result. What outcome would make a meaningful difference for you?

And he initiated an annual conference whose panels combined executives and faculty members. Turning to personnel, George replaced the people likely to generate the most opposition and appointed a new, supportive vice dean from among the existing department chairs. He created a new position, director of external relations, and placed that director and the director of marketing on the management committee.

To give the new changes time to take effect, he delayed a formal discussion of the new strategy until his third year, by which time both revenue and ranking were higher and attitudes had become more favorable. Action strategy is about making things happen. By taking a set of coordinated actions that add up to a strategic change, a leader can kickstart the process without creating organized opposition.

High-OQ leaders rebel from the top. Strong leaders usually have strong views about how things should be done, which can lead them to take on too many fights too early in their careers. Really effective leaders learn early to target only important issues — and ones they have a fair shot of winning.

That requires two skills. The first is the ability to accurately estimate the level of conflict a particular course of action will elicit. This is where EQ can support OQ. The second is the maturity to not engage in unimportant issues. In many ways the second skill is the more difficult one to develop; most top managers are competitive, and their natural reaction to a challenge is to take it head-on.

Rebelling from the top means taking on the biggest challenges only when you have the most firepower. The criticism was scathing, including from McKinsey and other top consulting firms. Leahy succeeded with both dramatic changes in part because he maintained a modest demeanor throughout.

To rebel from the top, leaders must strike a difficult balance. High-OQ leaders stage moments of theater that will be told and retold throughout the organization.

To help leaders understand how to build versatility, this practical model emphasizes the opposing but complementary behaviors that are required: It makes the distinction between, on the one hand, how you lead in terms of interpersonal behaviors for influencing and interacting with other people and, on the other hand, what you lead in terms of the organizational issues you focus them on.

Two big challenges characterize leadership today. One is the need to juggle a growing series of paradoxical demands do more with less; cut costs but innovate; think globally, act locally. These challenges have significantly amplified the need for versatile leaders who have the ability to cope with a variety of changes and the wherewithal to resolve competing priorities. Versatile leaders have more engaged employees and higher performing teams.

Their business units are more adaptable and innovative. Their organizations are more capable of gaining a competitive advantage because they know how to disrupt before being disrupted. For almost 25 years, my colleagues and I have worked to help leaders improve their versatility, and we have found the above to be true in a range of industries across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Throughout our work, we have coached hundreds of senior executives and systematically studied their development, as well as assessed more than 30, upper-level managers in mostly large, global corporations as varied as Google, The Walt Disney Company, Allianz, Schneider Electric, and more. Our practice and research have helped us create a framework that defines what versatility is and how it can be developed.

In short, versatility is the capacity to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary skills and behaviors. Leaders are typically better at reading change than they are at responding to it, largely because developing a broad range of behaviors requires a systematic effort that often pushes them out of their comfort zones.

To help leaders understand how to expand their behavioral repertoire, we devised a practical model that synthesizes the work on leadership behavior from the last years of research in both psychology and management. Because of the paradoxical demands versatile leaders face, our model emphasizes opposing but complementary behaviors: It makes the distinction between, on the one hand, how you lead in terms of interpersonal behaviors for influencing and interacting with other people and, on the other hand, what you lead in terms of the organizational issues you focus them on.

Think yin and yang, where both types of behaviors are good and necessary, and each is completed by the other. Forceful leadership is about asserting personal and positional power.