Being the Boss, with a New Preface: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader

by Linda A. Hill

It’s a common story. Time and again, in our work, we hear from smart, hardworking individuals who are progressing in their careers. They are consistently delivering what is asked of them and carefully avoiding major missteps. Yet, when it comes time for the big promotion, they are passed over, leaving them to wonder what went wrong. The problem is rarely a performance issue. Too often, managers get derailed, quite simply, because they misunderstand what leadership is about.

Leadership as we knew it was (and still is) evolving to deal with transformative changes in the workplace.

Many were so focused on exercising formal authority over the people who reported to them—their teams—that they neglected to invest in building the broad network of relationships they needed to ensure that their teams had the resources necessary to achieve what are ever more demanding stretch ambitions.

Manage Yourself—Trust is the foundation of great leadership, the glue that holds people together through challenging times.

Manage Your Network—Only by building a web of reciprocal relationships with people inside and outside your organization—people over whom you have no formal authority but on whom you are deeply dependent—can you ensure that you and your team will have the knowledge and resources that you need.

Manage Your Team—It is no longer enough to have people who play on your team; you need the people who report to you to play as a team.

Unleashing the talents of your team and getting them to work together means that you must develop people, both individually and collectively. If you neglect this imperative, you can’t delegate and leverage yourself; you won’t have the time or energy required to manage the other two.

Leadership is not simply getting every one-on-one relationship right with your people, it is about building the culture needed to deli...

In fact, in today’s world, networking is what allows you to develop both contextual intelligence—to scan and sense the competitive environment to determine what your priorities should be—and emotional intelligence—to build the relationships required to fulfill those aspirations.

To be considered a high potential, you must also be a game-changer in your organization. High potentials today are those with the ability to create value and change the game—that is, they must be skilled at executing for today and adapting and innovating to deliver for tomorrow.

Leading is about using yourself as an instrument to influence others to get things done and fulfill your organization’s ambitions. Good is not good enough; great is what is needed. We all need to keep learning and adapting. No one can teach you how to lead, but you can learn how to lead.

But too many derail and fail to live up to their potential. Why? Because they stop working on themselves.

I never set out to be a boss. If anything, my earliest and most basic ambition was to teach. Parts of management fit nicely with this inclination, but much of it cut against the grain of my impulses. I started out, for example, trying to motivate people through friendship, until I realized that didn’t work. Whatever I achieved came from constantly stepping back and reflecting on what I needed to do to succeed. I was a student of my craft because I had to be.

Second, that management was a practice, a discipline, and, above all, a process, and that good managers were therefore systematic.

Third, at a time when management wisdom said to “match authority and responsibility,” he derided the notion.

Being the Boss will help you answer these questions. It's not just about good management, it's about you—about how you can assess your current capabilities as a manager and how you can become the great boss you want and need to be.

Becoming an effective manager is difficult because of the great gulf that separates the work of management from the work of individual performers.

Second, becoming an effective manager requires that you not only acquire new skills and knowledge but also undergo difficult personal change.

It requires you to consider anew the questions, Who am I? What do I want? What value do I add?

You and every other manager must make them yourself, based on your own experience as a boss. You make progress on your journey as you learn and change, step-by-step.

Instead of confronting a performance problem, they fill out the compulsory annual appraisal form and simply negotiate the wording with the person involved.

If you were a high performer in your work before becoming a manager, you may find the journey into management particularly difficult. Because of their previous success, stars are understandably reluctant to give up the attitudes and practices they think produced their success thus far, and they're unwilling to change themselves.

They don't know how to develop or coach people because they never needed much coaching themselves, or so they believe. They don't know how to deal with people who lack their motivation. Because they've never failed, they've had little practice reflecting on and learning from experience.

If you were a star, be aware that the very success that produced your promotion c...

It will help you understand the nature of your journey into management and what to expect along the way. Making progress requires an understanding of management and why it's difficult. If you don't know what to expect, you're much more likely to give up because you think you're alone and your problems are unique.

It will help you understand the purpose of your journey. What is a fully effective manager? What does such a person do, and how does she do it?

It will help you understand where you are on your journey and how much further you have to go. This is truly important.

First, the people for whom you're responsible need you to keep going. In the long run, they cannot perform better than the quality of management you provide.

Second, you cannot achieve your own aspirations if you don't keep making progress.

Management is responsibility for the performance of a group of people.

To carry out this responsibility, you must influence others, which means you must make a difference not only in what they do but in the thoughts and feelings that drive their actions.

Management is defined by responsibility but it's done by exerting influence. That, in a nutshell, is what you do as a boss—influence others in ways that make them more productive as individuals and, especially, as a group.

“To focus on the work people do, focus on the people doing the work.”

Peter Drucker pointed out: when you hire a hand, it comes with a head and heart attached.

Other, less direct but more effective forms of influence—such as support, development, and encouragement—are needed that engage the whole person.

It is a boss's dual responsibility both to foster the development of her people and to determine if and when those same people must be removed because they cannot do the work.

How do you find the right balance between someone's need to learn and their need to perform?

Dealing with the opposing roles of coach and judge will present some of the most difficult emotional and managerial challenges you will face as a boss. You will be sorely tempted to abdicate one of the roles.

To deliver expected results may mean that you sometimes act as change agent both within and outside your group. You are responsible for creating the conditions needed for your own success.

You need results today, but if you don't prepare today for the future, you won't get results tomorrow when tomorrow becomes today.

It says management focuses on doing work on time, on budget, and on target—steady execution—while leadership focuses on change and innovation.

Such harms are not the goal but the consequence of actions you must take, yet they are real and painful to those who suffer them.7

As a manager, you cannot avoid decisions that affect the work and lives of others in profound ways. They appear all the time, a burden of being the boss. What makes them truly difficult is that you must weigh competing considerations that render your choices anything but clear and obvious. “Nothing is black and white,” one new manager observed. “It's all gray. My job is to manage trade-offs.”

You probably don't see yourself as someone who consciously harms others, and so confronting the necessity of inflicting harm, however inadvertently, will force you to examine your identity and think hard about what you're willing and not willing to do.

For example, you tend to focus on the individual over the team—or vice versa. Or you focus on the work and not the people—or vice versa. To each paradox, you apply a default response. Taken together, these predispositions or default responses make up your style, the way you tend to lead as a boss.

Globalization and technological change, and the heightened competition they bring, are forcing organizations to become ever more agile and responsive. As a consequence, organizations have become flatter, more far-flung, and hence more multicultural, as well as more complex and fluid in their structure.

While organizations are changing the way they function, the work force itself is shifting too. Employees of different generations—there are now four in the workplace—bring to work diverse aspirations, motivations, values, and feelings about authority and organizations. Imagine the challenges of managing a collection of workers ranging from twenty to sixty-five years old. That's not an unusual work group today.

As a result, there's growing similarity among cultures in the way people dress, talk, and interact socially. Yet these superficial similarities often mask fundamental differences in attitudes about such key work matters as time, deadlines, hierarchy and authority, how to manage conflict, and even how to communicate.

“People go to work for a company but quit a boss” is probably more true today than ever.

Manage yourself. Many managers, new and experienced, think the third imperative, manage your team, covers the whole of their work. It's not obvious to them that effective management begins with them as individuals. Thus, manage yourself deals with changes required in how you think about yourself and your role, how you relate to others as a boss, and especially how you try to influence others.