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

by Linda A. Hill

Manage your network.

Instead of the fly caught in the web, you must become the spider that creates the web—your own network—and dances lightly over it.

Manage your team is about building a high-performance team that's more than the sum of the individuals involved.

Your success will depend on your ability to make progress, and progress depends on a clear sense of your current strengths and weaknesses.

With commitment, there's no limit to where your journey can take you.

It begins with you because what you think and feel, the beliefs and values that drive your actions, matter to the people you must influence.

It's not that they necessarily enjoy controlling others but that they believe exercising authority is the most efficient way to influence others and get results.

In fact, formal authority is a useful but limited tool.

Many managers—especially those who were achievement-driven stars as individual performers—don't even think about relationships. They're so task oriented that they put the work to be done and their authority as boss at the heart of what they do and assume they can ignore the human aspects of working with others.

As someone told us, “I fixed my boss. I did exactly what he said to do.”

you cannot decree what's essential for good work—you must win their commitment by winning over their heads and hearts.

Fear is a limited, ultimately corrosive and demeaning way to get what you want from others.

Change often brings uncertainty, loss, and pain for those it touches. Yet those are usually the very people who must embrace the change and make it work. Real solutions can only come from those involved, and real change requires that they alter not only their behavior but their thinking, assumptions, and values as well. Authority cannot compel such change.

Managing people primarily by exercising your formal authority—by telling them what to do without truly seeking their input—is far less likely than a more open approach to capture that full value.

Organizational success today requires the involvement of everyone at all levels. Less authority-driven organizations are more likely to elicit and take full advantage of the talent and experience of their people. We see firms in all cultures moving in this direction, even those that are traditionally hierarchical.

For example, a leading Indian IT firm introduced several practices to encourage employee engagement and foster innovation.3 Those practices include 360-degree feedback for all managers, including the CEO, who posts his reviews on the company intranet and encourages others to do the same. In Indian culture, which has historically valued hierarchy and the status it provides, that's a shocking move, but it models the openness the company is trying to achieve.

Research confirms the old saying that “power corrupts.” The frequent exercise of formal authority can lead you to inflate your own sense of self-worth and denigrate the value of those on whom you exercise it. 5 As a manager who had recently taken over a group described his experience: “Then review time came around … it was quite an exercise … You hold their job, their career, in your hands, so to speak. They have an inbred fear.”

No wonder you hear almost every day of powerful people whose inflated sense of personal importance led them to perform stupid, inconsiderate, and even illegal or unethical acts. You think such things only happen to other people, but they can happen to anyone, including you.

If you see yourself primarily as “the boss,” the one in charge, the one above those you manage, it will limit the willingness of others to accept your influence.

Problems are technical challenges with a “right” solution, and the messy human element is something you can and should ignore.

As one manager told us, “You have the ability to hire and fire, but the moment you rely on that authority or imply it, I think the battle is lost.”

When Members of Your Group Cannot Reach Agreement It sometimes happens that your group, after full discussion of alternatives, cannot reach consensus. Here you'll need to make a choice in order for the group to move forward. You'll have to explain the reasons for your decision, especially to those who preferred some other course of action, but most people in such situations will prefer progress to impasse.

There is a powerful prerogative of authority that few dispute but is often overlooked: the simple ability to command people's time and attention. Suppose you fear customer service is being ignored. But instead of imposing new procedures, you have your people join you in talking about service to ten customers each. Such assignments, along with asking for reports or calling meetings, can bring attention to an issue or problem and let people discover it for themselves. That's usually better than dictating a solution.

If something prevents a direct report from doing his or her job, then the relationship must end.

Still, we maintain, it is possible to care deeply while focusing on the work. Consider other relationships. Do you expect or want your lawyer, doctor, accountant, or therapist to be your close friend? You want them to care deeply and genuinely for you. But you want their insights and expertise, and you don't want those clouded by affection for you. Think of a great teacher you had. You wanted her on your side, caring for you, but you understood that if you didn't know the exam answers, she would grade you accordingly. Think of a coach. Again, you wanted him to care for you and help you develop, but you both accepted that his ultimate goal was to field the best team. Whether you made the team, whether you played or sat on the bench, depended not on his feelings for you but on your performance.

If you create relationships in which the primary goal is to sustain the relationship rather than do work, you will be creating a trap that sooner or later will snare you.

There's no easy solution for the potential problems except frank and ongoing discussions of roles, expectations, and consequences. Those involved must often separate their personal ties from their work relationships and mutually decide how they will operate in each sphere. It's no surprise that many family firms, as well as partnerships begun by friends, eventually disband—often with a big bang—because the relationships are so complex and the tensions so extreme. It can be helpful to enlist outside assistance from an executive coach who specializes in these matters. Such assistance can help you anticipate and prevent or work through the inevitable dilemmas that arise from the mix of family, friendship, business, and wealth.

Relationships often tend toward one of the extremes—toward distance or toward friendship. Only steady care by you will keep each relationship on track: caring, human, but always with a little distance, and always focused on the group and its work. Friendly but not friends. The penalties of failing this requirement will be painful to you, both as a boss and a person. It's easier to get these things right from the beginning than to repair them after they've gone wrong.

Nothing will be more fundamental to your success and your progress than your ability to generate trust. Trust in you as a boss is the foundation of your influence as a manager.

People's belief in your competence as a manager People's belief in your character as a person

We think of managerial competence as having three elements: technical competence, operational competence, and political competence.

Political competence is about knowing who does what and how to influence them. As one direct report said of his manager, there's “nothing worse than working for a powerless boss”—that is, a boss who couldn't get anything done in the organization.

Would people say you work hard? People respect a good work ethic and tend to trust a manager who invests great personal effort—does homework, comes prepared, and takes the work seriously. If you work hard as a manager, it means you value the group and its work and want it to succeed.

A critical distinction: empathy isn't about putting yourself in someone else's position. It means seeing through their eyes based on their experience, needs, and values.

“To treat people fairly is to treat them differently,”

What's required is the ability to recognize your own and other's emotions but not be controlled by them. This is what's called emotional maturity or emotional competence, and management will reveal how much you have.

One manager told us he'd discovered that “you can't be pessimistic on the job. The amount of your enthusiasm translates directly into how your people feel and how much effort they put into the job.” Or as another concluded, “Be like a duck—on the surface calm and serene and underneath paddle like hell.”

Do you ever say these words at work to your people? “I'm sorry.” “I made a mistake.” “I was wrong.” “I don't know.” “Would you help me?” “Could you explain this to me. I'm not sure I get it.” “What do you think?” “What would you do?”

We know a new manager who took over a trading desk in a global investment bank where he oversaw a group of experienced traders. Like many other new managers, he first used a directive approach, giving detailed instructions for adopting or closing specific positions or trying different trading strategies. The traders resented his commands and demanded to know his rationale, even though many acknowledged privately his talent for timing trades. Tension grew between them. He did recognize his lack of knowledge about foreign markets, however, and one day he asked a trader a simple question about pricing. The trader spent several minutes explaining and even suggested they talk again at the end of the day. It provided an important insight for the manager, who said he learned to stop talking all the time and begin listening. Once he made that change, he said, he began to learn about the work, and people questioned his calls less. In short, people began to trust him.

you must actively recognize their emotions and take them seriously, even if you disagree or consider them misplaced, and even when they're directed at you and feel personal. Sometimes simple acknowledgement of a person's feelings and allowing him to talk are enough. Of course, you need not condone behavior that exceeds the bounds of respect, civility, and decency.

Everyone suffers frustrations, setbacks, and failure at times. Your journey will be full of them. The question is, How do you respond?6 Do you keep going? Do you find a way to keep making progress? We once heard a senior manager at a successful company describe it this way: “To succeed as a manager here, you have to have a strong ego. Not a big ego, not someone who's ‘me, me, me’ all the time. We don't like that. That person won't last one day here. But you have to have toughness, a strong sense of who you are and what you're about. When you get whacked, you keep coming back. You can do that because you're focused on the work and what you and your team have to do.”

Don't focus your relationships around either authority or friendship. Build them on trust in your competence and character.

No group can succeed by itself. As a result, instead of the freedom and independence you probably expected as a boss, you found dependence—or, more accurately, interdependence.

Thus, you must negotiate and compete constantly for scarce resources, including the attention of your management.

You can turn inward, focus on your own group, and deal with others only as some specific need arises. Stay above the fray, you think. Or you can turn outward and proactively engage the broader organization by building a network of ongoing, mutually supportive relationships with others.

Now consider a second question.

How much influence do you have in your organization?

Influence is how conflict in organizations gets resolved. Groups whose managers have influence tend to get what they need. Those whose bosses lack it don't. If your group is to perform at its best and produce the results you want, you need organizational influence.

You Troubleshoot for Your Group Two employees who must coordinate their work disagree because their different groups have different priorities. When problems arise between your group and others, you're the one who must deal with them to keep the work flowing smoothly. If you don't confront them quickly, they have a way of suddenly blowing up in your face. We know of a manager whose customer service group carried on a running dispute with the sales department over promises made by salespeople to important customers. As this dispute festered, frustrated customers began shifting to a competitor.

You are your group's official spokesperson and its champion, ambassador, lobbyist, advocate, and public relations flack. Both your people and the organization expect you to play this role. How your group is perceived by outsiders will depend largely on your efforts. Did it successfully complete a big project and come in under budget? It's your job to spread the good news. We know a group that failed to hit an important deadline, and its manager saved the day not only by leading the group to find a solution but also by personally going around to all other groups involved and explaining the cause of the delay and the solution. Only you, the boss, can do this.