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

by Linda A. Hill

Too many managers overlook the management possibilities of using a team to influence their people. Instead, they focus on building the most effective relationships they can with each person who works for them.

A team is a group of people who do collective work and are mutually committed to a common team purpose and challenging goals related to that purpose.

Mutual commitment means members hold themselves and each other jointly accountable for the team's performance. Not only do they think and act collectively, but the social, emotional bonds among them are strong.

Mutual commitment springs from the two pillars noted in the definition: first, a common, worthwhile purpose, a sense of doing something important together; and second, specific and challenging team goals based on that purpose.

Define the Future. Does your team know where it's going? Can you and your people describe the future you're trying to create? Above all, does your team have a compelling common purpose and specific, challenging goals focused on that purpose?

The burden of putting all these pieces in place and maintaining them in a tumultuous world falls on you.

It requires impersonal systems through which you influence others, including purpose, goals, roles, standard practices, values and expectations, feedback systems, and many more.

Systems lift management from the mere supervision of moment-by-moment activity, allow bosses to manage large groups, and create the boundaries within which subordinates can act with autonomy.

As you make progress and take on larger groups and more responsibility, your ability to influence your indirect reports through management systems will become increasingly important.

Your only choice is to move forward or lose ground.

Done well, a plan defines the meaning and context of the work you and your team do, identifies the forces shaping your world, and describes both the future you want and your strategies for creating it. In short, it's the foundation for virtually everything you do as a manager.

People relate to worthwhile purposes and goals. Most of us want to feel part of something larger and more important than ourselves. When workers were asked how important it was that their lives be meaningful, 83 percent said “very important” and another 15 percent said “fairly important.”2 That's an astounding 98 percent to whom it was at least “important.” Is it important to you and those who work for you? Most likely, it is.

Purpose is possible in any field. The survey just cited also revealed that at least 25 percent of workers in retail, finance, and chemical manufacturing—not fields known for their inherent “good of mankind” motives—strongly felt their work was important because of their company's purpose.

No job is meaningless. Identifying purpose and making it explicit can transform a job into a calling instead of a career stepping-stone or just a way to pay the rent.

Being “managerial” or “strategic” doesn't mean staying above everything. It means staying in close touch with the right things, the strategies and initiatives that truly matter, without doing the work yourself or micromanaging those who do.

“We need another person,” versus “With another person, we can reach our goal of increasing output 50 percent next year.”

If every group in an organization feels united by an overall purpose, that sense of common cause can serve as the social glue that overcomes their differences.

Planning is worthwhile because the process of thinking about the future will prepare you for contingencies.

A plan creates a context for delegation by making clear what activities are most important and should be delegated with greater care. A plan also creates a framework for making ethical judgments by helping you weigh the conflicting needs of stakeholders—in short, by helping define a greater good.

It's easy for producing managers to slight their management duties because the pressure to produce as individuals always feels more tangible and urgent than the requirements of being a boss.

First, it's unwritten and unspoken. Here it comprises a set of thoughts, ideas, possibilities, potential goals and priorities, bits of information, hunches, and opinions that exist only in your mind (or in notes and disjointed fragments you've written down) because they haven't yet congealed into something you can express and discuss coherently.

The second level of your unwritten plan is still unwritten but now it's spoken. It consists of ideas developed enough that you put them out for discussion with others in your group or network.

The best plans emerge through a rich exchange of ideas and input from a diversity of sources.7 As they emerge, they constantly change through a never-ending process that's partly rational and partly unconscious, messy, murky, and creative. Software platforms that ease the sharing of ideas, encourage collaborative development, and foster the process of emergence can be invaluable for this purpose.

Don't plan by viewing the future as a series of steps starting from where you are now.

Instead, in your imagination, leap to the future you want and describe that world. Then figure out how to get from here to there.

What will you do in that new world? Given all those ways the world will be different, combined with your aspirations to perform differently or better, define the future you and your group want. In that future, what will your group literally and physically do?

Cultures can differ in their fundamental beliefs about how much we control our futures, the importance of deadlines, the need to establish social relationships before team members can work together, tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity, and even whether change is inherently positive or negative.

trust is counting on someone to do the right thing. Culture defines “the right thing” within a group.

culture is a useful way to manage team members who don't report directly to you.

Clarity is challenging because it embodies another paradox: the need to be clear—“here's how we do what we do”—while remaining flexible in the midst of rapid change. It's a never-ending struggle to strike the right balance between order, stability, and predictability on one hand and flexibility and adaptation on the other.

People dislike arbitrary decisions. They want to know that a transparent, data-based process will be followed in making important team choices.

Manage your people as a team, but never lose sight of this reality: team members are people who still want to be seen and cared about as individuals.

Effective relationships require frequent contact. In fact, good managers spend most of their time interacting with their direct reports and others. Management is a contact sport. How much of your time do you spend engaging with others? It should be substantial. A significant portion of people's trust will be based on their day-to-day interactions with you.

Remember what we noted earlier: real listening means you're willing to change your mind based on what you hear.

If they do seem uncomfortable with your role as their boss, you might need to have an explicit conversation with them about their reservations. Avoiding the subject will not make it go away. If you do confront them, do it in a way that's not accusatory or threatening—by saying, for example, “I get the impression, I could be wrong, you're not comfortable with me as your leader. How can I help you? What can I do to help make this situation work?”

What About Individuals You Don't Like or Understand? This is the acid test of your interpersonal maturity as a manager. If you rely on your gut to drive your relationships, you'll only feel comfortable with people similar and familiar to you. Human chemistry guarantees that you'll like some people and dislike others. Those you dislike are the ones you avoid when you walk around the office. Perhaps they remind you of someone in your past, but the reason doesn't matter, except that knowing it may help you get over it. Find some way to interact or even work with those you need but dislike. Get to know them. Most negative feelings diminish with familiarity. They probably don't like you either. Take responsibility for making the relationship what it should be.

If you don't know your people, you cannot make intelligent decisions about assignments for them, and you cannot capture their commitment or decide how much to trust and delegate to them.

You need empathy, the ability to see the world as others see it without being captured by their point of view. This is the only way to understand truly why people think and feel as they do.

Empathy is possible only if you realize that others are fundamentally different from you. Yes, you know others look, dress, act, and talk differently. But do you understand that they think and feel differently too?

Are you good at delegating? It's a key way you work with the individuals who work for you. You'll never get the best from others or leverage yourself as a manager if you cannot let go of the notion that you must guide and oversee every step your people take.

It's your responsibility to make sure you have people to whom you can give responsibility and authority.

Developing people is also a way to engage them. All of us are more likely to commit to managers and organizations that help us improve in our work and move ahead in our careers.

In the end, all development is self-development. Yet your role is crucial. In a nutshell, it is this: people learn by trying, learning, and trying again. Your job is to provide new challenges—opportunities where the consequences of failure are minor—followed by feedback, coaching, and the ability to try again.

Disciplining or firing an employee requires care, skill, and humanity. They are the hardest parts of being a boss, but they're unavoidable.

A manager we knew conducted an informal and unscientific poll of experienced managers. “When you look back over your experience,” he asked, “what do you think you could have done better?” What he heard most often matched his own experience: “I didn't face up to people decisions fast enough. I usually knew someone wasn't going to make it well before I actually did anything about it. I wish I'd faced those issues quicker, resolved them, and gone on. Everyone would have been better off.”

Do You Let People Know When They're in Trouble, and Help Them Improve? If someone's job is in jeopardy, and you've satisfied yourself the person is responsible, she has a right to know she's at risk, why, and what she can do to salvage her performance. She also has a right to whatever help you can provide. Her team colleagues will expect, first, that you deal with her performance—a weak performer will drag down the whole group. Second, they will want you to deal with her fairly and forthrightly. Don't play games by telling her she's in trouble only after you've concluded she must leave.

A good manager's questions aren't aimed at catching people in mistakes or belittling them. They serve two purposes simultaneously: to guide people to the right actions or conclusions and to help people see a challenge in new and more productive ways. Good questions teach people how to think by demonstrating what questions to ask themselves.

You Use Your Formal Authority Effectively This is a strength to the degree you consider your formal authority a useful tool but not the primary way you influence others or the key driver of relationships with your people. You exercise your authority transparently—making clear what, how, and why you do what you do—and even share it with others as possible and appropriate.

You Create Human, Caring, but Not Personal Relationships with Your People This is a strength to the degree you're able to create and maintain relationships that are supportive and rich in human connections but always focused on the purpose and goals of the team and the organization.