On
Managing
Yourself
(Vol. 2)
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
Boston, Massachusetts
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First eBook Edition: Mar 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64782-080-0
eISBN: 978-1-64782-081-7
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
From Purpose to Impact
by Nick Craig and Scott A. Snook
Learning to Learn
by Erika Andersen
Making Yourself Indispensable
by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger
Make Time for the Work That Matters
by Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen
Collaboration Without Burnout
by Rob Cross, Scott Taylor, and Deb Zehner
Emotional Agility
by Susan David and Christina Congleton
How to Tackle Your Toughest Decisions
by Joseph L. Badaracco
How Dual-Career Couples Make It Work
by Jennifer Petriglieri
Cultivating Everyday Courage
by James R. Detert
BONUS ARTICLE
Be Your Own Best Advocate
by Deborah M. Kolb
Building an Ethical Career
by Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac H. Smith
BONUS DIGITAL ARTICLE
When and How to Respond to Microaggressions
by Ella F. Washington, Alison Hall Birch, and Laura Morgan Roberts
About the Contributors
Index
From Purpose to Impact
by Nick Craig and Scott Snook
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
âMark Twain
OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, thereâs been an explosion of interest in purpose-driven leadership. Academics argue persuasively that an executiveâs most important role is to be a steward of the organizationâs purpose. Business experts make the case that purpose is a key to exceptional performance, while psychologists describe it as the pathway to greater well-being.
Doctors have even found that people with purpose in their lives are less prone to disease. Purpose is increasingly being touted as the key to navigating the complex, volatile, ambiguous world we face today, where strategy is ever changing and few decisions are obviously right or wrong.
Despite this growing understanding, however, a big challenge remains. In our work training thousands of managers at organizations from GE to the Girl Scouts, and teaching an equal number of executives and students at Harvard Business School, weâve found that fewer than 20% of leaders have a strong sense of their own individual purpose. Even fewer can distill their purpose into a concrete statement. They may be able to clearly articulate their organizationâs mission: Think of Googleâs âTo organize the worldâs information and make it universally accessible and useful,â or Charles Schwabâs âA relentless ally for the individual investor.â But when asked to describe their own purpose, they typically fall back on something generic and nebulous: âHelp others excel.â âEnsure success.â âEmpower my people.â Just as problematic, hardly any of them have a clear plan for translating purpose into action. As a result, they limit their aspirations and often fail to achieve their most ambitious professional and personal goals.
Our purpose is to change thatâto help executives find and define their leadership purpose and put it to use. Building on the seminal work of our colleague Bill George, our programs initially covered a wide range of topics related to authentic leadership, but in recent years purpose has emerged as the cornerstone of our teaching and coaching. Executives tell us it is the key to accelerating their growth and deepening their impact, in both their professional and personal lives. Indeed, we believe that the process of articulating your purpose and finding the courage to live itâwhat we call purpose to impactâis the single most important developmental task you can undertake as a leader.
Consider Dolf van den Brink, the president and CEO of Heineken USA. Working with us, he identified a decidedly unique purpose statementââTo be the wuxia master who saves the kingdomââwhich reflects his love of Chinese kung fu movies, the inspiration he takes from the wise, skillful warriors in them, and the realization that he, too, revels in high-risk situations that compel him to take action. With that impetus, he was able to create a plan for reviving a challenged legacy business during extremely difficult economic conditions. Weâve also watched a retail operations chief call on his newly clarified purposeââCompelled to make things better, whomever, wherever, howeverââto make the âhard, cage-rattling changesâ needed to beat back a global competitor. And weâve seen a factory director in Egypt use his purposeââCreate families that excelââto persuade employees that they should honor the 2012 protest movement not by joining the marches but by maintaining their loyalties to one another and keeping th...