Unleashed

Key Concepts

Core argument

“Our starting point is that leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. Instead, it’s about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential.”(p. 9)

“The practical definition of leadership we use in our work is that leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence. Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for the people around you to become increasingly effective, to help them fully realize their own capacity and power. And not only when you’re in the trenches with them, but also when you’re not around, and even (this is the cleanest test) after you’ve permanently moved on from the team.” (p. 12)

“To create a context where teams thrive, however, requires something more. Leading a team with any type of difference embedded in it (and we will argue that this describes most teams) requires you to champion that difference and ensure that everyone can contribute their unique capacities and perspectives.” (p. 20)

Trust is the foundation of leadership

“...trust is also the input that makes the leadership equation work. If leadership is about empowering others, in your presence and your absence, then trust is the emotional framework that allows that service to be freely exchanged.” (p. 36)

“I’m willing to be led by you because I trust you. I’m willing to give up some of my cherished autonomy and put my well-being in your hands because I trust you. In turn, you’re willing to rely on me because you trust me. You trust that I will make decisions that advance our shared mission, even when you’re not in the room. The more trust that accumulates between us, the better this works.” (p. 36)

“Here’s the basic formula: people tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy).” (p. 36)

FIGURE 2-1 (p. 37)

“For most logic wobblers, however, rigor isn’t the issue. A more likely explanation for the breakdown in trust is that you’re not communicating your ideas effectively.” (p. 47)

“You may have an authenticity wobble if people feel they’re not getting access to the “real” you, to a full and complete accounting of what you know, think, and feel. If the version of reality you present feels overly curated or strategic, an invisible wall can form between you and the people around you.” (p. 48)

Leaders show their love by having high standards and deep devotion to their colleagues

“Leaders are most effective in empowering other people when they create a context we describe as high standards and deep devotion. When a leader’s expectations are high and clear, we tend to stretch to reach them. And we are far more likely to get there when we know that leader truly has our back. It’s a version of tough love that places equal emphasis on the toughness and the love.” (p. 62)

“Instead, we’re often spending less time in justice than our leadership mandate asks of us. We’re sometimes creating empowering contexts where other people can succeed wildly; at other times, we’re either not helpful or making choices that undermine their ability to thrive. Our thoughts and emotions distract us from leadership. It becomes about us rather than them.” (p. 71)

“The good news is that the most effective mechanism we know for accelerating human progress taps into our natural devotional impulses. The idea is simple: catch someone in the act of behaving exactly as you want them to behave, using sincere and specific praise.” (p. 74)

Leaders create inclusive cultures in which people feel like they belong

“One headline is that true inclusion—not just diversity—will help you solve those business problems faster and better.” (p. 87)

“As we began to explore in our chapter on trust, organizations win when people can bring their complete, multidimensional selves to work. And it’s not just underrepresented employees who benefit. We are all better off in inclusive spaces where authenticity can flourish.” (p. 87)

“Our advice is to do—or at least to start doing—as much as you can simultaneously. When people ask us about the optimal timing for inclusive change, our standard response is, ‘How about now?’” (p. 88)

Step one: Attract and select diverse talent

“If your existing processes tend to attract a singular profile, then you likely need to design different processes for attracting other profiles.” (p. 93)

“The more objective your selection criteria, the better off you’ll be on the inclusion front. Be wary of squishy, subjective standards such as “best athlete” and “cultural fit,” which live almost entirely in the eyes of overconfident beholders.” (p. 98)

Step two: Make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive

“In our experience, the opportunity to thrive has two practical drivers: a culture that values inclusion and widespread access to development opportunities.” (p. 100)

“A culture of inclusion has four levels: safe, welcome, celebrated, and cherished.” (p. 100)

Step three: Promote your best people using a rigorous, transparent system

“A promotions process is working when decisions about whether to promote someone are self-evident. Among other things, this requires full transparency in promotions criteria, for both candidates and gatekeepers. Everyone should know exactly what it takes to get to the next level.” (p. 109)

“The absence of that clarity comes at a big price. It creates space for subjectivity in promotions decisions, with all its potential downside, including the alienation and frustration of talented people who are more likely to get overlooked. It also takes up outsized space in the organization’s emotional life.” (p. 111)

Step four: Retain, retain, retain

“Wake up every morning with a commitment to create the conditions where your employees aren’t even tempted to take that first call [from headhunters]. That process is going to look different for every organization, but it always starts with open-hearted, open-minded inquiry into what’s getting in the way of everyone thriving, particularly the ones who are contributing the most.” (p. 114)

“Why We’re Often Skeptical of 360-Degree Reviews” 

“In reviews of male and female managers of equal caliber, women were regularly, well, skewered, while their male peers were often left unscathed and even celebrated, sometimes for the very same behaviors.” (p. 111)

“The short explanation for this pattern is that people are more likely to say, well, dopey things about women [in 360-degree reviews], particularly when they have the chance to do so anonymously (see internet).” (p. 111)

“The other pattern we see in 360s is that something completely new almost always pops up—again, particularly for women. A curveball comes out of nowhere, some transgression she’s never heard about before, from a source she’s unable to identify, at a stage in the process where it’s hard for her to provide context or defend herself.” (p. 112)

“As an experiment, we asked the senior leaders to develop a list of equivalent performers with equivalent reputations—men and women who they were confident the organization perceived similarly. We then asked the leaders to study the corresponding 360s and observe what was written about these employees.” (p. 112)

“They agreed that if an outsider had read these evaluations without context or personal experience with the candidates, they would in no way conclude there was equivalence.” (p. 113)

Strategy amplifies the leader’s impact

“Strategy, done well, empowers organizations by showing employees how to deploy the resources they control (time, focus, capital, etc.) in the absence of direct, hands-on leadership.” (p. 125)

“This scale of leadership depends on people understanding the strategy well enough to inform their own decisions with it. In our experience, too many companies are held back by strategic confusion below the most senior ranks. Said differently, strategy guides discretionary behavior to the limit of how well you communicate it.” (p. 125)

Strategy is about giving up the good to focus on the great

“Your first job as a strategist is to be better than your competitors at the things that matter most to your customers.” (p. 126)

“This sounds simple enough, but here’s the thing: in most cases, this means you’ll also have to be worse than your competitors at other things, ideally the less important ones. A major lesson of our decade of research on service companies—we wrote a book about this idea—is that organizations that resist and try to be great at everything usually end up in a state of ‘exhausted mediocrity.’” (p. 126)

“In particular, we suggest underinvesting where it matters least in order to free up the resources to overinvest where it matters most. We propose being bad in the service of great.” (p. 126)

Wise strategists don’t squeeze their customers, suppliers, and employees; they make sure everyone wins

“Our practical advice is to be like Apple and aim for the middle of the value range, even if you’re competing for a segment of the market that’s not particularly price sensitive. Great products are built on enduring stakeholder partnerships where companies and customers are increasingly rewarded for the ride they’ve decided to go on together. Even if it’s counterintuitive, leaving value on the table for customers is a way to compensate them for doing their part. It’s an expression of trust, love, and belonging, all wrapped into that transactional moment of truth.” (p. 132)

“We don’t advise squeezing until it hurts for the simple reason that it’s a lot harder to sustain your company’s health without happy, prosperous suppliers. They generally aren’t going to stick around or work hard for you if they’re not rewarded for it, and so protecting supplier surplus can be just as strategic as leaving value on the table for your customers.” (p. 135)

“In her breakthrough “good jobs” research, MIT professor Zeynep Ton demonstrates the performance return on investing in decent wages and dignified jobs, even in low-cost, low-margin business models. ...Rather than treat their employees like unreliable, interchangeable cost units, the companies Ton studies are investing unapologetically in their frontline people. They’re reducing operating costs and growing their employee surplus in the form of high wages, while fostering cultures of community and belonging in the workplace. (p. 136)

“This is where value-based strategy gets even more interesting. The goal of strategy is to grow the “wedges” on your product’s value stick (customer delight, firm margin, and supplier surplus) without making any of the other wedges smaller.” (p. 141)

Culture also helps leaders amplify their impact

“Whatever strategy has not made clear to your extended team, culture will unapologetically fill the void. Culture establishes the rules of engagement after leadership leaves the room; it explains how things are really done around here.” (p. 152)

“What’s more important, growth or excellence? Action or analysis? Being direct or saving face? Strategy drops hints, but it’s culture that has the definitive answers.” (p. 152)

“As a starting place for discovering how possible it is to change culture, we like former MIT professor Edgar H. Schein’s iconic framework, which loosely divides organizational culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions.” (p. 154)

“Another way to describe culture is that it’s our collective agreement about what is true. What is important. What is a crisis. What is cause for celebration or pride or shame. Culture even determines something as fundamental as what is funny.” (p. 154)

The Culture Change Playbook

“Step 1: Collect the devastating data” (p. 168)

“Step 2: Keep it to yourself (for now)” (p. 168)

“Step 3: Pilot a rigorous and optimistic way forward” (p. 169)

• “Your intention is to demonstrate that success is possible—to show the organization that the problem can be solved (relatively) quickly without good people being harmed.” (p. 169)

• “For the design phase, recruit a pilot leadership team with a bias for action and deep intuition about the problem.” (p. 169)

• “As you move to execute the pilot, be as creative and audacious as possible, running smart experiments in a range of conditions.” (p. 169)

“Step 4: Involve everyone in the solution” (p. 170)

Quotables

“Hoffman put it this way: ‘As a leader, you have to constantly shut off your own reel and watch all the movies playing around you.’” (p. 16)

“More important, if our ambition was to lead, then we were asking the wrong question. The relevant question wasn’t “What do these people think of me?”; it was “What can I do to help make these people better?” That’s the shift that empowerment leadership demands.” (p. 26)

“What will be the focus of your own leadership story? Will it be about the power you stockpiled and protected? Or about how much more you achieved by using that power to unleash the people around you?” (p. 30)

“There’s a role for both positive reinforcement and constructive advice in anyone’s evolution, but here’s the part that surprises most people: the right ratio of positive to constructive is at least 5:1.” (p. 76)

“One pattern of neglect we see is the subconscious decision to disregard someone who needs to be separated but is still in the ecosystem. As creatures of feeling, we often insulate ourselves from the discomfort of the separation process by dehumanizing a person, sometimes even in small ways like reduced eye contact.” (p. 83)

“What’s worse, we often throw people who are different from us into the deep end, without realizing how much informal scaffolding we’re giving to people who are like us, in ways we sometimes don’t recognize as developmental, such as a casual conversation at the preschool fundraiser.” (p. 108)

“The solution? Earn the right to keep your people, every single day.” (p. 114)

“In our experience, leaders need to confront their organization’s history [with bias] with both optimism and honesty. Optimism is about building a better tomorrow, fixing an organization’s problems with the kind of humility and resourcefulness we explore throughout this book. Honesty is about taking radical responsibility for the things that went wrong and the human costs of those mistakes.” (p. 116)

“When we began this work, the shorthand we offered people who wanted to get belonging right was that if you made your organization better for women, then you were likely to make it better for everyone. Over time, we evolved that advice to, “Make it better for black women,” to reflect the complexity of carrying around more than one marginalized identity. Sheryl Sandberg recently offered us this variation: “Make it better for black working moms.” If a black working mom has as good a chance of thriving in your organization as anyone else, then you’re getting a whole bunch of things right.” (p. 119)

“Here’s the thing: the future is queer, arguably very queer.* By some measures, less than half of your future workforce will identify as heterosexual, and more than a third won’t view gender as an essential, immutable characteristic.” (p. 104)

“Our point is that evaluation is a skill and we should honor it as such—and not dishonor it by subjecting each other to our unfiltered, anonymous reactions.” (p. 112)

“A former CEO of Vanguard once showed up in Frances’s office in a threadbare suit and shoes that had clearly been resoled multiple times. He had traveled there from the company’s headquarters through some ungodly mix of indirect flights, airport shuttles, and subway rides. Vanguard’s strategy is to be the lowest-cost player in the financial services space, which it achieves through a unique, customer-owned structure and companywide obsession with efficiency. Frances asked him very directly: “So is this just for show or are you really this frugal?” He essentially answered, “It’s both.”” (p. 150)

“But the most successful organizational leaders we know are the ones who put culture at the very center of what they do. They’re the CEOs who implicitly replace the “e” with a “c” and interpret their roles as chief culture officers first.” (p. 174)

“The most effective culture leaders we know use their experiences as a jumping-off point, but (and here’s the real trick) they don’t get trapped by them. They remain open to the idea that what their own life has taught them—the assumptions and behaviors driving their personal triumphs and failures—may not be aligned with their company’s current culture needs.” (p. 162)