PDF Summary:Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook, by Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville

Being an effective leader requires more than managing day-to-day operations—it demands the ability to inspire teams, drive meaningful outcomes, and balance present performance with future innovation. In the Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook, Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville outline six essential practices that form the foundation of leadership: defining a shared mission, developing strategy, building teams, driving results, innovating for the future, and leading yourself.

This guide explores how to create vision statements that unify your organization, provide feedback that drives improvement, and build high-performing teams from talented individuals. You'll learn how to balance immediate business needs with long-term opportunities, delegate effectively to free up time for strategic priorities, and develop the self-awareness necessary to lead others. Whether you're managing a small team or leading an entire organization, this handbook provides a framework for generating meaningful impact.

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The History of Vision, Mission, and Values

The distinction between vision, mission, and values was already well-established by the time Ashkenas and Manville wrote their book. For example, John M. Bryson’s 1988 book Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations distinguished between mission, values, and vision. Bryson explained that a mission statement defines the organization's purpose, values guide behavior and decision-making, and a vision statement describes the desired future state. He emphasized that all three elements are essential for effective strategic planning and organizational success.

Accomplishing Goals

Ashkenas and Manville assert that providing feedback is crucial for improvement. Without it, people can’t determine if what they're doing is effective or how to alter it. Leaders must provide input to those they supervise and create an environment that fosters feedback and learning throughout the organization. This process helps ensure that individuals are taking appropriate actions in suitable ways. They suggest framing feedback as a process for addressing problems. Consider ways the person can improve and what support you can offer. You should also provide your team with feedback on their collective performance and motivate them to offer each other feedback.

(Shortform note: While feedback can be beneficial, it can also be detrimental. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that “telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.” They argue that feedback is often delivered poorly, and that the more feedback is emphasized, the more anxiety it creates. This anxiety can lead to a culture of fear and defensiveness, where employees are more focused on avoiding criticism than on doing their best work. Leaders who believe feedback is always beneficial may inadvertently create a climate of constant evaluation, undermining the very performance they hope to improve.)

Additionally, leaders should provide feedback on performance to organizations as a whole, especially concerning critical themes or challenges. This can frequently result in substantial changes and enhancement. To give impactful feedback, plan out the approach and content in advance, and get mentally ready. Feedback isn't effective if it's given hastily or in rushed conversations. Even if it's appropriate to offer immediate feedback, you should pause and think before you talk.

(Shortform note: When you provide feedback to organizations as a whole, you’re sending a powerful signal to a large group of people at once. This can be a catalyst for change because it prompts many people to reconsider their assumptions at the same time. When people realize that their current beliefs might not be accurate, they become more open to new ideas and ways of doing things. This collective shift in thinking makes it more likely that the organization will adopt new behaviors and practices, leading to substantial changes and enhancement.)

Next, we'll discuss how to develop and coordinate a team of leaders that achieves superior performance, and ways to balance current business results with future innovation.

Building Blocks for Performance

Developing, adjusting, and sustaining the team you lead is an ongoing challenge. Ashkenas and Manville say that strategies are revised, customer needs transform, markets change, and new technologies appear. Frequently, individuals throughout the company struggle to adjust to these changes. The first step to making this adjustment is focusing on those who answer to you. When you have the correct personnel in place, you must assemble them to form a group. Creating an exceptional leadership group doesn't occur automatically.

(Shortform note: Focusing your initial efforts on the people who report to you and turning them into a leadership group can have unintended consequences. In Groupthink, Irving L. Janis argues that when a small group of people work closely together, they can become so cohesive that they lose sight of the bigger picture. He explains that this can lead to groupthink, where everyone starts thinking the same way and ignores important information from outside the group. This can make it hard to see problems or opportunities in the rest of the organization.)

You can't simply gather skilled individuals and anticipate they'll naturally form a unified team. In your leadership role, you should proactively facilitate collaboration among your direct reports. This is essential since your people will probably have a greater impact when collaborating, and working in tandem is a crucial element of the social agreement. The majority of studies indicate that workplace satisfaction is influenced not just by people's tasks, but also by their coworkers. Ensuring your direct reports work together in productive, supportive, and collaborative ways is crucial for motivating, engaging, and aligning your team with your vision and strategy. Encouraging collaboration of this sort also amplifies your influence. Creating a high-performing team from talented, competent people requires effort and intention.

(Shortform note: In Leading Teams, J. Richard Hackman, a professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard, synthesized decades of research on team effectiveness. He found that what most determines whether a work group develops into an effective team is not the talent or interpersonal virtues of its members, but whether someone has deliberately put in place a small set of enabling conditions—making it a real team with clear boundaries and stable membership, giving it a compelling direction, designing a task and norms that form an enabling structure, embedding it in an organizational context that provides appropriate information, resources, and rewards, and ensuring access to competent coaching about how members work together over time. Hackman’s research showed that even highly talented groups will fail to become teams if these conditions aren’t met, while less talented groups can become high-performing teams if the conditions are present. He explains that the reason is that teams are complex social systems, and their effectiveness depends on how the system is designed and supported, not just on the individual parts.)

The group reporting directly to you probably isn't the only team under your supervision. Your direct reports might each have their own teams, and so on. Thus, your direct team's operations can set an example for others. Additionally, your organization likely has several interdisciplinary teams dedicated to areas like developing products, serving customers, introducing systems, and similar activities. Additionally, your company might have periodic or permanent teams that feature members from external organizations, such as innovation discussions or socially responsible projects, and you might manage or be involved in some of these.

(Shortform note: Another kind of group you might want to pay attention to is the “community of practice.” In Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger describes these as informal networks of people who share a common interest or expertise and learn from each other through regular interaction. These communities often cross formal organizational boundaries and can be powerful sources of innovation and knowledge sharing.)

In your leadership role, ensure the various teams within your organization are collaborating as effectively as they can. These insights are relevant for any organization in rapidly changing and uncertain settings. To create an exceptional team of leaders, ensure your group has at least one shared and engaging goal that demands input from everyone. Create a mutually accepted framework for team collaboration, incorporating behavioral standards, information-sharing practices, meeting schedules and formats, communication methods, and clear task definitions.

(Shortform note: A shared, engaging goal and a mutually accepted collaboration framework can help teams collaborate more effectively in rapidly changing and uncertain settings by creating psychological safety and a common mental model. Psychological safety allows team members to take risks and share ideas without fear of negative consequences, which is crucial when navigating uncertainty. A common mental model ensures everyone understands the team's objectives and how to achieve them, enabling faster decision-making and better coordination.)

Offer the necessary backing for the team's success, including training, resource access, budgets, coaching, and more. Support additionally entails psychological backing, enabling your team members to believe they can assist and constructively critique each other, instead of resorting to hostility and criticism. Additionally, you should encourage a collective way of thinking and team identity. Especially in organizations with geographically dispersed members who travel often and connect remotely, you should urge people to build personal connections and learn about one another beyond their immediate duties. Schedule time for activities away from the workplace, informal talks, meals, and occasional enjoyable events that might involve partners—all of which can unite your team. As a leader of a team or department, it's important to motivate your direct reports to engage, exchange information, work together, and support teams other than their direct reports.

The Importance of Psychological Safety

Amy C. Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has conducted research on the concept of psychological safety in teams. She defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In her studies, Edmondson found that teams with higher psychological safety were more likely to engage in learning behaviors such as seeking feedback, sharing information, asking for help, discussing errors, and experimenting with new approaches. These behaviors are essential for teams to coordinate effectively on complex tasks. By fostering an environment where team members feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks, leaders can create conditions that support the kind of constructive critique and mutual assistance that Ashkenas and Manville advocate for.

Sustaining & Enhancing Performance

Ashkenas and Manville say you must balance present outcomes with upcoming innovations. Focusing too much on the present means you’ll miss out on future opportunities, while focusing too much on what's to come means you’ll neglect what you have going on now. Many leaders invest too much in current projects and not enough in future ones.

To balance your time, make room in your schedule by delegating daily activities so you can focus on future priorities. To balance your investments, create a portfolio of initiatives with varied timelines and focus areas. Manage the portfolio by distributing resources, cutting some projects, and doubling down on others.

Balance Your Portfolio

Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff offer a rule of thumb for deciding which initiatives to cut and which to double down on. They say that companies should have a portfolio of three types of innovation: core, adjacent, and transformational. Core innovations are improvements to existing products or services, adjacent innovations are expansions into new markets or customer segments, and transformational innovations are entirely new offerings that create new markets. They recommend allocating 70% of resources to core innovations, 20% to adjacent innovations, and 10% to transformational innovations. To balance your portfolio, trim or expand projects until you reach these percentages.