Harvard Business School’s Linda Hill on Practical Skills for Today’s Leaders

ELISE HU: That’s Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor who also chairs the school’s Leadership Initiative. She’s got so much great advice about how to lead when the economy feels uncertain and work keeps changing. How do you rally people and build trust? Later, we’ll hear from WorkLab correspondent Mary Melton and Michael Dent, senior director of leadership development at Microsoft. He discusses the three principles that guide the company’s approach to building leadership capabilities. But first, here’s my conversation with Linda. 

ELISE HU: Linda, thanks for doing this. 

LINDA HILL: Oh, thank you. 

ELISE HU: I’ll start with a big-picture question. Since 2022 has been pretty complex, rather uncertain with inflation climbing and questions about the US and the global economy, what is something leaders should be focused on right now in this rather uncertain moment? 

LINDA HILL: One of the leaders I spoke with described these times in the following way. He said, Linda, when we’re leading now we’re leading through a fog. And he said the key issue here is not to try to take charge and steer the ship. Instead, the task is really to figure out how to convince your people that there’s nothing called “business as usual” and they all need to be agile, innovative problem solvers. 

ELISE HU: That’s such a great point. And reminds me that you co-wrote a book about a decade ago called Being the Boss about becoming a manager and how there’s a lot of trial and error involved. I imagine that journey is only compounded with more difficulty now, with flexible work adding another challenge and this fog that we’re going through. So what sort of practical advice do you have for managers transitioning into their leadership positions now? 

LINDA HILL: Well, one of the things that I learned from my research is that when people move into the role of being, if you will, the boss, what they really focus on is the use of their formal authority as their way of exercising influence. And they soon discover that formal authority is a very limited source of power. Very limited. Because what you need from people, particularly during a fog when there’s so much change, is you need people to use their judgment. Consequently, it’s not about you being there to tell them what to do. You need to create the contexts required for them to figure out what they need to do to fulfill the purpose of the organization at that moment, from their particular point of view, which is about creating the right kind of culture and capabilities in your group to do the job. It’s time for you to step back and say, “How do I make sure that I create an environment in which people will be willing and able to be those innovative problem solvers?” 

ELISE HU: What might creating that context or creating that environment look like? 

LINDA HILL: When we wrote that book on Being the Boss , what we talked about is that leadership is about managing yourself, managing your network, and managing your team. Now, if I were to ask most people to define for me what is leadership, what is management, they would immediately think about the people who report to them. They would look down. It turns out in today’s world, you’ve got to look up and out as much as you have to look down. You have to make sure you are really managing those horizontal relationships because if you don’t do that right, you won’t be working on what’s really most important to the organization, and you won’t have access to the resources you and your team need to deliver what you need to deliver. And with uncertainty, if you’re not connected to the horizontal, you’re not going to know what’s really happening across your enterprise, to know how that translates to what your team needs to be doing. You’re not going to be working on the right stuff or have the resources you need. 

ELISE HU: And practically, what are things that leaders could do today when it comes to reaching out to the network and leading horizontally? 

LINDA HILL: First thing is, really pay attention for a week of how much of your time are you actually spending doing that. Ask yourself, Who are you really spending time with? How much time are you spending with people outside of your team and how much diversity do you see there? Are you getting lots of different points of view to figure out what really does matter, what you should be working on, and building the relationships you’re going to need when you have to go ask somebody to help you out to get something done or to get some resources from them. Leaders are shocked to see how small their networks actually are. The second thing I would say is, all relationships, to be healthy, need to have reciprocity to them. Don’t be tit for tat about it in terms of a transactional sense, but what are you getting and what are you giving? And if you see that balance is off, you know, how much do you want to give to people that give you nothing back in return? So this is a bit of a diagnostic for you to look at yourself and see how you’re actually treating people. But then the other thing I have to say is, simply ask them, stop assuming that you know the answer. What do you need? How can I be helpful to you? How do you prefer to work? We make so many statements, particularly people who are stars, because we think we know. Ask as many questions as you make statements. 

ELISE HU: It sounds like what you’re talking about is this idea that business leaders, some of them are living in a bubble. How do they react when they hear about this or are given feedback that say, hey, you need to be more externally focused? 

LINDA HILL: One of the things we do here, and we interviewed leaders all around the world and did a survey of 1,500 leaders. Part of this is if you’re not thinking about managing those horizontal relationships both inside and outside, you’re not hearing what you need to hear to know what really should matter. So if you want to have a customer-centric organization, if you’re not deeply engaged with the customers in some way or fashion, you’re not going to be working on the right stuff. Now, if you’re at the top of the organization, often you’re not so deeply engaged with the customers. The people at the front line are. So if you don’t have communication that is transparent and honest between the top and the bottom of an organization, the people at the top really don’t know what they’re about. This is truly becoming an issue when we look at digital transformation, because many people tell us, “You know what, I’m not a digital native, so what I need to do is I need to figure out how I work across the generations and with people who actually do have that mindset and that point of view,” because we need that so much right now if we’re going to deliver for our customers. So you’ve got to get out of the bubble and spend time with, as one leader put it, the unusual suspects—people that you didn’t normally spend time with because they have a point of view that you need to hear. 

ELISE HU: And is this related to another part that you were talking about, which is learning to manage yourself? Because I’d love for you to kind of expand on what that means. 

LINDA HILL: To talk about the self piece, I want to tell you a little story. One of the leaders that I was studying was about to be promoted to a very big job. But he was told in the end that he wasn’t going to get the job because, even though his team loved him, his peers didn’t trust him. And he’s like, “What do you mean, my peers don’t trust me? What’s that about? I’ve always delivered for the organization. I’ve made every sacrifice. What does it mean that they don’t trust me?” Well, I don’t think that that individual really thought about how people experienced him. He maybe thought about how his own team experienced him, but he didn’t think about how that network, those peers experienced him because he didn’t think that was his job. And what you need to think about is, well, if people don’t know you, then they’re not going to know whether to trust you or not. And I think he was pretty introverted and pretty private, and he worked in a big global company. So he thought, if I do my job, look down, get my whole team going, you know, I’m delivering. The bosses love me. And his bosses did love him, but his peers didn’t think that he was taking into account their needs, their point of view as he was pushing, if you will, or pulling his team forward. And this tendency is one that I see a lot—of people who are stars, who are really good at what they did in their whatever their functional role was, and they move to being, if you will, the manager of the leader of the group, and they don’t really ever make the psychological shift. They stay the superstar in some ways who’s pushing and pulling their team along to make sure they deliver. But they don’t look back and say, “I’m the link between my team, the rest of this organization, suppliers, customers, regulars, all those other parties out there that we’re dependent on to get things done.” They don’t look at that and they don’t think about that experience that everyone who they’re encountering is really having of them. Because in the end, leadership is always about an emotional connection. Leadership is emotional. So we always need to be asking ourselves, How do people experience me? How do they experience themselves when they’re with me? That is where the action is. And it matters even more now because when we’re living through a fog or trying to get through a fog, we really feel that uncertainty, that anxiety. And we need our leaders to understand that this is what we’re going through with them and we need them to be present for us. 

ELISE HU: Yeah, empathy is a superpower. I remember we had a conversation on this very podcast last season with another HBS professor, Frances Frei, who talked about the importance of empathy. And it’s actually a rather simple solution that we sort of overcomplicate. 

LINDA HILL: Well, I’ve been running for about 15 years our programs for high potentials, and we always have them get 360-degree feedback on how people do experience them. The two characteristics that they’re almost always lowest on are self-awareness and empathy. So yes, empathy is important and you need to be able to step into the shoes of the other. And as I said, the others are more different than they used to be in some ways, because just the nature of doing work, but just because you can understand that person’s point of view doesn’t necessarily mean you’re prepared or know how to change your behavior to adapt to what they need to really do their very best work. That’s the other piece of the puzzle. And it’s pretty clear that as you become more senior, what you see is most people actually lose that self-awareness. 

ELISE HU: How do we correct for that missing self-awareness when you do get into the executive levels, for example? 

LINDA HILL: You have to constantly be prepared to correct for it. So one of the things that I study is how people learn to lead, in particular how stars learn to lead. And the danger of being a star is you’re really good yourself, you have lots of energy, and in some ways you don’t need other people as much. Or you can begin to believe you don’t need other people as much to get stuff done because you can carry the group pretty far. So one thing that tends to happen, and I see this all the time, is until you actually reach your own limit, you’re not necessarily open to understanding that, in fact, you are going to need other people to help you get something done. So years ago, when I was doing a project at Pixar, one of the people working on Finding Nemo , obviously a movie that was a fabulous movie, he described when he finally said, “I don’t know the answer. I need your help,” that is when everybody stepped in and helped him and made that movie the movie that we’ve all enjoyed. So being able to say, “I don’t know.” Very basic. 

ELISE HU: Is there any other practical advice like that? Sort of simple things that we can apply or maybe try with our own teams that help us become more self-aware in positions of leadership? 

LINDA HILL: Yes, I think there are things we can do. So one of the things I think we need to back up and define is trust. So, trust has two dimensions to it: one is competence and the other is character. Competence tells people you know what the right thing to do is. Your character tells them that you want to do the right thing. Too often, we spend all of our time trying to give people evidence of our competence: “I know what the right thing to do is.” Frankly, you don’t know. The man who told me that he’s living through a fog—very talented CEO of a company who told me that. So then that character piece becomes more important. What is your intention? So what I see here is that you need to be able to talk to people more about the why , not just what we’re doing or how we do it, but why are we doing it? We often move too quickly past that. If they trust you and have a sense that you are trying to do the right thing that you’re intended, they can live with the fact that they know you’re not competent. They know it. And we can act like it, but they know you couldn’t possibly know because we’ve never been here before. We’ve never seen this before. And so, frankly, once you do that, you’re really making yourself a bit vulnerable, but you’re really being more authentic about what the reality is. And as you know, and you get through the fog, you tell them. And then that’s fine, we’re happy to follow you there. How can we all be willing and able to create the future we’d like to see as best we can and the circumstances we’re living through? 

ELISE HU: Yeah, and I imagine it gives the team a real sense of ownership too. 

LINDA HILL: Yeah. 

ELISE HU: I want to turn to another big dynamic in this fog—burnout. Microsoft has a report called the Work Trend Index where they survey 20,000 people in 11 countries who work in all different industries and organizations. And in the most recent one, the index found that half of the respondents reported being burned out. Half. So if you’re a leader, Linda, what do you do with a number like that? 

LINDA HILL: Well, I think that this is something that we’re seeing in so many organizations because speed actually matters a lot more to being competitive nowadays than it used to. So speed and scale have to go together. So burnout, this goes back to you. You actually will burn other people out before you burn yourself out. So the only way to handle that is, on the one hand, we have a lot of demand for performance and we know we’re getting ready to go through very tough economic times. But we have to provide the support and trust to balance that real need to perform. People who actually do take the time to look at their micro behaviors and ask, are they being supportive? 

ELISE HU: On the topic of this kind of speed that we’re having to work at, or employees have to work at, another finding from the same Microsoft report shows that the vast majority of employees are saying they are productive. On the flip side, the vast majority of leaders said that they are finding it tough to be confident that people are productive while working hybrid. It is a total disconnect here, a kind of productivity paranoia. How do you react to that? 

LINDA HILL: I think the first thing I think about is, how are they defining productivity, on both sides? That is what we need to be looking at these days. And for sure, going back to this innovative problem solving, and for me, innovation is about innovating on how you execute; it doesn’t mean, you know, some big breakthrough thing, whatever. But in fact, that is part of the problem. This goes back to why we see all these books on purpose. If my work is not meaningful, why should I be productive about it? So you as a leader need to create a narrative that helps people understand, this is where you fit into the story. As you know, the other book I wrote is Collective Genius , and now we’re writing one called Scaling Genius . In that book, one of the things we found about these leaders who built these incredible companies is they understood that everybody had a slice of genius. Everybody has talents, everybody has passions. They want to use those talents, those passions, to do something that is meaningful, that helps them feel a part of a community they actually care about. But if you, as the manager of my team, have not helped me understand that this work is meaningful or that I even make a contribution to it, then why shouldn’t I quiet quit? 

ELISE HU: Linda, do you want to just define quiet quitting or how folks are defining it? 

LINDA HILL: Yeah, so quiet quitting is this idea that, yes, I’m at work, but I’m not going to do my very best work, I’m going to do just enough to get by. That seems to me like the most rational thing to do. So if you’re being paranoid about whether people are being productive, I’d say you’re not being paranoid, you’re looking at how you’re leading them yourself. It’s really a reflection, looking at yourself and saying, “Am I creating an environment in which people really want to do the work?” 

ELISE HU: And as you mentioned, ask yourself how you’re defining “productive.” 

LINDA HILL: Yeah, that’s a real question for me because, I don’t know about you, but I have never worked so hard in my entire life, actually, as I have in the last number of years. And I don’t see that the workload is going away. I have these marvelous research associates who are younger than me, and I turn to them all the time to help me figure out, what do I need to be paying attention to or, not only what are the questions I need to be asking, but what are your answers to them? Or who should I be talking to to get answers to those questions? 

ELISE HU: Yeah, well, I’ll put those questions to you. What should we be paying attention to? What’s coming up around the corner? What are you excited about? 

LINDA HILL: Well, what I’m working on right now, and I’m quite excited about it, is really this idea of scaling genius. Organizations cannot go it alone. They have to reach out to get the talent and the tools they need, particularly in this digital age. So what we see is, yes, as a leader, you need to be an architect of the culture and capabilities of your own organization or your own team, whatever it might be. But you’re probably going to have to go outside to get some of the talent or the tools you’re going to need, so you need to learn to be a bridger. And that’s what leadership is moving toward. What’s the problem we have to solve? Who can help us solve this problem? Maybe they’re inside the organization, maybe not. But how do we catalyze and facilitate them doing that work? Because we need their solution to really solve our problem that we have. Think, frankly, all of it’s about leading without formal authority, learning how to use influence and get people excited about some collective intention. Figure out how to do the collective learning necessary across organizations so you can have collective impact. 

ELISE HU: As you talk about using influence, Linda, before we let you go, what is one piece of actionable advice you could give us about helping energize our employees and our teams rather than deplete them? Because we’ve talked a little bit on this episode about quiet quitting and then these productivity paradoxes that are faced between leaders and employees. So is there anything that you want to leave folks with that might help energize their employees? 

LINDA HILL: I think in terms of energy, what I guess, if you truly do accept that everyone does have a slice of genius and they have talents and passions, I think you need to ask them, What could we be doing that would energize you? Not just what should we be doing, but what could we be doing? And what worries me about the times we’re getting ready to go through is all of us are going to be pressured to do the should should should should shoulds —all those things that we need to get done. But to keep us energized, we need to understand the coulds that are in people’s hearts. And what I find is that leaders that simply say to their people, “What’s your dream? What do you wish we could be doing?” Now, you may not be able to do it for a long time, right? But at least you know how to speak to them. It’s a way of empathizing, asking them a question about what they see as possible. And I think once you know that, then when you’re making choices about what they work on or how you set up stuff or whatever it might be, you take into account what their dreams are. I think most of us will work for our dreams. We’re energized by them. 

ELISE HU: I love that. Linda Hill, thank you so much. 

LINDA HILL: Thank you. 

ELISE HU: Next up, our correspondent Mary Melton talks with Microsoft senior director of leadership development, Michael Dent. They’ll chat about the three core principles that guide the company’s approach to building leadership capabilities. 

MICHAEL DENT: When we started our cultural transformation journey, seven or eight years ago now, we really based that around growth mindset. We realized that we needed to be able to help people understand how to act as a leader and be able to step into complexity and find productive ways through it. Microsoft’s approach to leadership is based on three principles: create clarity, generate energy, and deliver success. Linda talks about the fog. How can you see through the fog, even if it is just the next step of a journey, is it sufficient to be able to move forward. 

MARY MELTON: Let’s dig into this first principle then, which is to create clarity. So is that another way to say, set a goal? 

MICHAEL DENT: It’s part of it. So measurement goals are hugely important, but they’re only part of the story. And so how can you then tell that story about what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis? And linked to that, what is the end goal, and that’s not easy. It’s also about bringing together all of the different initiatives, the external trends, what’s happening with a specific team, what area are they working within an organization, what area they’re working within an industry, how are they dealing with their customers? What are their customers saying? It’s synthesizing that complexity. And so being able to pull through the key threads which will be useful for people, and focusing on those rather than everything which might be changing or everything that might be important is getting through. So being able to link that to generating energy, which is the second principle. So it’s about, how do you create clarity and generate energy to be able to move towards those—whether they’re goals, whether it’s an aspiration, whether it’s a vision, it’s something that the team can really feel is closely connected to their own personal purpose, it helps you do that. 

MARY MELTON: Yeah, and it’s really having that clear vision and being able to articulate it. 

MICHAEL DENT: Exactly. Repeatedly in different conversations, in different contexts as the world changes and be able to take account of those changes. It’s not easy, which is why we constantly think around, what are the resources of support we have in place to help people actually bring it to life. One of the things everybody struggles with is to find time to allow the leaders to be able to really do that thinking so they can be more thoughtful in the way that they lead and the way that they bring all of their skills, their teams together, to solve problems. 

MARY MELTON: So “create clarity” is the first principle for leadership. The second one is to “generate energy.” What does that mean exactly? I just wonder, how in the world, with everything that leaders have got going on, they find the space, as you say, to focus on having clarity and actually getting energy back into their lives. 

MICHAEL DENT: So we say quite clearly, leaders should be inspiring optimism, creativity, and growth. Part of that inspired spirit is that you show it, and if you’re not able to show it, have the vulnerability to say, well, today I may not be inspiring this because I’ve just got to get this done right now. But having that understanding that you do over the longer term need to be able to give that longer-term view about why people should be working in this way for that goal. In Microsoft, we have a mission, which is to empower every person, organization in the world to achieve more. That’s pretty easy to get inspired by. Who wouldn’t be? However, on a day-to-day basis, how does me doing this PowerPoint deck work to that higher goal? Sometimes writing that code, linking that everyday activity to a bigger purpose is important. To be able to understand people’s purpose and be able to link work that’s done day to day to the wider vision is really important, and knowing the people is really important to be able to do that. 

MARY MELTON: So let’s just dig in to our last of the three identified core leadership principles, which is a big one: “deliver success.” 

MICHAEL DENT: Yes, deliver success. That’s what we all want to do. So we’ve talked about creating clarity and generating energy and why it’s super important. But when we think around success, Microsoft defines that as, How do you drive innovation that people love? How do we make sure that we understand our customers’ needs, whether they are unarticulated or very clear? How do we help them do the things that they need to do to be successful? And that can help us as an organization then deliver success. And we also say that we need to be boundary-less in seeking solutions, whether that is collaboration across the organization in different teams, whether that is collaboration with the right partners more widely. We think that’s really important, and I think that’s probably important in every organization. How do you make sure that when you’re living success, you’re doing it in a way which is building, not just on an individual organization or teams viewpoint, but you are achieving maximum success for everybody, rather than seeing it as a zero-sum game. So that’s absolutely key in the way that we talk about it. And also, we have to tenaciously pursue the right outcomes. It’s really important. These things aren’t easy. The things that every leader almost everywhere now does, none of them are easy. But being able to understand why it’s important to understand the complexity of delivering it and be supportive to all the people who need to come together to make it happen is key—driving that success over a longer time period while you’re generating energy and you’re quite clear about what you’re trying to achieve and why you’re trying to achieve it all come together for leadership. And no matter where you are in the organization, you have a leadership role. You can use the principles to be able to think about how you are coming across in meetings, how you’re coming across in any way that you communicate to be able to help the overall success of the organization and indeed yourself. 

MARY MELTON: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Michael, for sharing your insights. This is really invaluable information for leaders, so I appreciate it. 

MICHAEL DENT: Thank you so much for having me. 

ELISE HU: That was Michael Dent, senior director for leadership development at Microsoft. And that’s it for this episode of the WorkLab podcast from Microsoft. Please subscribe and check back for the next episode of WorkLab . That’s when my colleague Tonya Mosley will be talking to Julie Whelan of CBRE, the real estate and facilities management company, about how workspaces are changing. Please rate, review, and follow us wherever you listen. That helps us out. And if you have a question you would like to pose to leaders, please drop us an email at worklab@microsoft.com. Be sure to check out the WorkLab digital publication too, where you can find, among many other things, a transcript of this episode. You can find it all at Microsoft.com/WorkLab. The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or opinions. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produce this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. All right, until next time.