Harvard Business School

4 TIPS FOR DEVELOPING YOUR PERSONAL LEADERSHIP STYLE

Developing your personal leadership style doesn’t need to wait until you hit the C-suite. Wherever you are in your career, you can cultivate the essential habit of self-awareness. The process of finding a style will look different for everyone, but here are a few key steps you can take to make sure you're developing an approach that is true to you.

Try these four tips for developing your personal leadership style: 

1. Imitation is the enemy 

2. Know your strengths (and weaknesses) 

3. Understand the influence of bias 

4. Be brave

ATCHING AMY CHU, M.B.A. ’99, stride through Midtown Comics in Manhattan’s Times Square is like watching a queen visit the heart of her realm. The staff know her, of course. She looks up a few graphic novels by writers she knows, then heads upstairs to search for some of her own back issues, breezing past posters of characters she’s written for DC and Marvel: Wonder Woman, Deadpool, Red Sonja, Poison Ivy, Green Hornet.

At 51, Chu is an established comics writer, working for the biggest publishers on some of the biggest titles in the business. She’s living any comics nerd’s fondest childhood dream. It just was never her dream. As a kid, Chu hadn’t wanted to be comic-book writer—or any kind of writer. She certainly never planned on telling stories about antiheroes in spandex or metal-bikini-clad warrior babes for a living.

In fact, before 2010, the closest she’d come to writing a comic book was creating a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation in her old life as a business consultant. “It’s not the same,” she says now. “No one says, ‘I was so moved by your PowerPoint presentation.’” But perhaps there were clues to Chu’s destiny in her early life. Born in Boston, she went to high school in Iowa, an experience she now describes as “fairly traumatic.” Chu was nerdy and shy and one of the only Asian kids in town, and her dream was to play soccer. Only one problem: her school didn’t have a girls’ team. When the school district forbade her from trying out for the boys’ team, Chu’s parents sued and won under Title IX. She joined the boys’ team. But the first time she stepped onto the field to play, the opposing team walked off en masse—forfeiting the game as a political statement, rather than face a female opponent.

She remembers the experience as mortifying. But it stood her in good stead when she eventually made it to Wellesley College, where she completed a double degree in East Asian studies and architecture, in a joint program with MIT. “You sue under Title IX,” she jokes. “That’s a really great thing to get you into a women’s college.”

Spring on Campus

Senior management teams tend to focus on achieving results that will show up on their most current income statements. For weeks on end, significant internal resources are allocated and frequent board meetings are held to formulate explanations for recent earnings or revenue growth.

This focus is understandable. Analysts who cover public companies tie earnings to stock prices. Silicon Valley investors view the last quarter’s growth rate as a key determinant of a growth company’s valuation. But we have found that particularly strong management teams actually spend less time obsessing over the current income statement and more time focusing on a different report: the forecast.

There are several reasons for this. To start, the forecast is a vital tool for value creation. Finance theory points out that the value of an enterprise is the present discounted value of its future cash flows, and the forecast provides a road map for earning those cash flows. The forecast also provides a scorecard to evaluate if strategy is appropriate and effective, and directs attention away from short-term results towards longer-term strategic objectives. Furthermore, the forecast guides actions by providing inputs needed to execute operational initiatives. For example, Pantheon, a Platform-as-a -Service, venture-backed company in San Francisco, where one of us is CFO, traces the difference between realized growth and forecasted range to assumptions about core business drivers and unlocks specific product initiatives. This allows the company to adjust its resource allocation between long-term product investment and shorter-term marketing investment depending on the findings.

Not all forecasts are built alike, however . . . 

COMING HOME TO HBS

My son Francesco was 3 months old when I started at HBS in August 2014. In the winter break of my EC year, my little daughter Giulia Maria was born. Francesco was 2 and a half and Giulia Maria was 8 months old when I started my job at Microsoft in Silicon Valley right after graduation.

Since my husband and I were starting a family at the same time I was starting my MBA, I applied only to schools that met the following two criteria:

Located where my husband would have been able to relocate with his job;

Was a top school. Since we were moving out of our home country of Italy (and literally out of our lives) our financial, emotional, and time investment had to be very much worth it.

HBS matched both criteria, and when I got accepted, I simply had no doubts. Three years post-graduation, I have never thought once that I could have made a better choice, and here’s why.

Blueland Wins 2019 New Venture Competition Alumni Track

Blueland takes the weight and waste out of your everyday products 

Alumna: Gina Pak (MBA 2015)CMO

Region: Northeastern U.S./New York

Hikma Health Wins 2019 New Venture Competition Student Social Enterprise Track

Hikma Health creates customized data management systems for healthcare providers caring for refugee patients. 

Students: Jordan Lebovic, HBS 2020; Senan Ebrahim, HMS; Erik Grueter; Zara Allkhateeb

MyToolbox Wins 2019 New Venture Competition Student Business Track

MyToolbox is a platform for construction workers. 

Student: Wil Eyi (MBA 2019)

How edX is redesigning learning for the future

Staying relevant in todays’ workplace requires constantly adding and being credited with new skills. Anant Agarwal discusses online education platform edX's innovative solutions which better meet the needs of today’s workforce than traditional models on Managing the Future Of Work.

This sad scenario plays out at many firms: Top-performing salespeople get promoted to become sales managers, but don’t actually know how to manage. The result is a disaster—productivity takes a dive, disgruntled salespeople start heading for the door, and the new managers themselves burn out.

Why are so many salespeople so terrible at managing?

It’s because even after they put on their manager hats, they continue to suffer from the “super salesperson syndrome,” unable to disconnect from the thrill of selling. They hover over their salespeople and micromanage every deal to make sure it closes, says Harvard Business School’s Frank V. Cespedes, the MBA Class of 1973 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration.

“Every company has examples of people who persist in their behaviors as salespeople, and as a result they flame out as managers,” says Cespedes, who teaches management strategies at HBS and recently wrote an article called Sales Managers Must Manage for Top Sales Magazine.

Celebrating General Shoe Company, the Inaugural HBS Case

It’s like a great detective story: What’s gone wrong at General Shoe Company, and how would you fix it? The School’s inaugural case presents learning still relevant today.