Harvard Business School (HBS) professors Hubert Joly and Len Schlesinger are the faculty cochairs of the HBS Executive Education program, Growing as a Purposeful Leader. Below, they share the program's goals and discuss how its innovative curriculum can help leaders drive exceptional performance at a time of great uncertainty and high stakeholder expectations.
What inspired you to create the program Growing as a Purposeful Leader?
We want to help executives become better able to lead their teams and organizations in today's increasingly challenging business environment—and in an increasingly challenging world. Growing as a Purposeful Leader will help them become better, more authentic, more purposeful leaders who can rise to meet current challenges head on.
One unique aspect of the program is that we explore purpose from end to end in a short period of time. We start with personal purpose, continue with the broader concept of corporate purpose, and provide a framework for change and transformation. Then, we get right down into the nitty-gritty of how to do it—how to make purpose come to life through strategy and culture, thereby creating extraordinary outcomes.
Ultimately, we believe the program will help leaders create better-performing, more resilient organizations with motivated employees. These leaders and their organizations will be more prepared to manage the constant flow of crises and tensions that are today's business reality.
Why is this program needed now?
We're living through complicated and difficult times—difficult for businesses and their leaders and also difficult for employees at all levels. Given global issues such as an unprecedented pandemic, economic volatility, societal issues, racial issues, the threat of climate change, and geopolitical risk, people feel daunted. When they ask themselves "Why am I here, doing this job" the answers often are not very satisfying. This has given rise to the "great resignation," as well as a lack of engagement, known as "quiet quitting."
Leaders can grieve about what has changed and tweak things at the margins, or they can say, "No, this is going to be our finest hour and we're going to do our part to create a better future." That means trying to tackle some of the world's biggest challenges. In fact, there's a growing expectation that business should be a force for good beyond the four walls.
With all of these pressures coming together, many people feel the need to redefine business around key principles focused on a noble, higher purpose and a different way of leading. If this program wasn't called Growing as a Purposeful Leader, it might be called Re-Founding the Firm. This concept gets at the fundamental nature of the problem and the solution.
Why is the notion of a personal purpose such an important part of this program?
Leaders aren't immune from feeling daunted. To thrive, grow, and lead by example, they need to act from a strong sense of their own reasons for doing what they're doing. They also need to be guided by a set of principles. One assumption underlying this program is that leaders will continue to face a constant flow of new challenges. Purpose and principles help leaders navigate those headwinds.
Business is now very personal. If you're not clear about who you are, what drives you, and what legacy you want to leave in the world, you're not going to be a great leader. In other words, personal purpose is the starting point and the foundation for corporate purpose.
How does the program approach the challenge of purpose?
As part of a personal exploration, participants delve into the core of their experience. This is designed to build self-awareness and emotional intelligence, and helps executives become effective, purposeful leaders. We then examine how to lead in a very challenging and complex environment. The focus here is on putting purpose to work—translating personal purpose and corporate purpose into strategy and outstanding performance. By infusing every level of the organization with purpose, leaders can unleash human magic and inspire an entirely new level of performance.
The curriculum includes case discussions, guest speakers, faculty presentations, personal reflection, and small group work. We're excited about the cases, which are nearly all brand-new. We're also incorporating longer videos into the cases, which has proven to be very successful in driving richer conversations.
We call the small learning groups Purposeful Leadership Groups. These are a critical part of the program. The groups bond during the first module and they continue to meet throughout the program. Participants do a lot of their personal exploration in these groups and receive support and feedback from their peers.
What is your approach to corporate purpose—and to "unleashing human magic"?
It's important to understand that purpose is not about being nice and having profits suffer. Rather, it's a philosophy and an approach that can lead to extraordinary performance.
Most companies now recognize that having a corporate purpose is the right direction. They know that their employees, their customers, society, even their shareholders are expecting them to be a force for good. But they're not really sure how to do it. That's what this program is about. Corporate purpose is a journey—like our personal journey through life. You never actually "arrive" and are constantly striving toward a goal.
Infusing a purpose throughout the organization is hard work. In the program, we define what that work is—how to reflect a corporate purpose in your strategy, how to mobilize an entire organization in the face of unprecedented challenges and fatigue, and how to engage people in their work again.
That's where we get into the concept of unleashing human magic. It's not a top-down process where you tell everyone what to do. Rather, you inspire them to do the right thing, which can produce remarkable results for the company.
One great example of a company that has unleashed human magic is Microsoft. Their CEO, Satya Nadella, has helped to drive cultural change that makes the company look and feel very different from what it was—and the changes have paid off in terms of results. Our cases spotlight examples of how companies, led by human, humble, authentic leaders, have done this.
What are some of the core elements of effective purposeful leadership that you explore in the program?
This program gives participants the opportunity to explore and refine their leadership philosophy, purpose, and principles. In an uncertain and volatile environment, and in the context of evolving stakeholder expectations, the old model of the leader as a know-it-all superhero no longer works—if it ever did.
Putting purpose to work and unleashing human magic in today's business world requires different leadership qualities. We believe that these qualities start with being clear about your own purpose, curious about the purpose of the people around you, and able to connect employee purpose with the work and with the company's purpose. This enables you to emphasize the good you want to do in the world and to make progress toward the legacy you want to leave.
Purpose and principles are key to navigating an unpredictable business environment. Leaders are inevitably faced with crises, tensions, and tradeoffs. Sometimes the world seems to be in complete chaos. In these times, how do you make difficult decisions? When you go back to your purpose and principles, you have a path for moving forward. The world around you changes, but your purpose and principles don't.
Another important quality is the ability to embrace all stakeholders: employees, customers, vendor/partners, community, and shareholders. We think of this as a "declaration of interdependence." Leaders need to learn to lean into the tensions of multi-stakeholder capitalism, embrace them, and transcend them in a way that creates win-win outcomes.
Finally, great leadership today includes recognizing that your role as a leader is no longer about being the smartest person in the room. Rather, it's much more about creating the environment for others to thrive. As a result, authenticity, empathy, vulnerability, humility, humanity are essential qualities today. In particular, leaders need to be willing to admit what they don’t know—and they need to work together with their team to solve high-priority problems. Today more than ever, no one person has all the answers. A lot of us grew up in a time when it was not OK for a leader to say "I don't know." But that's not the case now. Saying "I don't know" is the start of telling the truth and problem-solving together.
What kinds of companies and executives will benefit most from the program?
The program is designed for senior executives at significant companies with sizable workforces.
The participants should be either in the C-suite or have the potential to be there within a few years. When people rise to these levels in an organization, expectations change from mastering the technical dimensions of management to leading the organization. That has always been the case. But today's stakeholders and society expect more from senior leaders. Now is a great time for companies to invest in the development of their top leaders. Our mission, as we see it, is to help these senior leaders rise to the occasion and become the best that they can be.
Why should companies consider sending more than one person to this program?
Companies can of course send one executive to an HBS program, but we always encourage them to send more, because they return to their organization with a shared understanding of what's needed and can help each other execute on the ideas from the program. But this doesn’t mean you need to send people who work closely together. A company could draw participants from different parts of the organization. This can have a big impact in driving change company-wide.