309/briefing su… · Web viewIn a Word, He Wants Simplicity

Leadership

How has your leadership style evolved?

Answered by Joseph Plumeri, Willis Group

I was once a command-and-control guy, but the environment's different today. I think now it's a question of making people feel they're making a contribution, and they're part of the process. In the end, you're still directing the process, but you're allowing for the collaboration and debate to take place, which in a command-and-control environment doesn't happen. A command-and-control environment is where you have a meeting and you say, "This is what I think, what do you think?" The good news about that was there was no question about where we're going, and what we were going to do. And if it works, that's terrific. The problem is when it doesn't work, and people start to grow and feel like they've got more to contribute, it wears out. I think that's what happened to that whole command-and-control approach.

This answer originally appeared in On Passion and Playing in Traffic »

What made you start out as a command-and-control leader?

Answered by Joseph Plumeri, Willis Group

My key role models were very strong individuals. And then you add your own personality, which in my case is big dreams, anything's possible, zeal and work 24 hours a day. But you get to a point where you realize not everybody wants to work seven days a week, and not everybody has this as their main passion in life. And you find that you can wear people down by being overly zealous, and what you think is motivating is de-motivating. I thought I was being exciting. I thought I was being motivational. And as it turns out, being too exciting and too motivational is overbearing, and it turns people off. You justify it by saying, if they can capture my zeal and my passion, that's a good thing. But you've got to make sure that you don't turn up the music to the point where it's so loud that they don't want to hear it.

This answer originally appeared in On Passion and Playing in Traffic »

What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned?

Answered by Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Let people do things. If they do it better than you, let them do it. You have to recognize that in order for this plane to fly, I need co-pilots, I need engineers, I need passengers.

This answer originally appeared in Don’t Ask ‘How Are You?’ Unless You Mean It »

How did you learn that?

Answered by Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

There’s no formula. It’s kind of the natural thing to do. I’ve been in a competitive situation almost all my life. I’ve been having a competition with myself and trying to be the best I could be. I did a lot of praying. I did a lot of preparation. But then, I also learned how to release, how to let go. That’s a constant learning process — how to let go and let somebody else do it who knows how to do it better than you do it. If it keeps the plane in the air, fine.

This answer originally appeared in Don’t Ask ‘How Are You?’ Unless You Mean It »

Talk about the challenge of running a big global company in this tough economy.

Answered by William D. Green, Accenture

We operate the company so that we keep one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow, regardless of what’s going on. In an economy like this, everyone wants to look at their shoes. You can’t. We’ve got to be doing as many things about tomorrow as we are today. We operate with a philosophy that says, never be afraid to change, even when we’re at the top of our game. In our company, usually in the summer, people ask me, "When are you going on vacation?" Because when I come back from a week’s vacation, they know I’ve had time to think and reflect and have been strategizing about changes and it could be anything.

This answer originally appeared in 68 Rules? No, Just 3 Are Enough »

Does that usually happen?


Happens every time. People even joke about it a little bit. Even my outside board members say, "When are you taking the vacation, Bill?" This year, in the middle of tough economic times for everybody, we built a human capital strategy for the future, we refreshed our corporate-wide strategy, and I moved my leadership people around into different positions and promoted some new people into leadership roles to infuse energy. All of this is about energizing people, giving them broader scope and new experiences. This obviously helps build durability in terms of people being able to have multiple jobs, and it’s an important part of succession planning, getting the athletes the experience they need in different spaces. So just when you think all the cylinders are clicking and everything’s right, that’s the time you have to change, because that’s the world we live in now. If you rest, it will cost you, because global competitiveness is here to stay, and it’s not about the traditional competitors anymore. It’s about new and emerging competitors that you’ve never heard of, and you just have to get your mind around the new normal, as they call it.


Can you elaborate on why you shift people around?


If you look at why people in general leave companies, they often leave because they get bored. And high-performance people are learners by nature. And as long as they’re learning, they’ll stay where they are. When they start to think about leaving, when they start to respond to a headhunter’s call, is when they haven’t been learning. On my leadership team, I have 15 bona fide C.E.O.’s. These people are capable of running big companies. But as long as they’re learning and engaging and on a mission, they don’t need to be the C.E.O. They just need to be part of the ecosystem that leads the company.


Why was it unhealthy?

Answered by Mindy Grossman, HSN Inc.

Fear is not a motivating factor. You might be able to get a little bit more out of someone in the short term, but you will completely erode your business and your culture in the long term. You’re going to lose all your good people. You’re not going to have people tell you the truth, and it becomes the tradition. The company had had about seven C.E.O.’s in the previous 10 years. What happens in that kind of situation — where you have a lot of leadership changes, changes in strategy and perhaps not the best leadership style — is that everybody freezes. It’s like Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations." And when someone new comes in, most people think, "O.K., we’ll wait this one out." So there’s an impact when someone says: "I want to be here. Here’s why I’m here. I’m here to listen and understand what we need to do." To create change, I knew I was going to have to change the culture down to every single person in the company. You can’t do that if you’re not accessible to every person.

This answer originally appeared in Are You a Tigger, or an Eeyore? »

So what ever happened to command-and-control leadership?


It’s not culturally relevant anymore. Even if you look at generations who are coming up, the idea that you need somebody to tell you what to do and not think for yourself — that’s not our culture. With that sort of manager or C.E.O., you’re not going to keep intelligent, inspired talent, because they want some form of entrepreneurial environment to be able to exercise their talent. I want to challenge them to be able to do that, not tell them to do something my way, especially when they might be able to do it better than me. Also, all organizations are significantly diverse today. Command-and-control isn’t the kind of corporate culture people want to be in anymore.


Tell me about your leadership style.


I believe in accessibility. I believe in honesty and a culture that supports that. And you can’t have that if you’re not open to receiving feedback. I find out as much from the guy in backstage

TV as I do from my C.F.O. Anybody can e-mail me. I do town halls with employees at least once every eight weeks. I’m out there and it makes a huge difference.


How do you make sure you’re getting honest feedback?


I think the way you start sets the tone for your leadership style. For example, my first day, I went through orientation just like everyone else, because I wanted to see what everybody else feels when they come into this company for the first time. There were 15 people — a guy who is in backstage TV, somebody in production, somebody in planning, and I just came in and sat down. Everybody had to go around the room and say what their job was, including me. There were a couple of abrupt reactions, with people saying, "Really?" But the impact that had, and how viral it was throughout the organization, made a huge difference, because it was a signal of a new management philosophy. When I came into the company, honestly, it was an unhealthy environment. I had worked in unhealthy environments, so I know what it feels like.


Can you talk more about that?

Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG

By definition if there's leadership, it means there are followers, and you're only as good as the followers. I believe the quality of the followers is in direct correlation to the respect you hold them in. It's not how much they respect you that is most important. It's actually how much you respect them. It's everything.

This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »

How did you learn that?


I don't know. Maybe it's because I've worked for people who didn't have enough respect for me and I resented it, and they didn't value me to the degree to which I felt they should. And so I'm working super-overtime every day to try and do that. By the way, I didn't think that way 10 years ago. This is something I've come to feel much more strongly about the last couple of years. I'm sure that's a reflection of my age and job. Today there are several people within DreamWorks who are the students who became better than the teacher. I'm thrilled. I find myself getting completely comfortable with the idea that if somebody else can do my job as good, let alone better, that's O.K. Let me move on and find something else to do. That was an interesting transition to make. You know full well I am someone who's spent a very good part of my career as a micromanager. And if you talk about attributes that were my least good attributes, being a micromanager would certainly be on the top of my list. What I have learned recently is to be a selective micromanager. There are times when it's actually good to be a micromanager, but mostly not.


So what happened?


I don't know, just with time, the quality of the people around me impressed me. I started to realize that if I wanted to stay surrounded by great people, I had to get out of their way and create the room and make sure they started to get the recognition and the credit and everything that goes with it. Honestly, it allowed me to stay around longer.


So how do you decide when it's time to micromanage and when it's time to stay out of the sandbox? Leadership


It's an hourly process of when to get in and when not to and to know when it matters. One of the up-and-coming superstars who works with us is Bill Damaschke, who's the head creative

guy at the studio. He said this amazing thing to me a couple years ago that has just resonated with me day after day after day. He said, "Jeffrey, different is not necessarily better."


What did you learn from other bosses you've had?


I've had great bosses and I've had terrible bosses, and I have actually learned my greatest lessons and my most important lessons from my worst bosses.


And can you explain more about what that means?


If an actor says a line in one particular way that I like and the director likes another way, my different idea isn't always better. Sometimes it is, but not always, and that's the thing Bill has made me really think about. When I have a reaction to something, now there's a five-second tape delay. I try to self-edit in that way if I can. For decades, I would always go first in meetings to discuss opinions on stories, a sequence, design, artwork or a music score. I don't like to go first anymore. I actually like to hear what other people have to say first.


Can you elaborate?


There are things you're able to observe in people, the mistakes they make. None of us is objective about our own mistakes, I think. I'm not particularly good at looking in the mirror and being

self-critical. But I consider myself a student of human nature, and so you can observe in other people the qualities that you both most admire and those that you most dislike.


Can you talk more about those qualities?


You cannot surround yourself with the smartest and most talented people and then start looking over your shoulder or behind your back, worried that somebody smarter or better might be on your heels. Big mistake. Being respectful of people, I think, is the single most important quality in leadership — earning the respect of people who work with you, for you, your customers, your investors. That really to me is what defines successful leadership — earning that respect.




In the world we live in today, the single most important thing is making people feel secure. It's a very different era today than it was five or 10 years ago, even two years ago. We're in a moment in time when people don't want to take risks, they don't want to gamble. In my business, you must. If you stop being creative and innovative, you're finished. And so striking this balance, the equation works quite simply like this: In order to succeed at the high end of the movie business, you must be original and unique. Now if you were putting an equation up on the white board and you wrote "original + unique = what?" Then the answer would have to be "risky." And if you said, "risky = what?" The answer would be "some failure." It has to, by definition, just sort of in the most fundamental way. If you don't make failure acceptable, you can't have original and unique. And so in a world today that punishes, brutally punishes, any of us for failure, it's the single most important quality that I think we work so hard to provide for our 2,000 employees, the understanding that they are expected to take risks. We have a need, if not a demand, for innovation and for creativity, and we accept that there will be a degree of misses that will come with it and it's O.K. We're prepared for it. They're not as good as hits, by the way. A miss is not a good thing, but we don't run the enterprise on the edge of thinking that every single thing we do will be a hit. It can't be. That's what I'd call a gravity-defier. There are no such things.


What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Answered by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University

I think the most important leadership lessons I’ve learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution. You’re always interacting with them, learning from them and directing your energies toward helping to pull and push them in the direction you wish to move.

This answer originally appeared in Leadership Without a Secret Code »

But with so many different constituents, you can’t make everybody happy.

Answered by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University

No, you don’t make everybody happy, but I believe that if people feel they were listened to, that their views were taken into account, that they had a chance to show you the world from their point of view, they’re going to be much more likely to go along with a decision.

This answer originally appeared in Leadership Without a Secret Code »

What’s changed about your leadership style in terms of interacting with people?

Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO

For a long time, my mode of operation was to get very excited about other people’s ideas and work really hard to kind of build them, which meant I often took ownership of them. Not intentionally, necessarily, but others would end up feeling like their idea was now my idea. And that was not because I wanted to take credit for things; it was because I cared about them. And I think I’ve learned over time, slowly, that in fact it’s much more effective to let them keep ownership of the idea. And that is enabling more people in our organization to kind of rise up and be very strong in

themselves, instead of me sitting on top of them. But it’s very hard. When somebody says something that’s interesting, I want to get in there and I want to be part of it.

This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »

What were the most important leadership lessons you learned, and how did you learn them?


My very first professional design job was with this little company in the north of England. And they were an old company, straight out of the Industrial Revolution, that made woodworking machinery. They’d never hired a designer before. Over six months, I redesigned all of their equipment for this one piece of the company. Toward the end of that, the chairman said: “Hey, Tim, I really like what you’ve been doing while you’ve been here. I want to take you to all our other divisions around England, and I want you to advise the people running those businesses what they should do about design.” I was 21 or 22 years old. Here was this guy who was chairman of this relatively large company in England, taking the advice of me, this really young person. For some reason, he trusted what I was doing. I was bringing in new ideas, he liked them and he wanted to share them around the company. So I tripped around in his Jaguar for a couple of days and we visited all these factories. And that for me was a really important learning about how the best ideas or important ideas or new ideas can come from anywhere in an organization. Here I was, kind of the least important person in his company, yet he thought the ideas that I had were interesting enough that he wanted to share them elsewhere. That is something that I’ve continued to really believe — that you don’t know where the best ideas are going to come from in the organization. So you’d better do a good job of promoting them when they come and spotting them when they emerge, and not let people’s positions dictate how influential their ideas are.


And how does that manifest itself in the way that you run IDEO?


I’ve gone to great lengths to try to encourage what I call an emergent culture at IDEO, where people understand that it’s essentially their responsibility to have good ideas. Not about the work they do every day — we all have to do that — but about new ideas for the company. What are we going to do next? What fields are we going to work in? What are our new big things?


What other important leadership lessons have you learned?


As a design consultant, I get to work with all kinds of interesting people who are leaders of their own businesses. So I constantly learn from watching some of the great leaders do what they do. A.G. Lafley is a great example. I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the last seven or eight years, until he retired. I’m a member of his design board at Procter & Gamble, and we would get together every four months, and the various divisions would come and show their work. He was willing to get involved really early on in new ideas — not in a way where his opinion was overly influencing what was happening, but where his support would really push an idea along quickly. I learned a lot from him in terms of style of leadership, which was involved without being dictatorial. He seems to see his role as constantly reminding teams of what they should be focusing on, rather than telling them whether they’ve got the right idea or not. Somebody else I worked with a lot is Jim Hackett, the C.E.O. of Steelcase. He’s somebody who, no matter how compelling and short-term an issue might be, is always forcing the conversation up to being strategic. How are we thinking about this long term? As a designer, I’m always looking for solutions to the problems I see in front of me. And the big trick to being a successful designer is always making sure you’re asking the right questions and focusing on the right problems. It’s very easy in business to get sucked into being reactive to the problems and questions that are right in front of you. And it doesn’t matter how creative you are as a leader, it doesn’t matter how good the answers you come up with. If you’re focusing on the wrong questions, you’re not really providing the leadership you should.




I do think that’s something that we forget — as leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is in itself a creative process. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked. When I go back and look at the great leaders — Roosevelt, Churchill — one of the things that occurs to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about. In design, that’s everything, right? If you don’t ask the right questions, then you’re never

going get to the right solution. I spent too much of my career feeling like I’d done a really good job answering the wrong question. And that was because I was letting other people give me the question. One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more — and I obviously have the opportunity to do as a leader — is to take ownership of the question. And so I’m much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions.


But answers are often rewarded more than questions, right?


That was one of the things that used to make me feel very, very insecure as a business leader — thinking: “Am I supposed to have all the answers? Because I know I don’t.” Then I finally came to realize, well, nobody else has all the answers, either. It’s just that somehow we’ve got this culture of having the answers. It’s partly the media, you know, and some sort of self-image that business leaders have. And partly it’s about trying to convince the stock market that things are all fine. It’s all of these things added together. To some degree, it’s a cultural thing here in America. It’s a little different when you go to other parts of the world. But I’m personally perfectly comfortable admitting that I don’t know the answers and that I’m more interested in the questions anyway.


What have you learned to more of, or less of, over time?


I’m definitely doing a lot less worrying about the sort of simple operational things and a lot more worrying about what we’re really doing as an organization. And I think that’s natural. You know, every stage of leadership that I’ve gone through and every stage of leadership I’ve observed other people going through, there’s a predictable process. Whatever role you first step into, you’re overwhelmed by whatever the operational pieces of that role are. It doesn’t matter what they are, because you’ve got to learn how to do them. And then you get more and more comfortable with those, and you either do one of two things. Either they take up less time because you’re better at it, or you hand them off to other people. Mostly you hand them off to other people; to be honest with you — that’s what I do. And so it gives you more and more space to work on the things that are important,

or that you think are important, and that allow you to evolve to whatever that next level of leadership might be. I suspect that every leader goes through that same experience.


Why?

Answered by Carol Bartz, Yahoo

Well, I thought it was such a big responsibility. I had public shareholders and I had a board and this is one step you take that’s a pretty big step. There’s a progression in management. The first step you take is when you’re a people manager, and then the next step is when you’re a manager of managers. And then there’s that step when you are on top. And who are you going to complain to now? Because everybody likes to complain to their boss, or their peers. I think the biggest steps in that progression of a manager are the first and the last. The last because if it’s a public company, you say: "Wait a minute. I have shareholders. I have a board. I have press. I have all these things to juggle and I’m supposed to run this company. And how do I set my time and how perfect do I have to be?" You get that weight of the world on your shoulders and so I think you overreach. I thought I had to know answers that I didn’t have to know. I thought I had to be the biggest cheerleader, and so it just saps a lot of energy out of you because you’re the person that has to be up and on. It’s just a big responsibility. And then you settle in over time. So I made some people mistakes — like I tried too hard with some people who should have gone earlier. You just make a lot of mistakes that you probably know in your gut are mistakes, but you’re not sure how to twist the organization around. You’re just not as confident. It’s that simple. So I actually wouldn’t have liked working for myself back then.

This answer originally appeared in Imagining a World of No Annual Reviews »

What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?


I grew up in the Midwest. My mom died when I was 8, so my grandmother raised my brother and me. She had a great sense of humor, and she never really let things get to her. My favorite story is when we were on a farm in Wisconsin; I would have probably been 13. There was a snake up in the rafter of the machine shed. And we ran and said, "Grandma, there’s a snake." And she came out and she knocked it down with a shovel, chopped its head off and said, "You could have done

that." And, you know, that’s the tone she set. Just get it done. Just do it. Pick yourself up. Move on. Laugh.


What about leading others?


A lot of it is just picking the right team and just picking people so much better than you are, and involving them in a decision. Everybody on my team — I couldn’t do their jobs. I could not. I really mean that. So I figured out early on that the way you’re successful is you hire really successful people.


How would you say your leadership style has changed over time?


I’m calmer. I think that just comes with confidence. I would hate to describe the C.E.O. I was in ’92. I think I was pretty pathetic, actually.



Answered by James E. Rogers, Duke Energy

I think as the years have gone on, I've really honed my ability to listen and understand everybody's story, and to help them build a story around their capabilities -- a story that's open-ended, that plays to their strengths. Because one of the biggest things I find in organizations is that people tend to limit their perceptions of themselves and their capabilities. And one of my challenges is to open them up to the possibilities. I mean, who would've guessed at 40 that I'd be selected as a

C.E.O. after having just left a law firm as a partner four years before? So, I have this belief that anybody can almost do anything in the right context.

This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. as General (and Scout) »

But some people are best suited for certain roles. You don't ask a center to play point guard.


There are clearly role players. But you have to push some people out of their comfort zone. You've got to have a sense of the person, that they're willing to take on that risk, because if you try to push them and you sense they don't want to go there, then it's probably a mistake. And so it's more art than science, it's more feel. That's what I'm better at, the longer I've been C.E.O. I understand when no is no and no is maybe.


Do you use a line to close the deal?


I think that, at the end of the day, they have to trust you. They have to trust that you wouldn't be asking them to do this unless you had confidence in them. They have to trust that you see something in them that they may not see completely in themselves. So, I think it really gets down to them trusting me. I tell them, "I'm confident you can do it, but I want you to know I'm here for you, I've got your back, and at the end of the day, I'm going to help you succeed because I know you can."


Tell me about your leadership style.


I've always had a bias for being engaged and being on the front lines. I think about the example of Normandy, where they had all these elaborate plans, and then when they landed on the beaches, they didn't quite work and they had to make it up as they went along. Particularly now, as I've been a C.E.O. for over 20 years, it's really important to be on the front lines and to remember kind of the sound of the bullets whizzing by, to be on the ground. It's one thing to make policy or direction or say, "Go take this hill." It's another thing to be there when the hill's being taken.


With all the responsibilities of a C.E.O., how do you make time to be on the front lines?


When you're a C.E.O., the tendency is to get removed from the day-to-day activities. You deal with strategy, you deal with Wall Street, you deal with a wide array of stakeholders, but the fact of the matter is, you're operating at 30,000 feet. I think it's important, if you're going to lead an organization, to have some sense of what everyone does every day. It gives you an empathy that really helps you in terms of telling a story about the company and leading them in terms of where you're trying to go.


Can you elaborate?


At one level, I'm like a general. I make the strategic plans, the five-year plan, take this hill, hit these objectives, etc. But also, since I'm in an industry that's going through great transformation, I'm uniquely positioned to be a scout, to really go out and deal with clean-tech development, to deal with national environmental leaders or national consumer advocates. It gives me the freedom, because I am the C.E.O., to find an idea and to bring it back and champion it. I accelerate whether we do it or not.


What are some other important leadership lessons you've learned?

Answered by Susan Lyne, Gilt Groupe

When I started editing Premiere magazine, it was the first time I had ever been the true leader. When we had our first issue coming out, my instinct was to send my editor's letter to my boss, who was running Murdoch Magazines. My thinking was, "Let me get some feedback here." And he called me up and he said, "What is this?" And I said: "It's my editor's letter. I just thought you'd like to see it." He said: "I don't buy a dog and bark for it. Don't ever send me your editor's letter again."

This answer originally appeared in Want to Talk to the Chief? Book Your Half-Hour »

What are the most important leadership lessons you've learned?

Answered by Lawrence W. Kellner, Continental Airlines

A lot of the lessons probably came from my dad. When I was a kid, he was a manager in a Campbell's Soup plant and had several hundred people working for him. When I watched him at work, he never really seemed to tell people what to do. He always seemed to figure out how to get them to want to do it. He always spent a lot of time figuring out who his best people were, and he spent a lot of time figuring out what it was they wanted to do, and then it all seemed to work flawlessly. So it comes back to getting the right people, and getting them doing the right thing, and getting them the right training.

This answer originally appeared in Bad News or Good, Tell Me Now »

What are the most important leadership lessons you've learned?

Answered by Linda Hudson, BAE Systems

It was when I first became a company president, and it was the first job where I was truly responsible for the performance of a company. I had mastered the day-to-day mechanics of running organizations. But I don't think the leadership part of it had settled in quite as profoundly as it did

when I took over a company. I was the first female president of the General Dynamics Corporation, and I went out and bought my new fancy suits to wear to work and so on. And I'm at work on my very first day, and a lady at Nordstrom's had showed me how to tie a scarf in a very unusual kind of way for my new suit. And I go to work and wear my suit, and I have my first day at work. And then I come back to work the next day, and I run into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine. And that's when I realized that life was never going to be the way it had been before, that people were watching everything I did. And it wasn't just going to be about how I dressed. It was about my behavior, the example I set, the tone I set, the way I carried myself, how confident I was -- all those kinds of things. It really was now about me and the context of setting the tone for the organization. That was a lesson I have never forgotten -- that as a leader, people are looking at you in a way that you could not have imagined in other roles. And I didn't see that nearly as profoundly when I was leading a functional organization or a smaller enterprise. But to this day, not only the awareness of that, but the responsibility that goes along with it, is something that I think about virtually every day.

This answer originally appeared in Fitting In, and Rising to the Top »

Stepping back, what were the most important leadership lessons you learned over the course of your career?

Answered by Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

I remember the first time I was put in charge: I was put in charge of the foreign exchange business, including sales and trading. And of course, you know the way bread always lands on the buttered side down. In the first minute, the business is going through something where we start losing money. And by the standards at even that time it was probably a piddling amount of money. But it meant a lot to me, and I was nervous as hell, and I went in to my boss at the time. And I said, "You know, we're losing money." And he said, "Well, what would you do?" I said what I would do, and he said: "That sounds right. Why don't you do that?" I would remember that always. His validation made it my idea if it worked, and his problem if it didn't. So he took a lot of pressure off me. He took weight off the scale for me. And I remember a second lesson in that same meeting. I turned to walk out of the room, and he said: "Lloyd, just one second before you go. Why don't you stop in the men's room first and throw some water on your face, because if people see you looking as green as you look, they'll jump out the window." And that was a second thing: I learned in general about how important that kind of symbolism is and how you can inspire or defeat confidence.

This answer originally appeared in Lessons Learned at Goldman »

What other leadership lessons have you learned?

Answered by Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs

You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses' goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more. Because they can make it easy for me to get information. They'll come to me and say: "Look at this. Do this." Or they can give it to me begrudgingly, if they're hostile. Now why would they be hostile? Why would they be negative? Why would they be slow to give me information? Because they thought I wasn't good for them. They thought I'd be bad for them. Life is always about contracts that you make with people. Very few of them are written. Most of them are implicit, and most of them evolve out of a course of dealing and understanding. And if you are good for your people, they'll be good to you, and help you and help propel you up in your career. By the way, being good to them doesn't mean you pay them more or you're more liberal, or you let them get away with things. Most people, what they want is to be better. They want to work for a great organization. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to not so much get promoted, as be promotable. They want to evolve. And if you're the kind of person that they think will help them do that, they'll give you a loyalty that's the most sincere kind of loyalty.

This answer originally appeared in Lessons Learned at Goldman »

Tell me about the first time you started managing somebody.

Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor

I was an engineer at Boeing, and I was promoted to supervise other engineers. I had my thoughts about what that supervisory job should be. The engineer assigned to me would prepare his work, and I had to approve it. So I thought that it was really important that it reflect my standards of quality. And 14 drafts later, he walked in and he quit. I said, "Why are you quitting?" He said, "Well, I think you're a great engineer and I think you'll be a good supervisor someday, but right now, this is just too much for me to be supervised this tightly."

This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »

What did you learn from that?


It was a gem, because I really thought about why it happened. I realized very early that what I was really being asked to do was to help connect a set of talented people to a bigger goal, a bigger program and help them move forward to even bigger contributions. That was a different role than what was expected of me as an engineer. That experience stayed with me forever on what it really means to manage and lead.




The more senior your management position is, the more important it is to connect the organization or the project to the outside world. You know, how does this fit in with what we're doing? What is the real goal, the real mission? And it makes you also think about: What business are we in? And how do we pull together to have a comprehensive plan to create whatever we decided to do together? And then, how do you get everybody included, where everybody's contributing and everybody knows what's going on?


How do you get everybody to contribute?


I think the most important thing is coming to a shared view about what we're trying to accomplish -- whether you're a nonprofit or a for-profit organization. What are we? What is our real purpose? And then, how do you include everybody so you know where you are on that plan, so you can work on areas that need special attention. And then everybody gets a chance to participate and feel that accomplishment of participating and contributing.


Looking back over your career, have you learned other important leadership lessons?


I've been very fortunate to be part of projects that are really big and broad. Airplanes are some of the most sophisticated designs in the world, four million parts flying in formation, and it involves hundreds of thousands of people all around the world creating these vehicles. And the same is true now at Ford, with our full product line. So they're just very big, large, compelling visions, and the biggest thing I've found is that the more everybody comes together on the real purpose, the higher order of that, the better. Is the airplane really about an airplane or is it about getting people together around the world so they can find out how more alike they are than different? And is a car about just a driving experience or is it about safe and efficient transportation, and your family, and freedom? And so the higher the calling, the higher the compelling vision that you can articulate, then the more it pulls everybody in. One of my favorite stories is an analogy where this reporter stops by a construction site and he interviews three bricklayers. He asks the first bricklayer, "What are you doing?" And he says, "Well, I'm making a living laying these bricks." The reporter says: "Oh, that's great. That's very noble." He asks the next bricklayer, "What are you doing?" And he says, "Well, I am practicing the profession of bricklaying. I'm going to be the best bricklayer ever." And the reporter asks the third bricklayer, "What are you doing?" And he says, "I'm developing a cathedral." There is technical excellence and professionalism, but we all want to contribute to making a cathedral. And the more we feel that and we know what our part in it is, the more I think you can take the team performance to a whole other level of excellence.


What have you learned to do less of over time?


I guess I've moved to a place where I'm really focused on four things. I pay attention to everything, but there are some things that are very unique to what I need to do as the leader. I have to really come through on these. And one of them is this process of connecting what we're doing to the outside world. I mean, we're here to create a business of serving customers with the best cars and trucks in the world, so where is the world going? Where is the technology going? Where are the customers going? Where is the competition going? A second focus for me is: What business are we in? What are we going to focus on? What's going to be our business? Are we going to have a house of brands of vehicles? Are we going to focus on the blue oval? Are we going to be competitive on quality

and cost and fuel efficiency? Are we going be best in class? So what's our point of view about the value proposition of our company? The third one that I really focus on is balancing the near term with the longer term. And especially in the environment like we see today, where you absolutely want to keep investing for the future, even though you could invest less and make your business performance look better in the near term. Do we have a plan that works in the near term and also creates value for the long term? And then I really focus on the values and the standards of the organization. What are the expected behaviors? How do we want to treat each other? How do we want to act? What do we want to do about transparency? How can we have a safe environment where we really know what's going on? I'm the one who needs to focus on those four things, because if I do that, the entire team will have a collective point of view and an understanding of all four of those areas.


You say it's important to be patient. On the other hand, the speed of business keeps getting quicker, and the competition isn't resting. How do you resolve the two forces?

Answered by Deborah Dunsire, M.D., Millennium

I think it comes down to a fundamental premise, and that's having the right people on the bus. There's a need to have the right people with excellent experience and good judgment, because all of us are going to always be faced with things we've never seen before. And your experience, combined with good judgment and high integrity, will allow you to react to situations you've never seen before. So I always look at who's leading the function. My trust in those function heads is very important.

This answer originally appeared in Stepping Out of the Sandbox »

What leadership lessons did you learn when you first started managing others?


When you desperately want to do well, and I am a person who's typically worked hard and done well, sometimes that desire translated into overdoing it on the leadership side. If something went wrong, I would get too anxious about it or think I had to fix it personally. As I've stepped further and further outside my comfort zone to the job I'm in now, I've had to focus more on the work of leadership and not focus on being the person who solved the details of the problem. In my first management position, sometimes if something didn't go well, I would feel I had to get personally

involved, in some ways duplicating what the person who worked for me was doing. I had to learn to step away from that and ask myself what I could uniquely do. The focus on the work of leadership means asking yourself: "What do I add? What can I bring that others cannot access without me?"


How did you learn that lesson?


The light bulb didn't pop to full intensity right away. But I heard gentle feedback that, "You're in my sandbox and we're not accomplishing a lot being in here together." I've also heard feedback from a team I worked with that said, "Gee, we know you're good at this stuff and you've done it, but sometimes we need to kind of bang our heads a little bit more without you fixing it." So I learned to step away sometimes and, in the right situation, allow a person to stub their toe. You don't allow them to do that if the chairman's coming for a presentation. But in a safe situation, it's O.K. to allow them to present their work with a flaw that you can see clearly, because you've done this more times than they have, and letting them learn from that. It also came at a time where I was more confident in my own leadership, so that by allowing that to happen I wasn't failing. I learned to separate the fact that everything had to go perfectly for me to feel that I was being the leader I needed to be. Also, I grew to understand more and more that the job of leadership is developing people, and that it involves not doing everything for them, but sometimes allowing them to stub their toe. The work may not come in perfectly, but the learning was much more effective, and people felt empowered to own the outcome in a different way. Putting that into practice was very hard for me because it's very hard for me to see a problem and not try and fix it.


When did you first learn how to lead people?

Answered by Maigread Eichten, FRS

You're really taking me back. I was a lifeguard and a swim coach at a pool in the Walnut Creek area outside of San Francisco. The hardest thing about being a swim coach in a somewhat affluent area is that all the parents want their kids to swim on the team, of course, and to swim every event. And while you want to win, you also want to make sure all the kids get to swim. So there's this balance. I was 17 and you've got these parents screaming at you every weekend -- "How come Johnny

didn't get to swim?" and "He's better than Sally." -- and you're going back and forth on this every week: Do I want to win or do I want to swim all the kids, and the kids are looking at you and the parents are screaming at you. That experience is very similar to many days how I feel here. I feel like I'm a judge, and I use that mental image a lot, which is that my job is not to make everybody happy. My job is to chart the right course and, at the end of the day, I leave this building and if I feel like I've done the right thing and people respect me, I'm happy. But on any day someone is probably unhappy with a decision that I made in the day, and that's the best I can do. It's the same thing with the swim team. Mr. Smith is probably mad that I didn't swim his daughter, and sometimes I have to look at little Jane and say, "You know what, you're not going to swim the 100 fly today, sorry." It's a team sport.

This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. Must Decide Who Swims »

Tell me about some of the leadership lessons you've learned.

Answered by Brian Dunn, Best Buy

I didn't realize it at the time, but the first deep leadership lesson I learned was when I was 14 years old and working in a grocery store. The manager at the time, a gentleman named Ken, came up to me and said, "What do you think about this process we're using here in the front end to tell people to pick up their groceries?" A seemingly simple challenge, and I gave him some sort of innocuous, nonspecific answer -- sort of, "Everything's fine." And he pulled me aside and he said, "Now listen, I asked you about this 'cause I really care what you think. You're doing this every single day and I want to know what you think about it." I know it seems simple, but just that notion of learning from people who are actually doing the work, and the encouragement he gave me to tell him exactly what I thought really stayed with me, and it was a recurring thing throughout the time I worked for him.

This answer originally appeared in You Want Insights? Go to the Front Lines »

What's the most important leadership lesson you've learned?

Answered by Gary E. McCullough, Career Education Corporation

The biggest one I learned, and I learned it early on in my tenure in the Army, is the importance of small gestures. As you become more senior, those small gestures and little things become sometimes more important than the grand ones. Little things like saying "please" and "thank

you" -- just the basic respect that people are due, or sending personal notes. I spend a lot of time sending personal notes. I'll never forget one of the interactions we had with my commanding general of the division in which I was a platoon leader. We were at Fort Bragg, N.C. We had miserable weather. It was February and not as warm as you would think it would be in North Carolina. It had been raining for about a week, and the commanding general came around to review some of the platoons in the field. He went to one of my vehicle drivers and he asked him what he thought of the exercise we were on. To which the young private said, "Sir, it stinks." I saw my short career flash before my eyes at that point. He asked why, and the private said: "There are people who think this is great weather for doing infantry operations. I personally think 75 and partly cloudy is better." And so the commanding general said, "What can I do to make it better for you?" And the private said, "Sir, I sure could use a Snickers bar." So a couple days later we were still moving through some really lousy weather, and a box showed up for the private. And that box was filled with 38 Snickers bars, which is the number of people in my platoon. And there was a handwritten note from the commanding general of our division that said, "I can't do anything about the weather, but I hope this makes your day a bit brighter, and please share these with your buddies." And on that day, at that time, we would've followed that general anywhere. It was a very small thing, and he didn't need to do it, but it impressed upon me that small gestures are hugely important.

This answer originally appeared in The Lesson of the 38 Candy Bars »

What is the most important lesson you've learned about leadership?

Answered by Carol Smith, Elle Group

The importance of winning over employees as opposed to bossing employees. I learned that lesson very, very early -- in sixth grade.

This answer originally appeared in No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers »

Tell me about that.

Answered by Carol Smith, Elle Group

In sixth grade, I was head of the project to create a mural for the graduating class to hang in the auditorium. That's a big deal. And I got a clipboard, I remember, and then I had all this power and I started bossing everyone around. And within days it was apparent that I was going to have a mutiny on my hands, and I was fired from the mural. They took my clipboard away. It was a

lesson I learned very early in life about the difference between being the boss and being bossy. I often tell people, "Ah, that's a sixth-grade clipboard problem here." I feel I'm a leader without ever really thinking I'm a leader, which is to say that I know when I walk into a room of employees, I command a presence, but I'm always feeling like I'm part of the gang. I don't instantly sit at the head of the table. I sit in the middle of the table, always. I don't want to sit at the head of the table. I want to be part of the process and part of the decision. In the end I think that if you win people over, they'll follow you. And of course you need other qualities, like honesty, decisiveness and the ability to confront. I'm a really good confronter.

This answer originally appeared in No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers »

How are you trying to shift the culture at Adobe?

Answered by Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Systems

One of the things we have tried to do in the last couple of years is introduce this notion of general managers -- you equip people with the responsibility to make the decisions that are required to drive their businesses. We've said to them, "Go run your business, make the decisions and make the trade-offs." Some of them will be hugely successful and some of them will stumble, and I think that's O.K. Creating a culture where you allow people to take risks and grow their careers, I think, is important. We've also created this notion of "seeds," to bring the venture capital culture into Adobe, to allow people who have a creative idea to run with it, but in the structure of a larger company.

This answer originally appeared in Connecting the Dots Isn't Enough »

How does that work?

Answered by Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Systems

The person who runs the seed is actually called an "entrepreneur in residence." The way you budget for seeds is you don't do the traditional, "O.K., how many engineers do you need and how many product marketing people do you need?" You say, "O.K., here's a first round of funding, and tell me what your metrics are." And if you accomplish those metrics, and if we still think we want to go from seed funding to first-round and second-round funding, then we'll put more money into it.

This answer originally appeared in Connecting the Dots Isn't Enough »

Talk a bit about your evolution as a leader.

Answered by David C. Novak, Yum Brands

I was promoted fairly rapidly in my career, and a lot of times I had people working for me who were older than me. When I was coming up as a manager, I think it was very difficult at first to manage people who had more experience. But I think what you realize is that when you get promoted, you're there for a reason, and you're there to take that leadership role and to get done what needs to get done. Someone might be older than you and they might have more experience than you, but they still need coaching. And if you're the leader, you've got to provide the coaching.

This answer originally appeared in At Yum Brands, Rewards for Good Work »

You talked earlier about the importance of taking an interest in people who work for you. Tell me more about that.


What I think a great leader does, a great coach does, is understand what kind of talent you have and then you help people leverage that talent so that people can achieve what they never thought they were capable of. The only way you can do that is to care about the people who work for you. No one's going to care about you unless you care about them. But if you care about someone, genuinely, then they're going to care about you because you're making a commitment and an investment in them. You show you care by really taking an active interest in the people working for you, and you care enough to give them direct feedback. People are starved for direct feedback. People want to hear how they can do better. Too many leaders don't provide that feedback. So if you take an active interest in someone, you take an active interest in sharing with them your perspective on what they can do to improve.


What are some of the rules of the road at Yum Brands?


Our culture is based on the fact that people have an innate need for well-deserved recognition. Using recognition is the best way to build a high-energy, fun culture and reinforce the behaviors that drive results. When I became president of KFC, I wanted to break through the clutter on recognition, so I gave away these rubber chickens. They were called floppy chickens. I'd go into a restaurant and I would see a cook who'd been there for 25 years and the product was great, so I'd give him a floppy chicken. I'd write on it and tell him his "Original Recipe" was fantastic, and take a picture of him with me. And then I'd give him $100 because you couldn't eat a floppy chicken. I now give away these big sets of smiling teeth with legs on them for people walking the talk on behalf of our customer.


There's an art to recognizing people.


One, it needs to be deserved. And, two, it needs to come from the heart. So I think what leaders have to do is recognize the people who are getting it done. For the people who are getting it done, it can't be done too much. Why be selfish on the thing that matters most to people? People leave companies for two reasons. One, they don't feel appreciated. And, two, they don't get along with their boss. We try to recognize the people who are really getting it done any time they happen to get it done, and we try to develop coaches instead of bosses. To me, with recognition, if you've got to err on the side of anything, recognize more than you should.


How do you create a sense of mission?

Answered by Wendy Kopp, Teach for America

Maybe this is easier in our endeavor than some, in the sense that we're looking for people who are magnetized to this notion, this vision, that one day all children in our nation should have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. And that magnetizes certain people. And so it's more about them -- it's their vision, it's not my vision. It's our collective vision, and so that creates a

sense of internal drive at some level. At one point, I also had this revelation that we were no longer going to go through all this development of strategic plans. We would go through this massive process of creating these endless strategic plans and reviewing them. And I don't know how many years we did that until I said: "Forget it. We don't even need to do this anymore. Let's figure out our priorities and how we are going to measure our success. And then we're going to let people run after those goals." And that just freed up all the energy. That was sort of foundational -- then lots of other people came into the picture to figure out how you really create a kind of data-driven organization where, at every level, we've got the right goals. We spent the last year asking ourselves, "Where do we want to be in 2015?" And that led to this analysis of our priorities. How are we going to measure our success? What should our goals be? But it wasn't a plan for exactly what everyone in the organization should do, or what should even be the key strategies. It was this massive, from-the-ground-up inclusive process that just got everyone aligned with our priorities and goals.

This answer originally appeared in Charisma? To Her, It's Overrated »

Tell me about your management style.

Answered by Daniel P. Amos, Aflac

I've always spent a lot of time choosing the right person for a job. But I think most people will tell you that I tend to be the inquisitor who will ask a million questions. When I get on something, I do not get off till it's done, and I will call you and ask you and stay on you until it thunders. My theory is that when you start telling people what to do, they no longer are responsible; you are. I'll give them my opinion and say: "Look, this is my opinion, but if you choose that and you fail, you're not blaming it on me. It is your fault." I think it makes them stronger. I have no qualms with people making mistakes. But if you lose confidence in them, then you can't keep them.

This answer originally appeared in Stumping for Votes, Every Day »

What was the most important leadership lesson you learned?

Answered by Daniel P. Amos, Aflac

Well, that's a hard question. I majored in risk management and insurance, and there were three principles: don't risk a lot for a little, don't risk more than you can afford to lose, and consider the odds. And in everything I've done in business, I've always used those principles as the guiding light. I would also say, make sure you motivate people because they ultimately are getting

the job done for you. In business, you should treat your employees like they can vote. It doesn't mean you're going to get everybody to vote for you. But you kind of try to kiss the babies and shake the hands and tell 'em you appreciate 'em and would like them to support you. You can do it like a dictator, but I'm not sure very many of them in the long run are successful.

This answer originally appeared in Stumping for Votes, Every Day »

What's your approach to leadership?

Answered by Jacqueline Kosecoff, UnitedHealth Group

I think a good leader has to do three things. It's almost like a three-act play. The first act is coming up with the concept for a product or a service to offer. And then you have to make sure that the entire team -- not just the executive management -- but the entire team believes in that concept and understands it. The second job is execution, and good ideas aren't as valuable as they might be until you make them into a reality. You often hear people say, "The devil's in the details." I think it's the divine. And so a lot of time has to be spent making sure the execution works. The third act is measurement; I'm a great believer in measurement. So before I begin the execution phase of any project, I sit down with my team and we ask ourselves: "What are the metrics against which we're going to measure our success?" We do two things: We measure where we're succeeding, and where we succeed we celebrate. And we also measure where we're not succeeding, and where that happens we ask ourselves, "Can we go back and fix something?" And if so, we do it. And if not, we make sure that we understand where we went wrong, put it into the corporate DNA, so the next project won't have that flaw. Another thing I learned was that when you're involved in a large development project, projects often morph. And when people become advocates of their project, they change some of those metrics so that they can claim success when perhaps it's not 100 percent legitimate to do so. So creating the metrics up front, and having a discipline of saying, "O.K., this is where we want to go, and if we don't achieve it it's O.K., we'll try in another way to get there," is very helpful. Not just for me, but for the whole team.

This answer originally appeared in The Divine, Too, Is in the Details »

What's the most important leadership lesson you've learned?

Answered by Clarence Otis Jr., Darden Restaurants

It's one that I learned early on, and it kept getting reinforced and cemented over time with a number of different leaders. It's this notion that leaders really think about others first. They think about the people who are on the team, trying to help them get the job done. They think about the people who they're trying to do a job for. Your thoughts are always there first, and you think about what's the appropriate response for whatever that audience is, and you think last about "what does this mean for me?" The guy who reinforced that most would have been my predecessor here at Darden, Joe Lee. I was C.F.O. at the time, but on Sept. 11, 2001, after it became clear what had happened, we had an all-employee meeting, and Joe started to talk. One of the first things he said was, "we are trying to understand where all our people are who are traveling." The second thing he said was: "We've got a lot of Muslim teammates, managers in our restaurants, employees in our restaurants, who are going to be under a lot of stress during this period. And so, we need to make sure we're attentive to that." And that was pretty powerful. Of all the things you could focus on that morning, he thought about the people who were on the road and then our Muslim colleagues.

This answer originally appeared in Ensemble Acting, in Business »

You talked about prioritizing, so I'm going to ask you to prioritize. Of all the leadership lessons you've learned, which one do you consider the most important?

Answered by Dany Levy, DailyCandy.com

There's something about a manager who can deliver a clear sense of the task at hand , and make everyone understand the importance of X, Y, or Z without it feeling tyrannical. I'm not really interested in the power aspect of being a boss or a leader. I think that people who get any kind of adrenaline rush from that ultimately make pretty uninspiring leaders, just because it's the all-about-them show.

This answer originally appeared in In Praise of All That Grunt Work »

What is the most important leadership lesson you've learned?

Answered by Eduardo Castro-Wright, Wal-Mart Stores

Walking the talk is the most important lesson I've learned. There's nothing that destroys credibility more than not being able to look someone in the eye and have them know that they can trust you. Leadership is about trust. It's about being able to get people to go to places they never thought they could go. They can't do that if they don't trust you.

This answer originally appeared in In a Word, He Wants Simplicity »

If you could teach any b-school course, including one that you create, what would it be?

Answered by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft

Leadership. Microsoft has grown from 30 people to more than 90,000 since I started, so I've had the chance to play a leadership role at practically every stage imaginable in a company's growth and development. I've learned a lot about leadership along the way from some great people that I've worked with and through experience. I've come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it's all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

This answer originally appeared in Meetings, Version 2.0, at Microsoft »

What is the most important leadership lesson you've learned?

Answered by James J. Schiro, Zurich Financial Services

It's the ability to listen, and to make people understand that you are listening to them. Make them feel that they are making a contribution, and then you make a decision. I don't think any one individual is so brilliant that they know all of the answers. So you've got to have a sense of inclusiveness. The other most important thing is making people understand the strategy and the message, and be out in front of the people so that they actually understand the mission. I remember I had just been elected senior partner of PriceWaterhouse, and we had our new partners meeting, and Colin Powell came to speak. I was talking to him before the meeting, and I said, "Well, what do you think is the most important thing?" He said, "The most important thing is the troops have to

understand where they are going." People don't like change, but they can manage change. They can't handle uncertainty. I think it is the job of leaders to eliminate uncertainty.

This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O., Now Appearing on YouTube »

What is the most important leadership lesson you have learned?

Answered by Robert A. Iger, Disney

What I've really learned over time is that optimism is a very, very important part of leadership. However, you need a dose of realism with it. People don't like to follow pessimists. I'd say that I've also learned, in general, to be more patient. I've learned to be more focused. I've learned to listen better and manage reaction time better. What I mean by that is not overreacting to things that are said to me, because sometimes it's easy to do that.

This answer originally appeared in He Was Promotable, After All »

What are the most important leadership lessons you've learned through the years?

Answered by Nell Minow, Corporate Library

The first time I ever really thought of myself as a leader was when I had a series of experiences in college, over a period of about 18 months, working on four different group projects. What I learned from that is that if you can get everyone to agree what the goal is, and to identify themselves with the successful achievement of that goal, then you're pretty much there. Early in my career, I also kept getting offered the job of special assistant to somebody. About half the time I turned it down, and about half the time I took it. All the times that I did it I enjoyed it very much and I learned a lot. When you are a special assistant, by definition you're working for somebody who is otherwise many, many levels above you. And so I got to hear managers talk about the people they managed at a stage when I think most people are not privy to those conversations. One thing that helped move my thinking forward was that I noticed in my first job that there was something very definitional in who was included in somebody's "we" and who was included in somebody's "them." I found generally that the more expansive the assumptions were within somebody's idea of who is "we" -- the larger the group that you had included in that "we" -- the better off everybody was. I started to really do my best to make sure that my notion of "we" was very expansive and to promote that idea among other people.

This answer originally appeared in Think 'We' for Best Results »

What else?


I also learned a lot about being a manager from being a mom. When I first became a professional manager, I was pregnant for the first time, and so I grew up with both responsibilities at the same time. You have people saying the same two things to you all day long, which is, "Look what I did." And you say: "It's really good. Do some more." Or they say, "He took my stuff." And you have to say, "Tell him to give it back." You're constantly trying, whether you're raising children or dealing with employees, to get them to take responsibility for their own issues. I'm not saying that in a maternalistic way, just in a way of trying to get people to take responsibility for themselves, to do the best that they can and to learn as much as they can. In both cases, you're trying to make people more independent and bring them along.


When you've started in new leadership roles, what did you say in the first-day speech to the staff?


At I.S.S., I thought very deeply about this issue of, how do I get people to be honest with me, because I was a popular fellow worker and I was becoming the boss. That's a big difference, and I was a little bit in denial for a while that people would still treat me the same way. But the fact is that you are in a different position when you're deciding who gets the corner office and gets a promotion, and they are going treat you differently. The thing I remember best about what I said to them was: "If you have a problem, I have a problem. I am vitally concerned with anything that concerns you, but I refuse to be responsible for a problem that is not brought to my attention. So you have the responsibility to bring the problem to my attention. "However, there are two points you have to remember. One is you are not allowed to bring a problem to me unless you have a proposed solution. So come in with what you think we should do about it. And the second one is, we're not making money yet. We're still losing money, and so until that changes the definition of a solution is that it costs less than the problem."


What is the most important lesson you've learned about leadership through the years?

Answered by John Donahoe, eBay

You can't change people. As a leader, there's a real temptation to try to change people or help people get to where you want them to go. And I learned, actually through experience, that you can't change someone. All you can do is help them help themselves. And so I spend a lot less time than I used to trying to make people do something that either they can't do, or don't want to do, and spend more time illuminating what needs to get done. And if they make the choice to do it, great. If not, get them into a role where they can do what they're good at.

This answer originally appeared in There's No Need to Bat .900 »

There are also, of course, intangibles in leadership. Could you talk about those?

Answered by Kevin Sharer, Amgen

Great leaders have something that when you see it, you know what it is, but it's hard ahead of time to describe exactly what it is. But the first thing I'd say is that leadership is not about charisma and it's not about style. It's something about authenticity. It's something about integrity. It's something about willingness to take risks. It's something about the ability to make others feel part of a larger thing. It's part of being able to articulate the social architecture in a way that others can understand, believe in and follow.

This answer originally appeared in Feedback in Heaping Helpings »

And what's the secret sauce?

Answered by Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox Corporation

It isn't a secret sauce. It's actually fundamental communications, in terms of your ability to really get out there and be with your people, tell a story. People really have to begin to believe in a story to get passionate about the direction the company is going in, which hopefully you've been able

to do through the way you articulate it, simplifying the complex so that people can get their arms around it and see how they can make a difference. There's nothing quite as powerful as people feeling they can have impact and make a difference. When you've got that going for you, I think it's a very powerful way to implement change.

This answer originally appeared in The Keeper of That Tapping Pen »

What's the most important leadership lesson you've learned and how did you learn it?

Answered by Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox Corporation

We talk a lot about execution and the importance of it. But I actually think it's a lot more about followership -- that your employees are volunteers and they can choose to wait things out if they don't believe. And that can be very damaging in a big company. So it is absolutely this essence of creating followership that becomes the most important thing that you can do as a leader.

This answer originally appeared in The Keeper of That Tapping Pen »

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