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-andcontrol 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?
Answered by William D. Green, Accenture
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.
This answer originally appeared in 68 Rules? No, Just 3 Are Enough »
Can you elaborate on why you shift people around?
Answered by William D. Green, Accenture
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.
This answer originally appeared in 68 Rules? No, Just 3 Are Enough »
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?
Answered by Mindy Grossman, HSN Inc.
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.
This answer originally appeared in Are You a Tigger, or an Eeyore? »
Tell me about your leadership style.
Answered by Mindy Grossman, HSN Inc.
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.
This answer originally appeared in Are You a Tigger, or an Eeyore? »
How do you make sure you’re getting honest feedback?
Answered by Mindy Grossman, HSN Inc.
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.
This answer originally appeared in Are You a Tigger, or an Eeyore? »
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?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
So what happened?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
So how do you decide when it's time to micromanage and when it's time to stay out of the sandbox? Leadership
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
It's an hourly process of when to get in and when not to and to know when it matters. One of the upand-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."
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
What did you learn from other bosses you've had?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
And can you explain more about what that means?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
Can you elaborate?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
Can you talk more about those qualities?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
How has your leadership style evolved?
Answered by Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation SKG
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 gravitydefier. There are no such things.
This answer originally appeared in A Boost From a Boot Out the Door »
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?
Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO
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.
This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »
And how does that manifest itself in the way that you run IDEO?
Answered by Tim Brown, 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?
This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »
What other important leadership lessons have you learned?
Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO
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.
This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »
Can you talk more about that?
Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO
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.
This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »
But answers are often rewarded more than questions, right?
Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO
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.
This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »
What have you learned to more of, or less of, over time?
Answered by Tim Brown, IDEO
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.
This answer originally appeared in He Prizes Questions More Than Answers »
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?
Answered by Carol Bartz, Yahoo
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.
This answer originally appeared in Imagining a World of No Annual Reviews »
What about leading others?
Answered by Carol Bartz, Yahoo
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.
This answer originally appeared in Imagining a World of No Annual Reviews »
How would you say your leadership style has changed over time?
Answered by Carol Bartz, Yahoo
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.
This answer originally appeared in Imagining a World of No Annual Reviews »
How has your leadership style evolved?
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.
Answered by James E. Rogers, Duke Energy
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.
This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. as General (and Scout) »
Do you use a line to close the deal?
Answered by James E. Rogers, Duke Energy
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."
This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. as General (and Scout) »
Tell me about your leadership style.
Answered by James E. Rogers, Duke Energy
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.
This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. as General (and Scout) »
With all the responsibilities of a C.E.O., how do you make time to be on the front lines?
Answered by James E. Rogers, Duke Energy
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.
This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. as General (and Scout) »
Can you elaborate?
Answered by James E. Rogers, Duke Energy
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.
This answer originally appeared in The C.E.O. as General (and Scout) »
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?
Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor
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.
This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »
Can you talk more about that?
Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor
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?
This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »
How do you get everybody to contribute?
Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor
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.
This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »
Looking back over your career, have you learned other important leadership lessons?
Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor
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.
This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »
What have you learned to do less of over time?
Answered by Alan R. Mulally, Ford Motor
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.
This answer originally appeared in Planes, Cars and Cathedrals »
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?
Answered by Deborah Dunsire, M.D., Millennium
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?"
This answer originally appeared in Stepping Out of the Sandbox »
How did you learn that lesson?
Answered by Deborah Dunsire, M.D., Millennium
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.
This answer originally appeared in Stepping Out of the Sandbox »
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.
Answered by David C. Novak, Yum Brands
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.
This answer originally appeared in At Yum Brands, Rewards for Good Work »
What are some of the rules of the road at Yum Brands?
Answered by David C. Novak, 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.
This answer originally appeared in At Yum Brands, Rewards for Good Work »
There's an art to recognizing people.
Answered by David C. Novak, Yum Brands
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.
This answer originally appeared in At Yum Brands, Rewards for Good Work »
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?
Answered by Nell Minow, Corporate Library
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.
This answer originally appeared in Think 'We' for Best Results »
When you've started in new leadership roles, what did you say in the first-day speech to the staff?
Answered by Nell Minow, Corporate Library
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."
This answer originally appeared in Think 'We' for Best Results »
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 »