Knowledge@Wharton - Conversations on Leadership: 6 Leaders on What Drives Excellence

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to talk with many of the worlds top business leaders at their corporate headquarters, at The Wharton School, and in many other locations. One idea that comes out of most of those conversations is that, based on their own experience, successful leaders believe that leadership is not an inborn talent but rather a skillset acquired over time.

For those who want to master that skillset, few more valuable sources are available than learning from those who are already successful leaders. By hearing how they have led, we gain useful, battlefield-tested ideas on how we should lead. And since the ideas are rooted in the tangible experiences of a proven leadership record, they come with exceptional authority.

Yet much of that leadership is exercised behind closed doors, and learning directly from executive-suite veterans depends on their willingness to share openly their acquired wisdom. In what follows, Knowledge@Wharton has collected a half dozen of its most informative interviews from leaders of major American enterprises who have been willing to share what they have learned from their experience.

Conversations on Leadership: 6 Leaders on What Drives Excellence includes interviews conducted by Knowledge@Wharton editor-in-chief Mukul Pandya, my colleague Adam Grant, and myself. We questioned what the executives had learned about leading on their way to the topand how they have grown and honed their own leadership capacities over those years. We asked them to dissect their successes, their failures, their most difficult decisions. We sought their advice for those aspiring to strengthen their own leadership along similar pathways.

As a brief sample of what lies ahead, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP chair Robert E. Moritz acknowledges that he was not a natural-born leader and had to continually learn and grow into his ever-enlarging responsibilities. Ellevate chair and former Citigroup CFO Sallie Krawcheck reports that for her, too, learning to lead was a lot of hard work. I hoped when I was younger, she said, that I would just be a natural leader or that it was something that was innate, but it is really a learned skill coming from thousands and thousands of micro lessons over long periods of time.

Bill George, former CEO of medical equipmentmaker Medtronic, stresses the value of personal mentors and wisdom advisors in developing his capacities, including confidence in just being ones authentic self. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger learned much from reflecting on vexing decisions he had to take on such issues as whether to publish a story on government wiretapping and how to impose a digital paywall. Huffington Post co-founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington references the power of a personal wake-up call that redirected her personal and professional trajectories.

Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky speaks for many in referencing the power of learning by doingand accepting setbacks along the way: The most important thing that a new leader can have stepping into a role is humility, understanding that theyre going to learn, that theyre going to make mistakes. Employees are not looking for a perfect leader. They want a leader who cares about them and is going to help them try to be better.

Taken together, the personal accounts in Conversations on Leadership provide a powerful leadership template, a working model rooted in the experience of those who have led in business. Like each of us, those featured in this volume faced concerns unique to their responsibilities, and your challenge is to incorporate what can work well in your own workplace. But selectively adapted, the ideas expressed in these pages can provide an exceptionally instructive way for all who are intent on better mapping their own leadership path forward.

Michael Useem
September 2015

Also in the Knowledge@Wharton Conversations Series