The
new book, The Journey of Leadership, brings the experience of one
of the world’s most influential consulting firms (McKinsey & Company) right
to your fingertips.
“We
offer in this book a step-by-step approach for leaders to reinvent themselves
both professionally and personally,” explain co-authors Dana Maor, Hans-Werner
Kaas, Kurt Strovink and Ramesh Srinivasan.
This
book includes revealing lessons from McKinsey & Company’s legendary CEO
leadership program, The Bower Forum, which has counseled more than five
hundred global CEOs over the past decade.
The
authors assert that if you are a traditional left-brained leader who’s great at
numbers, planning and scheduling, your job might be threatened in the future.
“Going forward, the differentiating factor will be human leadership that gives
people a sense of purpose and inspires them, and that cares about who they are
and what they’re thinking and feeling.”
As you
read the book, you’ll discover the two parts of how leaders learn to lead
from the “inside out.”
In Part
1 (It Starts With You), you will learn how to listen to your inner
self, and how to overcome your own barriers and biases. Part one includes
lessons on:
- Humility
- Confidence
- Selflessness
- Vulnerability
- Resilience
- Versatility
Part
2 (Moving Beyond Yourself) is all about unleashing the potential of
your team and making positive change in your organization by leveraging the
aspirations, the deeper self-awareness, and the human leadership attributes
that you cultivated in part one.
Part
two lessons include:
- Embedded
purpose - Inspire
boldness - Empower
people - Encourage
trust-telling - Adopt
fearless learning - Instill
empathy
“The
twelve leadership elements found within Part 1 and Part 2 are not easy to master
and take time. It is a journey that takes years, one where you must be mindful
every day about who you want to be, about the personal learning and reinvention
steps you are pursuing and what kind of teams and organization you want to
build,” share the authors.
They
add that some of the learned skills are likely to be more relevant in they
early years than in the middle or later years of your leadership/CEO journey,
and that in the final stage our your leadership tenure, your emphasis should be
to leave a strong legacy, which means putting aside your ego and finding a successor
who can lead the organization into the future.
Finally,
a few of my favorite takeaways from the book include these best leadership
practices:
- Being
open to frank feedback from those around you. - Spending
time to make sure your organization’s purpose is shared broadly in the
organization and that all employees understand how a sense of purpose shows up
in their day-to-day work. - Building
and leveraging informal networks of truth tellers who keep you grounded in
reality and help you understand how your team really feels.
Packed
with insightful and never-before-heard reflections from leaders, including Ed
Bastian (CEO of Delta Air Lines), Makoto Uchida (CEO of Nissan Motor
Corporation), Mark Fields (former CEO of Ford Motor Company), Reeta Roy (CEO of
Mastercard Foundation), and Stéphane Bancel (CEO of Moderna), The Journey of
Leadership is an invaluable, incredibly timely resource for anyone running
or hoping to run an organization in today’s ever-more-complex world.
The
book will help you to:
- Assess
your personal leadership approach and style objectively. - Discover
your true mandate as a leader. - Develop
creative, actionable ways to reinvigorate both yourself and your organization. - Create
a personal commitment plan to inspire your team and cement your legacy.
Hans-Werner
Kaas
Today,
co-author Hans-Werner Kaas shares these insights with us:
Question:
Which part (Part 1 – It Starts With You) or (Part 2 – Moving Beyond Yourself)
do most leaders find the most challenging to master?
Hans-Werner
Kaas:
- Even
the most experienced and successful leaders often struggle to do the inner
work, which requires self-awareness and self-reflection. They must use feedback
from trusted friends and stakeholders and their own “reality check” to nurture
their human-centric attributes. For many leaders, this is a reinvention of
their leadership approach, starting with traits such as humility, selflessness,
and empathy paired with appropriate confidence and resolve. - The
added challenge for CEOs is that so-called “soft skills” are not always valued
or encouraged in leaders. However, this is changing as we’re seeing evidence
that human-centric leaders can get better results for their organizations, both
financially and in terms of organizational health.
Question:
What is the genesis of the micro-practices you share in the book?
Hans-Werner
Kaas:
- Leaders
today must cultivate more resilience and versatility. They must also balance
how they combine human-centric attributes—such as humility with confidence or
vulnerability with courage—to thrive in a complex and ever-changing business
landscape. - The
most successful approach we have seen for CEOs to reinvent themselves as
human-centric leaders is to make numerous small behavioral changes, which we
call micro-practices. We often frame it as “unlearning” management techniques
and “re-learning” human-centric attributes. - We
find CEOs who make time for purposeful habits that help build and maintain self-awareness
and self-reflection are best equipped to navigate the challenges they face
within their organizations, in the business environment, and in society.
Question:
Is it important for a leader to learn and master the Part 1 leadership elements
before going on to the Part 2 elements?
Hans-Werner
Kaas:
- Yes, it is
essential for leaders to first look inward to reflect deeply and gain
self-awareness. They must understand their own reality while also embracing
feedback from trusted friends and stakeholders that will guide their approach
to leading their teams and their organization. - The best leaders cultivate human-centric qualities first
because these traits allow them to build trust, inspire their teams, and build followership. Leaders can then lead
their teams and organizations more effectively, united behind a common purpose
that goes beyond financial targets. - Ultimately, human-centric leaders need to have a dual awareness of their inner self—who they are as
humans with strengths and weaknesses—and their outer context to reach their
full potential.
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance
copy of the book.
