annrajaramLessons from Leadership Lab
This post lists some insightful leadership lessons from the book ‘The Edge’ by Michael Useem.
This book has 10 chapters about leaders who reinvented, turned around, or catapulted their firms to resounding success. Each CEO has a different background story and path to success. Yet we see many commonalities within this diversity. Most of these factors are traits that managers (or any freelancer/professional/ business owner) should try to learn and apply to increase their odds of success.
This is definitely a book that I will be reading again and again since it is filled with so many gems of wisdom. Some important takeaways are listed below:
Leadership is a journey, not a destination. No matter how far you come in your career, there will always be new crises to resolve, new skills to learn, and new challenges that keep cropping up.
Great leaders are the ones who can look beyond the curve and predict the future. They prepare for uncertainty and recognize change is the only constant! These world-class leaders actively leverage change and disruption and convert them into opportunities.
Leaders come in different forms and backgrounds. The book has stories about the CEO of Estee Lauder who inherited his family business, Progressive (worked up from a phone agent), Dupont (C-suite exec with 7 different firms!) This is an excellent reminder to readers that anyone can have a stab at the top roles, as long as you have the right mindset and strategic career moves.
What got you here won’t get you there! This adage might sound cliched but it is very true for leadership in the modern workplace. For example, in the past 10 years, C-suite execs have faced crisis after crisis, like recession, pandemic, political conflict, changing societal norms, rapid digital transformation, the rise of AI, climate change and so much more! Truly good leaders know that the reasons for disruption will keep changing, but they will keep coming! The key to continued success and leaving a stellar legacy is making sure to move fast and overcome these disruptions.
Value of a great team. Leaders need a brilliant and effective team that they can count on for expertise and execution. Delegation and influence go hand in hand as the span of control gets weaker as you move up.
If you have done an effective job as a leader, your successor should be vastly dissimilar from you. New expertise for a new world!
Swissknife, not laser. Building a diverse range of skills (people, technology, and domain) is needed. While past situations will never be a 1:1 match for new unprecedented changes, it will allow you to fall back on those experiences comfort with uncertainty, keep a cool head and think creatively for innovative solutions.
This post is day 02 of my participation in the Leadership Lessons writing challenge. The original challenge was issued by Niru – details here.