Introduction and leadership journey

0:00 You also have a new book coming out. Curt Strovink: Our group's work has focused on helping CEOs achieve their full potential and role. We think that's one of the biggest opportunities for global business. The book that's coming out is called "The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out". It builds on some earlier work we did around CEO excellence, where we examined what excellence looks like for high-performing CEOs who have delivered significant value in terms of total shareholder return and other metrics.

0:57 The thesis of the book, in a nutshell, is that learning to lead others often involves first learning how to lead yourself. There's a link between leading oneself and leading others. The book explores the relationship between these two sides of leadership. Michael Krigsman: What I found particularly interesting about your book is the focus on what we might call soft attributes - being self-aware, mindful, and collaborative. Of course, these are important personal and professional attributes for anybody. But you focus on this for CEOs.

1:31 Curt Strovink: As you point out, Michael, it's kind of counterintuitive because you might think the senior-most integrating officer of a company is always in charge, with a strong form of clear leadership. But we found that some of the best ones show traits of humility, vulnerability, and learning to lead through others. These softer skills are really important. Sometimes, when people struggle with these skills, it's traced to how they govern themselves—how they react to stress, ambiguity, or complexity.

2:07 We found a link between these aspects as we examined hundreds of CEOs. It's strange because we're coming out of an imperial CEO era, where CEOs were seen as all-knowing and all-powerful. I think we're definitely beyond that era now. The expectations of CEOs with multiple stakeholders are different. That's part of why these softer skills are much more natural to put in scope. People sometimes don't recognize the true value of the softer side. We've found that CEOs who operate at the top of their game often treat the soft stuff as disciplined matters, just like they treat the hard stuff of numbers.

2:36 They manage both sides and don't see it as soft. They see it as highly important for culture, leadership development, and those things. There are probably several reasons why the softer skills historically weren't as focused on, but I think they've now come back into scope. Given the rapid changes in the world, I think the requirement for adaptability, change, and agility in organizations and in leaders has gone way up. Michael Krigsman: I can certainly say that having interviewed hundreds of senior leaders from the largest companies on CXOTalk, one of the surprising aspects is the humility and humanness of the folks who I would think are the best leaders that I've interviewed.

3:41 Curt Strovink: I find that too. It might be that CEOs stand at an intersection where they get to see the effects of different leadership forms, and they learn over time. You'll often see this in the course of somebody's CEO tenure, where initially they might still be using the operating model from their previous role. You'll see how they evolve that role sometimes in leading and learning. But I think you're right about humility, especially if it can be done in a decisive way, creating an open space for learning and continuous improvement.

4:42 I think those kinds of skills go a long way to making organizations more agile, bold, willing to take risks, and able to learn how to respond. Michael Krigsman: When we talk about leadership disruption is a crucial part of that. Right now, we're facing this disruption