How CEOs Learn To Lead From The Inside Out As Part Of Their Leadership Journey

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.

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