Matthew Smith
While the business press tends to focus attention on macro strategic forces such as AI, geopolitics, and climate change, one of the biggest trends among experts in leadership development today is perhaps surprisingly a focus on building deeper, more “human” capacities. The call for leaders to embrace their humanity is not new. Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, which popularized competencies such as self-regulation, empathy, and social skills as critical to leadership success. More recently, however, many leading thinkers on leadership development have suggested the need for leaders to undertake even more profound internal work that in prior years was seen more as the domain of psychotherapy or even spirituality.
In their most recent global study of CEOs, Egon Zehnder, an executive search and leadership advisory firm, found that 80% of CEOs felt the need to embark on a “dual journey” of personal and organizational transformation, up from 26% only three years prior, a jump that they called the “most striking finding” in their research. Their research highlights the importance of senior leaders slowing down, listening more, and exploring their blind spots with humility, which may seem counterintuitive in the face of the ever-increasing pace of change and strategic complexity they face.
Earlier this month, four senior partners at McKinsey published The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, which makes an even more explicit argument for deepening the focus on the human side of leadership. The book synthesizes trends and lessons from over 500 CEOs who have attended McKinsey’s Bower Forum, which the authors describe as a “unique laboratory” for exploring the challenges that senior leaders face and how the most successful among them have flourished.
Kurt Strovink, one of the authors, notes that one of the surprising elements from the Bower Forum CEO discussions was the prevalence of topics related to what he calls the “personal and emotional side of how to lead.” Strovink observed that “almost 60% of the challenges raised were not business issues, but human-centric questions of how to operate with their teams, boards, families, and themselves.” This led the authors to focus on “leading from the inside out” as their core framework for successful leaders.
Leading from the Inside Out
Strovink insisted that the focus on more deeply human, inside-out leadership was not divorced from the strategic context, but rather was a direct consequence of the challenges that modern CEOs face. Strovink said, “Complexity is increasing. At the CEO level there used to be five or six big things that you were worried about. Now there are a dozen. The premium on balance and the emotional conditioning to do that well has gone up.”
Amy Elizabeth Fox, the co-founder of Mobius Executive Leadership and an expert on vertical development, makes a similar connection between the inner journey and the ability to thrive in complexity. Fox said, “Leaders with a strong inner core are more grounded and fluid. They are far better placed to guide an organization through the vast complexity and adaptive demands of the moment.”
The McKinsey authors describe a range of skills that the inside-out leader exhibits, including humility, vulnerability, selflessness, and resilience. Lest one mistakes this collection of traits as “soft,” they also note that the inner journey taken by these leaders imbues them with the confidence to make bold choices and stand up for what they believe is right. Strovink says that striking this balance of being “both bold and empowering” is one of the hallmarks of inside-out leaders: “It is amazing how much comes from their ability to govern themselves and create space within themselves to handle extra stresses and pressures.”
In a similar vein, Potential Project, a global research and leadership development firm with a focus on developing “human leaders,” describes the key task of leadership as “doing hard things in a human way.” Their Human Leader Compass describes a set of leadership mindsets and skills linked to awareness, compassion, and wisdom that leaders should develop to enhance their effectiveness.
Steps on the Journey toward Human Leadership
Both Fox and the McKinsey authors describe leadership as a journey and an exploration that requires both humility and curiosity. Fox said, “In leading from the inside out, executives turn meaningful attention to self-exploration and self-development. This enables them to understand their own emotions and habits, explore their core beliefs and values, and cultivate greater stillness and equanimity.”
Ramesh Srinivasan, another of the McKinsey co-authors, stresses both the importance and the challenge of embarking on this learning journey. “People usually don’t come and share feedback and tell leaders the truth,” Srinivasan said. “Holding up the mirror and helping people deeply reflect on tough issues is not easy.” Leaders must intentionally lower the barriers to receiving this deeper, more personal feedback and cultivate both “truth tellers” and a community of peers with whom they can open up and share challenges.
Srinivasan’s advice to those beginning their career is to start this process early by working on the muscles of humility and curiosity — “ask a lot of questions, be curious, and exercise the obligation to dissent” — and by remembering that learning is a lifelong journey with no end. “As Gandhi said, ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.’”
Perhaps the most poignant piece of advice is the one that many leaders will find the hardest to accept: the need to slow down. Fox said that “leading from the inside out asks a leader to embody practices that call them to slowing down, asking deep questions, opening their hearts, and inhabiting a very different rhythm than the hyperdrive most leaders live in.” If the experts are to be believed, those leaders who do manage to achieve this different rhythm will be rewarded — and perhaps achieve a more sustainable and balanced life in the process.
Forbes
