How CEOs learn to lead from the inside out

To lead others successfully, look inside first.

Amid the complexity and intensity of the ever-changing world, a human-centered approach to leadership is more important than ever. During a McKinsey Live session, senior partners Dana Maor and Kurt Strovink discussed their newly published book The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, co-written with senior partner Ramesh Srinivasan and senior partner emeritus Hans-Werner Kaas.

To become more effective, leaders must first dig deeply into themselves and take a journey of self-discovery:

• Reflect. Who am I at my core? What motivates me? And what’s no longer working?
• Seek and embrace feedback. Have open conversations emphasizing a high ratio of active listening to talking.
• Learn continuously and intentionally. Developing new skills broadens your reference base and releases creativity.
• Distill your personal purpose. What’s its source? What’s at its core?
• Evolve your personal way of operating. It’s easy to replicate what you’ve always done; it’s hard to change it.

Only then can a leader authentically cultivate and strengthen the personal attributes essential for modern leadership—humility, confidence, selflessness, vulnerability, resilience, and versatility. Leaders with lasting impact use their newfound insights to release their organizations’ full potential, by empowering their people, embedding purpose, instilling empathy, inspiring boldness and inspiration, and encouraging truth telling and fearless learning.

Among the many examples in the book of leaders who used newfound knowledge of themselves to steer their organizations to new heights:

• Former Swiss Life CEO Bruno Pfister decentralized the organization after realizing it was only his own ego stood in the way of making this shift that was in the best interest of all his people and the company’s performance.
• Wendy Kopp, CEO and cofounder of Teach for All, extended her organization’s reach to 60 countries by empowering others to create solutions in new geographies and contexts.

Q&A from the session

1. How can a CEO help other leaders in the company become more human-centered leaders, while they are on their own learning journey?

First, a CEO must prioritize their own leadership journey—to figure out who they are, what drives them, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they want to show up every day. Role modeling can go a long way toward cultivating more human-centered leadership among teams. There are a handful of actions to take that can build human-centered leadership into the foundation of an organization. These include establishing a method of assessing team effectiveness, engaging key external stakeholders for insights, building continuous learning capabilities, regularly communicating organizational values and purpose, and making certain that human-centered leadership is embedded into all levels of the organization’s processes and systems.

2. How can leaders develop a strong core to guide their leadership?

Leaders can develop a strong core through introspection and using the insights that they gather about themselves to guide their approach. They begin by conducting a self-assessment to understand their motivations, sources of energy, and what may no longer be serving them. Leaders should seek and embrace feedback from others they know, trust, and can communicate with openly. Learning continuously and intentionally can give leaders new perspectives, including helping them understand from where their personal purpose is derived. Adjusting their personal operating model to foster new habits, behaviors, and skills can challenge leaders to approach their role in different ways. It’s important to remember that leadership is a journey, and this process of learning about and evolving oneself should be ongoing.

3. What does “adopt fearless learning” mean?

People learn when they make mistakes, perhaps even more than when they succeed. To adopt fearless learning means to approach things from an unbiased perspective with the willingness to adapt to dynamic conditions. Fearless learning requires a leader to trust their teams to do the right thing, empowers them to act boldly, prepares them for both expected and unexpected challenges and outcomes, and provides them with a safe space to make mistakes and grow from them. Doing so can help establish a culture that inherently nurtures team members’ individual leadership qualities, including humility and resiliency, for the benefit of the organization.

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For more on this topic, see the article “The ‘inside out’ leadership journey: How personal growth creates the path to success.” Watch the author talk about “The transformational approach to leadership,” or listen to the podcast “It’s cool to be kind: The value of empathy at work,” on McKinsey.com.