What makes a leader great? That’s what we asked leaders of four of the world’s biggest and best-known companies in this mini episode of the Being Human Is Good For Business podcast.
Despite their different backgrounds and industry sectors, these leaders all agree on the essentials of a great leader: empathy, listening, clear communication, patience, and robust dialogue.
For Gary Cohen, the CEO of Qualitor, being decisive is a key leadership skill needed to set a vision and execute a strategy to achieve it, but good leaders also need to hone softer skills, such as listening and empathy, to support their teams in achieving that vision.
Mary Riley, Vice President of Litigation at Genentech, agrees that empathy is an important element of great leadership. She also feels that clear communication is key to making great teamwork possible, by ensuring everyone on the team understands what the expectations are.
Paul Johnson, former President of International Brake Industries, tells us that patience is an important element of empathetic leadership, knowing when to step in and take the reins and when to hold back.
For Vidhu Dev, Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, that mindset plays an important role in encouraging a robust team dialogue. It makes meetings more informal while allowing all to appreciate the expertise each team member brings to the table.
LISTEN HERE:
Listen for future mini episodes where we’ll bring you highlights from all our past episodes. To hear the full interviews with the leaders featured today, download these episodes:
Episode 8: Leading Innovation with Emotional Intelligence featuring Gary Cohen
Episode 15: Empathetic Leadership Underpins Business Growth featuring Mary Riley
Episode 10: Creating Connections Beyond the Org Chart featuring Paul Johnson
Episode 12: The Winning Mindset with Vidhu Dev
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MACHINE GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. It may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.
Podcast on What Makes A Great Leader
Hello, I'm Sherrilynne Starkie and welcome to the Trilogy Effect’s podcast Being Human is Good for Business. It’s the podcast for business leaders who want to build high-performance teams and we launched it more than a year ago now. Our goal is to help people discover who they are, as a leader, and as a human being to help them unleash the full potential of their organizations.
Along the way, we've interviewed dozens of executive leaders from a broad range of businesses and not-for-profit organizations. They come from different countries, different industries, and they face different challenges, yet when asked what makes a great leader, they all tend to agree on the essentials.
For example, in Episode 8, we welcomed Gary Cohen, the CEO of Qualitor Automotive, North America's leading supplier of parts for the automotive aftermarket. He spoke about the importance of empathy in leadership.
Gary Cohen: I would say there are many fundamentals to it. One is obviously vision, setting a vision for an enterprise, a strategy and an execution. I see them being very complimentary, it’s great to have a strategy, but you need to execute against it. Great leaders are decisive and they're very ethical and I guess I would add, you know, the soft skill, which is listening and empathy.”
You hear a lot about EQ and that's very much a part of leadership today and listening and empathy are two skills that Heather and I have worked on a lot in our organizations and very much ties into the work that Trilogy Effect does.
Sherrilynne: It is a message that was echoed by Mary Riley in Episode 15. She's the Vice-President of Litigation at the biotech industry leader, Genentech.
Mary Riley: I think, fundamentally, the things that I've really learned are number one, wisdom comes from the group, not from the top of the house. Being empathetic and really understanding first, yourself and then the others on the team makes great teamwork possible. Finally there’s clarity of communications, because no one can really achieve what they need to, if they don't understand what the expectations are or where things went sideways. It’s in those areas where I like to think I’ve contributed quite a bit, but I find every day I can continue to do better.
Sherrilynne: In Episode 10, we talked to Paul Johnson, the President of International Brake Industries, which is the market leader in brake kits for the automotive aftermarket. It's been leading the industry for more than 50 years. He confirmed that having patience is crucial to empathetic leadership.
Paul Johnson: I do think that a challenging part of leadership is patience. It’s being able to know when you need to step in and take the reins and when you need to back off. That’s a hard one, I think its part and parcel of going through the ‘personality typing’ to understand more about yourself and your team.
I think it also is experience, over time, having enough battle scars to know and look back and say, well, I should've stepped in then, you know, I survived barely. So now I know next time, you know, I'm going to step in. Then, in this case, I stepped in too much and I probably stepped on the team or I stopped some creativity before it could have actually blossomed to something more productive.
So the patience element, I think, is a key part of leadership. It's a struggle, you know, when you're in the higher positions in the company, the reality is that, whoever the stakeholders are, they're expecting performance, they're expecting some type of results and accountability and someone does need to take ownership of that.
So there are timelines that you're trying to drive for, but having the patience to know when to allow the organization to come through and in a more measured pace. That's a tough one to get, but it's, frankly it's not always to pound on the table and demand. Often it is let the organization breath here, let them come through and come up with a better, a better result.
Sherrilynne: I think we can all agree that there's often not enough patience in business situations. Paul's advice should give us all pause. Yes, that's an intentional pun, but the point is that you have to have the right mindset. This is something that Vidhu Dev agrees with. She's the Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, and she joined us in Episode 12 to explain the role that mindset plays in great leadership.
Vidhu Dev: It's a different attitude and mindset that you're bringing to the table. I think that does play a really big role, like you said, on energy, on a team kind of collaboration and the output you come to at the end. I think the other part of it is encouraging robust dialogue. We tend to get caught up in PowerPoints and the formality of how you want to say things and how you want to be, and present in front of the forum that you're in.
And I think it really needs to be more informal in order to encourage that robust dialogue, because it's robust dialogue that encourages people to test their thinking, to experiment and to cross check. It's robust dialogue that ends enclosure as well. So, you're able to get all of that out, have a decision at the end and move on. That's really important, I think, as we think about innovation and what do we want to encourage, as leaders, along with appreciating the expertise we have on the teams and allowing them and empowering them to find creative ways to solve the issue at hand.
Sherrilynne: All these ideas taken together show that being human really is good for business leadership. This principle is central to everything that Trilogy Effect’s team of executive coaches and leadership development trainers bring to their work. It's also the basis for this whole podcast, so thank you very much for listening. I've included links to these interviews in the show notes, and I hope that you will listen because you'll learn so much from the experiences of these leaders who are at some of the world's biggest and best known companies.
Make sure that you never miss an episode by subscribing to this podcast. If you like the show, please record. To your friends or anyone, you know, who wants to become a better, stronger, more effective leader.
I'm your host Sherrilynne Starkie and this is the Being Human is Good for Business podcast.