Leaders: Creativity, Expertise, & Risk

What characteristics do you think are most important, as a leader?

You need to be humble, because you need to be able to assess yourself. Who am I? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? As a leader, your job is going to be to assemble a team that compensates for your weaknesses. If I were to draw a graph, I would say, you need to assess along three different axes. Creativity, risk awareness and expertise.

Expertise is, how much do I know about what I’m supposed to do? Risk awareness is, am I paranoid enough? Creativity is, how much am I capable of thinking outside the box? First, you need to position yourself in this triangle. Am I of the risk-aware type? Am I of the creative type? Am I of the expert type? Am I more an expert that is creative? Am I more an expert that is risk aware? Where am I, in this triangle?

Once you have assessed yourself, you assemble a team that pushes the whole to the center of gravity. You have as much creativity as risk awareness as expertise. Where this becomes difficult is that this is dynamic in time. Your expertise grows. When you get hits, one after the other, you become much more risk aware. When you grow older, your creativity is less and less at the edge. You need to keep thinking of that and this is where humility plays. The temptation is so big to say, okay, I’ve succeeded in everything. So we’ll just do it as we did before. This applies all down the chain of leadership. It’s not just the chief executive. We’re always the leader of something.

How do you cultivate humility?

Besides what you can do in personal training, nothing is more humbling than comparing. Inside your organization, you put teams together and we compare cases between two different companies. Keep comparing. You may be the most successful leader in the world, but I can always show you things that can be improved. The first one to whom this applies, is myself.