Exceptional Leadership

I participated in a webinar today on Exceptional Leadership hosted by Bill Barnett, Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at Stanford Graduate School of Business (https://www.barnetttalks.com/). Key takeaways:

Important skills/traits for leaders:

1. Must be able to retroactively rationalize; and
2. Must take learning from the past (the retroactive rationalization part) and use it as a forward-looking lens to direct people.

Commonalities of adaptable companies (similar to bio-evolutionary theory):

1. Variation. Adaptable companies have leaders who can create a safe place for non-consensus – space that allows for discovery;
2. Selection. The leaders take an idea forward and test with a desired outcome of learning. The learning (sometimes it is failure - hopefully fast and cheap, if so) is then used to update strategy;
3. Retention. The company/people retain what they have learned and use it to scale (execute).

The leader’s role:

It is not your job to know the future, or to create what’s next, but to create a system that allows discovery of the future (using variation, selection, and retention).

Barnett’s final thoughts:

The two or three strong skills that got you to where you are in an organization are not enough, a leader must expand the role to create context that makes other people great and helps them create a path forward.

Check out his website, look for his presentations, and read his books. Bill Barnett is a clear thinker who talks “plainly about success, failure, and life in organizations.”