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Two decades of coaching leaders and developing myself as a leader have taught me a key lesson: Leadership isnt a destination. Just when you think youve reached the top of the mountain, look upyoull see another peak waiting. The truth is, theres no secret sauce for leading yourself or others. Leadership is an ever-evolving process of learning and growing. The best leaders never stop evolving. Here are four lessons every great leader eventually learns. 1. Humility is a strength Humility is often mistaken for weakness. In one survey, more than half of fifth and sixth graders described humility as embarrassed, sad, or shy. Adults often confuse it with humiliation. But groundbreaking research tells a different story. Bradley Owens and David Hekman found that humble leaders dont assume success is guaranteed. They test their progress, revise plans, and seek feedback. They empower others to take initiative and celebrate team wins over personal credit. Far from soft, humility gives leaders flexibility and strength. They avoid reacting from ego or abusing power, and instead lead from integrity, self-control, and emotional intelligence. 2. Great leaders learn from others Strong leaders know they dont know it all. They constantly seek wisdom from others and expand their perspective beyond their own experience. Remember the saying: If youre the smartest person in the room, youre in the wrong room. The best leaders deliberately put themselves in spaces where they can learn, grow, and connect with people further down the path. They remain lifelong students. 3. Patience gives you an edge Patience doesnt always get attention and it wont make any headlines, but its one of leaderships most underrated strengths. (I cover patience extensively in my new book.) Research shows that patient people make more progress toward tough goals, feel more satisfied when they achieve them, and experience less stress and depression. Impatient leaders tend to jump to conclusions and act impulsively. Patient leaders, by contrast, are steady and rational. In conflict, they listen first, respond calmly, and diffuse tension. That kind of presence builds trust and resilience in teams. 4. Self-awareness is nonnegotiable In a study reported by Harvard Business Review, teams with less self-aware team members made worse decisions, coordinated poorly, and struggled with conflict compared with teams led by self-aware individuals. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Leaders who cultivate it see the bigger picture, regulate emotions, and empathize with others. As emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman put it: If your emotional abilities arent in hand, if you dont have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you cant have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. In closing, remember: Leadership is about committing to the climb. And heres the real test: You dont prove your leadership on the easy days when everything goes smoothly. You prove it in the moments when your patience is tested, your humility is questioned, and your self-awareness is the difference between escalating a conflict or inspiring a breakthrough. Keep climbing. Keep growing. The best leaders arent defined by the peak theyve reached, but by their willingness to take the next step. Marcel Schwantes This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
On a recent flight, I watched a woman try to sneak an oversize briefcase and suitcase onto the plane. When challenged, she waved her boarding pass at the gate agent and declared, Do you see what that says? pointing to her top-tier status. That means I get to do what I want. Her sense of entitlement was staggering, but familiar. Leaders of organizational transformation, such as major digital/data analytical capability overhauls, or launching a new set off offerings across the globe, often cling to equally delusional rationalizations. And just like that traveler, their self-justifications backfire. The odds of transformation success are already dismal: 70% to 80% of efforts fail. While external forces can derail even the best-laid plans, more often its leaders self-inflicted fallacies that undo their own initiatives. Ive identified five particularly destructive fallacies that appear again and again. Recognizing them is the first step. Choosing better responses is the only way through. 1. The Myth of the Mandate: Repeating Yesterdays Wins Justification: Ive done this before, and I was hired to do it again.Reality: Past victories offer wisdom, not formulas. Many leaders believe their résumé is a ready-made solution. They assume that because a strategy, campaign, or turnaround worked once, it should work again. A consumer-products executive I advised had saved a skincare brand with a precise campaign. When he joined a tech firm, he tried to cut-and-paste the same formula. The market, customer base, and competitors were different, and the approach failed miserably. The danger of this fallacy is that it hides behind genuine strength. Leaders should use their experience, but if they impose it as a mandate, they miss the nuances of the new context. Teams sense the mismatch, and enthusiasm drains as people see yesterdays playbook failing on todays field. The antidote: Treat mandates as invitations, not marching orders. Start by studying your new environment as if you were an anthropologist: walk the halls, ask questions, listen deeply. Instead of asking What worked last time? ask What does this context demand? Extract principlessuch as how you built trust or navigated resistancefrom your past, but resist the temptation to replicate recipes. Thats how you turn past wisdom into present credibility. 2. Excessive Tolerance: Making Change Optional Justification: Im sure theyll get on board eventually, we just need to give them time.Reality: Some people have no intention of getting on board. When leaders become exhausted, confrontation often feels harder than compromise. Deadlines slip, underperformers are excused, and resistance festers. Employees learn quickly that change is recommended but not required. The costs are steep. Accountability erodes, peers resent double standards, and even those committed to change begin asking, Why should I bother if others arent held to it? The antidote: Sharpen accountability and send clear, early signals. Use symbolssometimes tough onesto show that the urgency of now is real. Dashboards of metrics tracking progress and regressions are common. Sometimes removing long-tenured leaders whose behavior contradicts the change is necessary. When actions dont match commitments, call it out. Consequences matter. Research on loss aversion shows that people fight harder to avoid losses than to gain bonuses. That means accountability must accompany rewards. Yes, it will feel lonely. Yes, you may lose popularity. But credibility depends on consistency. Tolerance masquerades as empathy, but it undermines urgency. Leaders who name and enforce consequences create trust, because people know the rules apply to everyone. 3. Settling For Dysfunction: Accepting the Wrong Norms Justification: It is what it is. With time, people will come around.Reality: Without sustained pressure, dysfunction becomes the new normal. One COO I worked with entered his role determined to challenge entrenched practices. But when resistance persisted, his frustration grew. Eventually he lost his composure in a board meeting, mirroring the very volatility of the previous CEO hed been hired to replace. Employees sighed, At least with the old guy, we knew what to expect. Instead of disrupting dysfunction, he had absorbed it. This rationalization is subtle. Leaders begin doubting their instincts: Maybe its me. Maybe Im asking too much. Surrounded by colleagues who shrug and say Rome wasnt built in a day, leaders can slowly adopt resignation as their operating norm. The antidote: Stay differentiated. Make time to decode the unhealthy patterns you seewhy do meetings after the meeting carry more energy than the actual meeting? Why does feedback trigger overreaction? Then encode what should be trueoptimism, accountability, or healthy debateand measure progress against it. Even incremental wins reinforce hope and prevent you from being seduced into complacency. Transformation requires leaders to behave differently than the culture they inherit. Settling into dysfunction might feel like relief, but it heralds surrender. 4. Dismissing the Devil You Know: Protecting the Wrong People Justification: She may not be perfect, but I cant afford to lose her now. Better the devil you know.Reality: The devil you know is still the devil. Few decisions are harder than removing a long-tenured executive. Leaders justify delay by citing loyalty, sunk costs, or fear of disruption. But keeping misaligned leaders is corrosive. It demoralizes others, who see that performance doesnt matter. It consumes disproportionate time and energy. And it erodes credibility, as people conclude the leader lacks the courage to act. The antidote: Evict the devils. Not everyone should make the journey. Leaving someone in a role they cannot succeed in isnt compassion, its cruelty. It sets them up for failure and broadcasts to everyone else that standards are optional. Yes, exits are painful. But acute pain from a tough decision is far better than chronic pain from avoiding it. Free yourself to focus on people already predisposed to advance the vision. When you remove dams, momentum flows again. 5. Reporting Enmeshment: Confusing Emulation with Growth/h2> Justification: Weve been a great team for years, and shes now ready to succeed me.Reality: Long-term reporting relationships often breed co-dependence, not development. Mentoring is essential. But when a promising leader spends too long in one bosss orbit, they risk becoming a replica rather than an original. Ive seen organizations elevate successors who sound and act just like their predecessor, only to find that more of the same isnt what transformation requires. Enmeshment feels safe but creates blind spots. It can also choke off opportunities for broader growth. Without varied assignments, leaders stagnate, lacking the agility transformation demands. The antidote: Move talent around, early and often. Diverse experiences stretch leaders styles and voices. Assign high-potentials to struggling business units, rival functions, or cross-border roles. The more of the organization they see, the strongerand more authenticthey become. Emulation is admirable, but growth requires mobility. Choosing the Path of Progress Transformation isnt undone by markets alone. More often, its these rationalizations, comforting stories leaders tell themselves, that derail progress. The woman at the airport thought her special status exempted her from the rules. Leaders often think the same. But leaders who resist these fallacies, and instead choose accountability, contextual wisdom, differentiation, courage, and mobility, create transformations that last. The costs of indulging rationalizations are dire: wasted time, lost credibility, and failed change. The benefits of escaping them are equally profound: resilient organizations, energized people, and futures worth building. Dont let the justifications win.
Category:
E-Commerce
The announcement came suddenly on Thursday. A Fortune 500 technology client needed an interim CFO immediately. Its previous executive had departed unexpectedly, leaving a $2.3 billion merger and reorganization in limbo. By Monday, Denise, the number two finance executive, occupied the interim CFO post. She faced 10,000 skeptical employees and a board expecting miracles. Interim leadership has exploded: The number of Fortune 1000 companies that have used an interim CXO has increased 117% since 2022. Yet most leaders enter these roles unprepared for the unique demands that await. Not only do these leaders suffer, companies do as well. When leadership transitions fail, organizations face a 20% higher likelihood of losing direct reports, experience 20% lower employee engagement, and incur replacement costs up to 10 times the executive’s salary. I’ve helped several interim executives land the job: here’s what worked. In this piece, paid subscribers will learn: Five tried and true strategies interim executives can use to land the job The questions they should ask to assess their performance Common pitfalls to avoid 1. From Methodical Relationship Building to Accelerated Trust Unlike executives afforded the luxurious nine months before performance expectations kick in, interim leaders face immediate scrutiny. Organizations typically place them during crises that don’t afford more reasonable onboarding runways. If externally hired, their high fees create financial pressure for quick returns. It can take months to build relationships, and understand where the problems in an organization lie. I worked with an interim COO at a manufacturing company who cracked this code. The COO and a small team conducted 20-minute interview sessions with 70% of the 350 stakeholders over a two week period to map the real power structure of the organization. This allowed him to identify needed wins neglected by the prior COO within 18 days. The learning: dont assume people with big titles have the deepest and most impactful influence. Here are some questions to surface needed relational information quickly and accelerate trust building: Who are the three most influential people beyond the org chart? What’s the one thing everyone complains about, but no one fixes? Which relationships will make or break my first initiative? What unspoken rules govern how decisions really get made? 2. From Holistic Solutions to Getting Traction with Visible Wins Instead of focusing on holistic solutions that include too much at once, getting traction in a few critical areas through visible and well-timed wins can take you to the finish line of landing the big role. These wins must coincide with high visibility, broadly supported parallel initiatives, and experience minimal disruption. As an example, an interim CHRO I worked with in a rapidly growing global Fortune 500 retailer was appointed to stop a talent hemorrhage in a flagship brand. The loss of recently hired talent was causing confusion, communication problems, and erroneous product assortments being sent to stores. Sales were suffering and internal teams started blaming each other for the errors. There were several areas across the company that needed to be addressed, but the CHRO honed in on what was underneath her control: onboarding new talent. The existing onboarding program for employees was expensive, lengthy, and outdated. However, a full redesign of the program would have taken eight months and rolling out the program would have taken another year. Instead, the CHRO and her new team laser focused on redesigning a module for field and merchandising employees: the employees who could make the most impact in fixing the organizations problems. The team transformed the 21-day onboarding program, which had a 23% dropout rate, into an efficient 10-day program with an 8% drop rate. The program also trained new hires in the field more efficiently on how to communicate with product decision-makers in merchandising. The result: better product assortment and sales for the brand, more collaborative relationships across merchandising and field organizations, and an improvement of 15% retention in the onboarding program. All of this was done within the interim CHROs tenure, over the period of a month without disruptions, and was universally celebrated as an all around win. Well-timed wins to focus on can be easily identified with some simple questions: What’s causing the most visible pain across departments? Which broken process would everyone celebrate fixing? What improvement would make my biggest skeptic an ally? Where can I demonstrate competence without threatening existing structures? 3. From Moving Quickly to Progressive Decision-Making I often observe new leaders put immense pressure on themselves to achieve something quickly, as a means of demonstrating their worth. Many times this leads to catastrophic overaction. An interim CTO inherited a cybersecurity software product failure crisis that resulted in a public customer backlash and a steady quarterly profit loss of 45%. Instead of a five-alarm fire reaction, he chose a graduated approach. His 30-day plan included an initial round of tactical fixes, while continuing to gather intelligence and keeping open lines of communication with both customer and investment communities. By day 60, armed with data and buy-in, he unveiled a short-term strategy to fix the points of failure using customer feedback to improve security and user intuitiveness. For those existing customers that participated and were pleased with the new softwares performance, discounts and incentives were provided through a new program. Overall, the CTO mitigated an initial potential profit loss of 34% and increased sales steadily 20% per quarter thereafter. Both metrics fed into a longer-term strategy that was being developed in parallel. Hitting pause on moving hastily allows you to step back and ask what decisions can be made incrementally for progressive success? Questions that can help are: What decisions are easily reversible if wrong? Which stakeholders must I consult before irreversible changes are made? How can I test hypotheses on small scales first? What data moves me from tactical to strategic decisions? 4. From Steward to Serious Candidate Interim executives are often perceived as more stewards of the status quo, seat warmers, until the permanent executive arrives. To avoid this pitfall, I recommend taking two precautions. Buffer risk by coalition building: Denise’s tech company merger carried enormous risks stemming from clashing cultures. Rather than freezing at the face of this risk, she identified 12 “culture carriers,” advocates from both organizations, forming an integration advisory committee, who became the companys informal culture coalition. The merger, projected for 22 months, was completed in 18 and considered widely as a success. Role clarity negotiation focusing on management success: Because interim executives are automatically given shorter-term objectives as a test-drive strategy before being offered the permanent spot, I advise interim leaders to ask for more. By actively working with sponsors to clarify the longer-term expectations of the job, interim leaders can make headway on demonstrating their managerial skills and ability to deliver on longer-term goals. One interim CFO I advised drafted her own ideal CFO description of the role and what would be required of her so she could clarify what impact she could make if she were operating as the full-time, permanent CFO. She reviewed the description with her board sponsor and documented weekly progress reports with this criteria after their meetings. This created transparency about both short- and long-term operational plans and their intended strategic outcomes. This systematic communication transformed perceptions of her as a placeholder executive to a proven C-suite ready leader within three to four months. By month six, she had landed the job. Demonstrate your abilities by asking the following: What evidence can demonstrate my ability to perform in a longer-term capacity? How do I maintain momentum while navigating the potential Caretaker perception? What three initiatives warrant acceleration versus transformation? What’s my exit strategy if the role doesn’t convert? 5. From Shifting Assumptions to Reputation Intelligence Two to three months in, stakeholder misperceptions crystallize but haven’t hardened. This critical window is the perfect opportunity for course correctionyet most operate blind to ones internal reputation. Dr. Chen’s cautionary tale illustrates this perfectly. As acting head of medicine within a highly esteemed healthcare institute, she delivered strong financial results with her CEOs support yet remained oblivious to her profound unpopularity amongst peers and her teams. When a permanent appointment seemed imminent, 40% of medical staff departed within six months. A 360-feedback check would have revealed trust scores 70% below average at a time when she had a chance to turn it around. Unfortunately, this feedback was obtained in exit interviews as most knew of the strong relationship between Dr. Chen and the CEO. It took several months before Dr. Chen began to intellectually process the disparity between what the exit data showed and her CEOs exuberant support of her. Sadly, because the transition was not well supported through proper vetting and personal development, it simply became too late for the board to regain confidence in Dr. Chen as a full time candidate. Unlike external recruitment’s gradual relationship-building, interim leaders are left in limbo. They arent given proper evaluations but people form impressions of them anyway. Companies should treat interim appointments like external searches from day one: establish formal evaluation criteria, capture feedback systematically, and reset relationship expectations immediately. I advise leaders to get ahead of such challenges by negotiating support: 360 leadership evaluations with recommendations and follow up, 1:1 executive transition and team coaching that surfaces differing needs, values, and personalities. Get ahead of potential reputation challenges by shifting assumptions to intelligence through these questions: How might peers perceive me differently as their leader? What concerns are discussed privately but not raised directly? Which actions have been misinterpreted, under which context(s) and how? Who provides genuinely candid feedback? When and how should I seek feedback? Interim does not always mean temporary if you possess a serious drive and desire to land the permanent role. If mastered, these five strategies can transform interim appointments into securing your role in the C-suite. And the rewardsboth personal and organizationalcan prove remarkable.
Category:
E-Commerce
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