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INTRODUCTION

On yet another perfect day in Northern California, a group of CEOs from various industries filed into an airy conference room with tall windows overlooking lush hills. Wine country's renowned weather and scenic views weren't the main attraction, however; these leaders came here to pause, reflect, learn, and develop, which is hard to do when you're busy at work. What they talk about will surprise you. At this session—one of McKinsey & Company's Bower Forum programs for CEO leadership development—the conversation, as always, started with strategy, operations, finances, talent, and other topics you'd expect executives to care about, but soon enough, we started to explore issues that can be hard to share anywhere but there.

A CEO of a major biotech company started talking about how he was struggling to lead his company into the future. He had a very powerful board whose members had their own strong opinions about the direction of the firm. He complained that every time he tried to initiate a bold move, his directors tried to push him in a different direction. He felt tentative and frustrated.

The other CEOs in the room started to ask him about his skills, his knowledge, and his vision for the company. Ramesh, one of the authors of this book and a Bower Forum coach, encouraged the CEO to think about why he felt insecure given his talent and his in-depth knowledge of the industry. "I asked him," recalls Ramesh, "to think about how much he has actually put into the business and the commitment he has made and that he should focus on what his investors and patients want."

 

The biotech CEO started to gradually open up to the others. He was learning how to get to know himself better, to recognize his strengths, to set aside his biases, and to understand that he needed to listen more closely to others and deliver on what his constituents wanted. As the retreat came to a close, everyone who had been in the room with the CEO saw a changed person, someone with a deeper self-awareness and a renewed sense of confidence—someone willing to make bold moves. It was no coincidence that the executive went on to build one of the most financially and scientifically successful biotech firms in the world.

As McKinsey senior partners, we have worked closely with hundreds of leaders like this biotech CEO, who hail from both Fortune Global 500 corporations and leading nonprofits. Two of us, Hans-Werner and Ramesh, are co-deans of McKinsey's Bower Forum CEO leadership development program, a two-day event where over the last ten years more than 500 of the world's top CEOs and business leaders—in aggregate they oversee 13 million employees—have opened their hearts and minds to confront personal and professional challenges. One of our coauthors, Dana, is the global co-head and European leader of McKinsey's People & Organizational Performance Practice. She partners with organizations to build leaders and talent and also coaches at the Bower Forum. Our other coauthor, Kurt, leads McKinsey's global CEO Initiative to help build great CEOs and CEO counselors. The Bower program is the culmination of the best thinking on leadership at McKinsey, whose roughly 3,000 partners work with 7,000 corporate clients around the world. Here McKinsey's best practices in leadership are put to work, offering CEOs a proven approach to reinvent themselves. We want to share with you what the four of us have learned from coaching some of the world's best leaders, both from working with them at the Bower Forum and through our consulting practices at McKinsey.

Over the years, we've seen that the best leaders learn to become more self-aware and self-reflective. They realize that the brake that's holding them back as they're trying to press the accelerator is their own psychological conditioning, which is rooted in the habits and behaviors that, ironically, got them where they are. We offer in this book a step-by-step approach for leaders to reinvent themselves both professionally and personally. It is a journey that helps a person change the psychological, emotional, and ultimately the human attributes of leadership that can prevent them from reaching the highest levels of excellence.

We first became interested in the human side of leadership after seeing many skilled people who had mastered all the right executive skills—financial acumen, strategic and operational management, and system thinking—and who felt confident and powerful yet struggled to link their vision for success with the actual performance of their organizations and failed to spark passion in their employees. They would lead their team with a rousing battle cry, only to turn and see that no one was following them or, at best, that employees were following them without enthusiasm and energy.

After a careful analysis of what was holding back these otherwise talented leaders, we concluded that on a deep, psychological level they were not authentically connecting with themselves and, equally important, with others on their team. At the Bower Forum programs and other McKinsey leadership development sessions we led, everyone knew how to define and acquire the logical, tangible skills of leadership. But when we asked how they could become both a logical and a human-centric leader—one who is more self-aware, empathetic, humble, reflective, vulnerable, and consequently more inspiring, resilient, and balanced—the pathway to acquiring those personal attributes was much harder to describe.