Some of the most innovative and creative people in history succeeded because they were versatile. They were able to master more than one discipline and then combine them to forge new ideas and inventions. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, the quintessential Renaissance man, was a writer, printer, scientist, and politician. He played a key role in drafting the Declaration of Independence, helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end the American Revolution, and published Poor Richard’s Almanack, which helped shape American political thought.
In this chapter excerpt from our new book, The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out (Portfolio, September 2024), we explore how today’s business leaders can similarly turn their diverse experiences into meaningful outcomes.
Today’s leaders must run their organizations while coping with a growing and shifting number of challenging externalities, including supply chain disruptions, inflation, political polarization, and global unrest. The increased rate of technological change—especially innovations such as generative and applied AI—is dramatically affecting both business models and the way people work. Generational differences are also adding to the complexity, as baby boomer, Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z workers express different preferences for how they work and what they expect from leaders and organizations. Increasingly, they are looking for human-centered leaders who give them a sense of purpose, inspire them, and demonstrate care for their well-being. In the next few years, an entirely new set of external challenges will undoubtedly come along to test the resolve and skills of every leader. At the same time, an ever-expanding lineup of constituents—investors, activists, government officials, the media—are pressuring CEOs, who ultimately need the support of these varied cohorts to succeed.
To deal with these challenges, leaders will need a mix of humility, confidence, selflessness, vulnerability, and resilience. They will likely find, however, that these qualities, while crucial, are not sufficient to get the job done. Like Ben Franklin, they will also need to be versatile. In our conversations with a range of successful global leaders, we’ve observed that the best ones are versatile in the following three ways: they have pursued diverse experiences in their careers, they are constantly curious to learn new things, and they have mastered the dynamics of interacting with a variety of stakeholders.
In short, versatile leaders know how to go broad, when to go deep, and how and when to expand their range, make trade-offs, and find the right balance between professionalism and empathy. They are good at what they do but they also know how to break out of their comfort zones. They continually challenge themselves and their organizations.
Do what feels uncomfortable
One thing we noticed about some of the most successful leaders is that most credit their career trajectories to a singular formula. Some make it to the top by being marketing whizzes. Others are skillful cost cutters and restructurers. Others know how to grow a business. Whatever the bundle of skills, most of these leaders operate in only one basic mode. They do what they’re good at and feel comfortable with, and they get rewarded for that behavior.
But having a single strength might not always be what’s needed to run a large, complicated organization. As John Plant, the CEO of Howmet Aerospace, explains, “So you get hired as CEO and you manage well the first phase of the cycle, which might require someone who has restructuring skills. But then, after three or four years, the company pivots to a growth mode, and because you don’t have the right skills, the board may fire you. Very few people have the experience or versatility to be able to operate in those different modes.”
In 2000, for example, when the dot-com stock bubble burst, the leaders of those online companies, who had been nurturing fast growth for years, suddenly found themselves managing for profitability. Instead of spending whatever it might take to grow, they had to pivot and find ways to save money by laying people off, canceling projects, and eliminating waste. Those are two entirely different sets of muscles, and a leader has to be versatile enough to make the switch. Much of this comes down to what kinds of experience leaders have. If they lack certain types of experience, they must find people both inside and outside the organization to complement any gaps.
Michael Fisher, who has been the CEO of three organizations—the nonprofit Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the global automotive supplier company Premier Manufacturing Support Services, and the Cincinnati Regional Chamber—says that on his way up the ladder, he found that people in each of these spheres genuinely wanted to share their knowledge and be helpful. Early in his career, soon after he graduated from Stanford, he was an associate athletic director at Northwestern University, managing all the school’s sports teams except for football and men’s basketball. “I was aware,” he says, “that I was never going to know more about women’s field hockey or men’s baseball than those coaches did, so I spent time building my relationships with them and understanding how I could help them to be successful.”
Fisher kept that mindset throughout his career. When he was running Premier Manufacturing Support Services, for instance, he hired a former General Motors maintenance superintendent who had worked all over the world and peppered him with questions until he felt comfortable in an industry that was new to him.
Those striving to become CEOs should make sure they put themselves into a range of environments, situations, and challenges where they can grow a varied set of skills. At one point, they might volunteer to, say, help with a big restructuring. At another point, they might decide to run a midsize company that wants to grow from $500 million in revenue to $5 billion over the next five years. Says former Ford CEO Mark Fields, “Just because I say I want to be ten pounds lighter and three inches taller doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. But if you’re putting yourself in positions in your career to get these different experiences, you’re going to learn how to be a utility infielder, and you will have that muscle memory that you’ll need when you have to pivot from growth to cost cutting.”
Why is being a versatile CEO so important? Because it can help leaders effectively engage with employees and other stakeholders and make a big impact on the bottom line. Before John Plant headed up Howmet Aerospace, he was the CEO of the global auto parts manufacturer TRW. In that job, he displayed the kind of versatility required to handle diverse operating situations. When he won the top job at TRW, in 2003, the global auto parts industry was humming along. Then, with the financial crisis of 2008, demand in the automotive industry dried up, and the global economy stalled. TRW, which made a variety of technology products, including airbags and stability control systems, saw its stock, which had been trading in the high $20s, fall to $3.60 a share in early 2009. In the first quarter of 2009, the once-profitable company reported a loss of $131 million. GM and Chrysler, two of TRW’s biggest customers, were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and were headed for a US government bailout. The Center for Automotive Research predicted that the possible collapse of the industry could destroy three million US jobs. The outlook, to put it mildly, was bleak.
Plant and his team went to work. Starting in 2009, he withdrew TRW’s financial guidance that he had been sharing with stock analysts, executed numerous rounds of layoffs, including engineers at the company’s technical center—the source of much of TRW’s innovation—and began closing and restructuring plants to reduce its cost structure. The retrenchment worked, and by 2010 the bleeding at TRW had slowed. Plant then switched hats and embarked on a growth mode, investing in new products and expanding internationally. At the end of Plant’s tenure, in 2015, TRW employed more than 65,000 people in approximately 190 major facilities around the world and was ranked among the top ten automotive suppliers globally. That year, TRW was sold to the German auto parts maker ZF Friedrichshafen for $105 a share in a deal that valued the company at $13.5 billion.
What accounts for Plant’s versatility? Part of it, of course, can be traced to his innate abilities, but he also worked hard to learn how to straddle cost cutting, growth, marketing, and delivering innovation. One tip: he says that throughout his career, he made it a point to pursue new positions with challenges that made him uncomfortable so he would not find himself pigeonholed as a “one note” manager.
Go deep
A variety of operating skills is the first prerequisite for cultivating versatility. The second is to be a deep, creative thinker. Most leaders think of themselves as deep thinkers, but are they really? How many of them really know or understand the intricacies of their business? Some take a “fake it until you make it” mentality, brushing over technical details or not truly understanding the competitive landscape, hoping that others in the organization will explain. We’re not saying that every leader has to master at a molecular level the products or services they provide. However, versatile leaders must think deeply about what makes an organization tick and its different capabilities and assets.
Mastering the details of a company’s business might seem a daunting task for a CEO running a high-tech or biotech company, especially if the CEO rose through the ranks via finance or marketing. Yes, a formal education in a particular discipline certainly helps, but the lack of one shouldn’t discourage a leader from buckling down and absorbing the intricacies of the business. The key is to be constantly curious.
John Plant displayed this kind of avid curiosity after he left TRW, in 2015, and later became the CEO of Arconic and then of Howmet Aerospace, jobs that demanded he dive into the intricacies of an entirely new industry. Howmet makes jet engine blades, structural components, and other high-tech parts for commercial and military aircraft, among other product lines. While there are some similarities to the production of auto parts, the aerospace industry is vastly different in both the technologies it uses and the markets it serves. When Plant switched from auto parts to the aerospace industry, he says he put himself into what he calls “deep-thinking mode” to find solutions. “It really just starts off with a lot of rigor,” he explains. “You analyze, decide, and—probably even more important—have the confidence to carry out that decision.”
Plant began by trying to fathom how the aerospace industry differed from the auto industry. It wasn’t only that the products were dissimilar—jet turbine blades versus airbags, for example—but that the applications for the products, as well as the customers, were different too. “It’s all about intellectual curiosity,” he notes. “You have to engage in an in-depth study of the products you make and the technologies that underpin them—not taking it at face value what they are. You also need to determine whether your products address what your customers need.” Gaining an understanding of the aerospace business took months of hard work. Plant visited Howmet’s facilities and debriefed employees, often asking the same question of several different people. “The key,” he says, “is not just understanding what a product does but also how and why it does what it does. You can then take the how and the why and contextualize it. That lets you know what your competitive advantage is—if you have one.”
One of the characteristics of the deep learning employed by Plant and other leaders we’ve spoken with is the ability to balance a thirst for knowledge with a sense of certainty. Especially during the first few years, CEOs have a strong desire to prove themselves. After all, no one wants to follow leaders who keep changing their minds for no good reason, nor ones who, by contrast, think they have all the answers. When Ed Bastian was appointed CEO of Delta Air Lines, in 2016, he says he wanted to prove he belonged and that he was equipped to take the job, but it took a couple of years before he felt comfortable in his role. “The CEO job is intimidating and it’s humbling. I was responsible for 100,000 employees and 200 million customers a year, and I asked myself, ‘How did I get here, and did the board make the right decision?’ These are things you won’t ever admit publicly but internally you have to wrestle with.”
Continues Bastian, “The way you deal with this uncertainty is you learn, learn, learn. I went out and saw people to ask them questions because I really wanted to be the best I could be. And I really do believe that the only thing that is constant is change, and as CEO you need to get comfortable with change and embrace change.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Bastian put his philosophy of learning to the test. “Every day, we were learning something that contradicted what we thought we knew the day before,” he recalls. “What we needed to do to navigate the pandemic was to keep taking our business model apart and putting it back together in different ways while continuing to lead through a crisis.”
In the early days of the pandemic, for example, Bastian heard all sorts of confusing and contradictory information about how to keep his employees and passengers safe. Is the virus transmitted by air or by touch? Do masks work, and which ones? Can the ventilation systems on planes help reduce exposure to the virus? Should the airline mandate vaccines? While most leaders followed the quickly changing guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as best they could, Bastian took the unusual step of reaching out to one of the United States’ premier medical establishments, the Mayo Clinic, and working with its top officials to better understand the behavior of the virus. Eventually, he even hired Mayo executive Dr. Henry Ting to become Delta’s first chief health officer. As one doctor at Mayo put it to him, “The only thing I can tell you, Ed, is that whatever you think you know today, it’s going to be different tomorrow.” “When I heard that,” recalls Bastian, “I realized that he was telling me that you always have to be willing to listen to what can change and learn from it, and that as long as we had that mindset, we’d be OK.”
Bastian’s dedication to learning without fear and biases, his willingness to question and rethink long-held beliefs and assumptions, and his ability to study on the fly and learn from the right group of experts helped Delta not only navigate through the turbulence of the pandemic but also come out of the crisis still on top of the industry.
Know when to speak up
The ability to assume different operating roles and garner deep knowledge about one’s business are two important elements of being a versatile leader. A third—and one that has taken on increasing importance—is having the skills to communicate where a business stands politically, socially, and on environmental issues. Executives continually ask us, when is it proper to take a stance? Do CEOs speak for their companies, or do they need to get sign-off from their boards and investors? What if the personal beliefs of a CEO conflict with a position that is in the best interests of the employees and other stakeholders? How do leaders handle the blowback from taking stances on controversial environmental and social issues?
In the current environment, neutrality is often not a viable option. In many instances, CEOs must make their beliefs clear in order to build an authentic mandate to lead and guide. Otherwise, employee and customer backlash can be swift and costly. Leaders must ask themselves, “Should I launch this product or that product? Should I select or promote this person if their values don’t quite fit with my own? Are my operations harming the community in ways I can avoid?”
Leaders know that these situations sometimes create tough trade-offs where they must forgo lucrative opportunities that are not consistent with their companies’ moral compass. For example, do they stop doing business in Russia in the wake of that country’s invasion of Ukraine, or is their business there critical to the well-being of Russian citizens? Do they believe in climate change, and, if so, are their zero-carbon targets credible or just greenwash?
It’s tempting to keep silent and hope the problem disappears. The world no longer works this way, however. Staying silent all the time is no longer an option in a world of social media scrutiny. As Dan Vasella, the former CEO of Novartis, puts it, “Journalists have a legitimate demand for access to the CEO. But you must modulate that to avoid overexposure. To the media, you are a product. And the press will paint you as either a hero or a villain—whatever sells. So if they paint you as a hero today, you should be prepared to be painted as a villain tomorrow. Not everything you do will work out every time, and you have to accept that people will be unfair.”
As Vasella suggests, it’s wise to limit the times when leaders should speak out. While of course it doesn’t make sense to tweet in response to every headline or employee concern, CEOs need to establish guidelines on when to speak out and when to keep silent on a controversial issue. We’ve concluded that CEOs should take a public stance on a topic only when it is both relevant to the company and authentic.
Leaders need to take that extra step to find the right balance between professionalism and empathy. Delta Air Lines CEO Bastian, for example, decided that some social issues are just too important to his employees for him to ignore. In the spring of 2021, Georgia passed a law that restricted voting access in the state. He and others saw it as an effort to suppress Black voter turnout. It wasn’t an easy decision for Bastian to speak out against the law, but he did. “There are times,” he says, “when you find yourself thrust into a topic that has relevance to your people, to your business, and to your local community, and people look to you for an opinion as to what’s happening.”
In this case, the voting law was especially relevant: Delta is the largest private employer in the state of Georgia, and it is committed to closing the diversity gaps at leadership and all levels of the company to create an equitable business. At first, Bastian did try to stay above the fray, but as he listened to the increasing concerns of his employees and members of the community, he decided to speak out. “I couldn’t explain to them why the law was something we should support. It simply didn’t reflect our values, and there was a lot of pressure to take a stand. When I looked around, everyone in the local corporate community was reluctant to take a stance, and so I felt an obligation to oppose the law.”
A lot of people took umbrage with Bastian’s stance, but many agreed with it. After he spoke out, hundreds of CEOs around the country voiced their opposition to the law. Looking back on the situation, Bastian says, “Did it change anything? No, the law is still on the books. But we showed that we had a voice that mattered, and consumers give business to companies who have and practice values.”
As Bastian discovered, getting involved in politics can be difficult and stressful, especially in a big corporation whose business interests and constituents might be split on a topic. The challenge is finding the stance and the right language in complex and controversial situations. We believe that there are basic, common shared values for which any CEO or nonprofit leader should always take a stand. These include the protection of innocent life and the condemnation of terroristic, murderous actions. Those are not choices. Those are musts. Yet weighing in on specific policy choices doesn’t, in our opinion, make sense unless, as in the case of Delta, the issue is truly relevant to the organization’s people and community.
While leaders must consider all their constituents, it is still the CEO’s role to create value for investors. Leaders need to be versatile enough to know what matters to themselves and to their companies, and how to signal the importance of broad social issues—such as climate change, freedom of speech, or LGBTQ+ rights—while reframing them in a way that is more relevant to all stakeholders, including employees, outside investors, and politicians.
If leaders decide to become involved in a controversial issue, they should ask themselves whether that belief is authentic―consistent with their organizations’ institutional integrity, values, and principles―and whether the world will perceive it that way. It’s easy for leaders to say the right thing, but if organizations aren’t ready or able to allocate the time and the money to follow through, CEOs can open themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy.
For example, many well-meaning leaders have pledged that their companies will achieve net-zero carbon emissions by, say, 2030 or 2040, but do they really know how they’re going to get there? Of course, if a company has a definite plan to decarbonize and has invested significant funds for it, that’s one thing. But that kind of deep commitment tends to be the exception. Often, companies that announce a zero-carbon goal fail to engage in a serious decarbonization effort. This can lead to charges of greenwashing.
At Howmet Aerospace, Plant takes a different approach to climate change, one that he feels is more authentic. He refuses to make a net-zero commitment for 2030 or 2050 because he doesn’t think doing so is credible—the people making those commitments, he notes, won’t even be in the job by 2030, never mind by 2050.
Instead, Plant tells his employees and anyone else who asks that Howmet’s obligation is not to pollute the air, not to pollute the water, and not to cause any harm to the people who come after them, and that their children and their grandchildren should be able to live in a clean environment. In practice, that means that Howmet puts tens of millions of dollars behind making its manufacturing more efficient and cutting carbon wherever it can along its entire value chain. “All those grand statements about going zero carbon are just political theater,” says Plant. “If you don’t back them up with real action, you’re an empty suit. You have to be authentic; you have to believe what you say, and you have to express a set of values. If you want to take people along with you, you’ve got to be honest with them.”
One thing is clear from our research: being versatile is critical for leadership success. To cultivate this versatility, leaders should think about the skills and experiences they need to develop, and the assignments and roles in which they can acquire them. They will need to keep in mind the trade-offs to manage. They should consider their approaches to learning and which team members and experts they can work with to fill any gaps in understanding. And they should consider how much time they can spend to expand their versatility—with both on-the-job learning and in-depth study. Leaders should pick a few areas that are most important for them and their organizations and go deep. The work of inside-out leadership is hard, no question, but the benefits are ultimately worth it.
This article is excerpted from The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 McKinsey & Company.
McKinsey Quarterly 60th birthday
We are celebrating the 60th birthday of the McKinsey Quarterly with a yearlong campaign featuring four issues on major themes related to the future of business and society, as well as related interactives, collections from the magazine’s archives, and more. This article will appear in the first themed issue, on the Future of Technology, which will launch in October. Sign up for the McKinsey Quarterly alert list to be notified as soon as other new Quarterly articles are published.
“Our firm is designed to operate as one—a single global partnership united by a strong set of values. We are equally committed to both sides of our mission: attracting and developing a talented and diverse group of colleagues and helping our clients create meaningful and lasting change.
From the C-suite to the front line, we partner with clients to help them innovate more sustainably, achieve lasting gains in performance, and build workforces that will thrive for this generation and the next.”