Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - True North Is the Only Leadership That Scales | Bill George - Former Medtronic CEO

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Lessons - True North Is the Only Leadership That Scales | Bill George - Former Medtronic CEO · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore how finding a true North shapes purposeful leadership
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  and long-term fulfillment beyond external success. Discover how deep self-awareness clarifies
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  values and career direction. Understand why authentic leadership builds trust and resilience
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  inside organizations, and uncover how mission-driven principles guide leaders through uncertainty,
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  growth, and crisis.
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  So the concept of true North, I want you to describe that concept, and I think that that's,
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  that would be the epitome of finding your purpose and your calling in a professional
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  and personal sense, correct? Is that what true North means?
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  Absolutely. True North is who you are at the deep, at your deepest level. It's the
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  belief that you have, that's your race whether you have the values that you live by,
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  the principles you lead by, and where you find real joy and satisfaction and fulfillment in your life.
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  Again, it's not about the external motivations like money, fame, and power. Those things will
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  come along, by the way, but you have to find the right place for you, which we call your
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  sweet spot, where you are highly motivated by mission values and see, that wasn't true at
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  Honeywell. The mission was making money in those days. That was some time ago, 30 years ago,
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  but you know, and you weren't your common engineers, come, you really couldn't be yourself,
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  and I think today it's all about being authentic, and that's what younger leader,
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  younger people in the organization, the millennials, which are more than half of your employees,
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  are looking for. They want you to be real. They aren't interested in some of those terribly
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  impressive. They're much more interested in someone who cares about them.
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  It's interesting though, because when a CEO is real and authentic and vulnerable, that's
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  super scary, because then it opens up all the flaws in the business, and it makes things seem
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  not as, and in reality, things probably aren't as great as the CEO would like them to be. So
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  for a leader, actually, I want to double down on True North first, and then I want to understand
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  how they can best do that while building and scaling an organization.
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  So first, a leader that's, so you have somebody who wants to lead an organization, whether or not
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  they're building it from the ground up, or they've worked their way up, and they're trying to figure
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  out where they want to place themselves and position themselves as a manager, or an executive
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  VPC, sweet director, whatever. How do you discover your true North? How did you discover your true
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  North outside the fact that your wife called you out on being miserable and not being happy and
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  not being in the right spot? How can a leader effectively figure out and define their true North
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  so that they can make more meaningful career decisions? Well, I think you have to spend a lot of
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  time developing yourself awareness. It starts with understanding your life story, who you are or
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  where you come from. Those are your roots. It's like a giant tree is nourished by its roots,
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  your values and the principles that you and beliefs you have. But beyond that, then you kind of
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  deal with the difficult times as we started out asking a question, difficult time. Well,
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  those define you much more than the good times. The good times you tend to think you're better than
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  you are, and it's when everything gets stripped away that you realize who you are, you look
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  yourself in the mirror. And I strongly advocate two practices for everyone, including all the CEOs
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  who we work with from MBAs to CEOs. And that's one, take 20 minutes a day for some form of
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  introspection. I'm a meditator. I've been meditating for 45 years. It could be some form of
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  mindfulness. It could just be going for a long walk, taking a jog, something kind of clear the
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  mind, put all the electronics away, and think about how did I show up today? Was I the kind of leader
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  I wanted to be? I was excited about what I was doing. I feel fulfilled. And those are really
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  important questions to ask yourself every day. That's the first one practice I recommend people
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  add. The second one is get honest feedback. Can people around you that tell you what you don't
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  want to hear? That'll tell you the truth or how you're coming off. I had a lot of people around
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  me and met 20 people around me. Obviously, Bill, you didn't handle that meeting well today. A lot
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  of people are upset. You know, you need people around to tell you the truth. And I think 360
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  feedback, particularly from your subordinates and your peers, is the most valuable thing you can get.
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  And every class I teach at HBS, so I could feedback. Someone's kind of painful. But that feedback
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  is how you learn. Otherwise, you can be deluding yourself about how well you're doing. That's the
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  honest feedback. And then let's, so then to follow up on that, you figured out who you are as
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  an individual. You have a feedback loop in place. You have time set aside for self awareness
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  introspection. So you've now slotted yourself into an organization in a spot where you want to
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  be with a team that you want to work with. But that whole concept of authentic leadership and
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  even like radical candor and transparency for a leader that's usually probably a very scary
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  thought. So how do you effectively action that in an organization without jeopardizing the
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  organization? Well, I think that's a very good question because it is scary. And I know for a long
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  time, I try to be the guy that had all the answers. And then you're not really using the people
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  you work with. I think it's extremely important, Scott, for leaders to admit their mistakes.
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  Because if you don't admit your mistakes, then the people working for you can't admit theirs.
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  And that's a form of vulnerability. And or to say, I need your help. I don't know how to solve
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  this problem. Will you help me? And people invariably will help you if you're willing to admit that.
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  But if you think you act like you have the answers when everyone knows you don't, you're going
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  to be in trouble. So I think that opening up, now you just don't go to a town hall with 10,000
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  people. And you know, I totally do that. But you can be very comfortable with people you're
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  closest to. And you need to know who those people are. And that's why it's so important that people
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  have around you, both in your key leadership roles, but also people who will mentor and guide and
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  support you. Yeah. And what has, and when you look at this, the average leader and what they're
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  dealing with in organizations, let's let's look at what a leader would have to deal with 30 years
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  ago versus what they're dealing with now. So what is the difference in how you lead an organization,
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  what are the norms and what what is the sort of the status quo what leadership is. And then also,
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  why are some of the principles that are true North principles timeless? So what has changed?
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  What has stayed the same and how did these had these principles effectively? These will be
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  applicable in right now and also in, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now. With 20 years ago,
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  we were admiring the command and control style, the all powerful white American male, if I may say,
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  you know, and Jack Welch is epitome of that, but there are dozens of others who tried to emulate
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  that style. And I think everything has changed because today, the people you work with have changed
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  dramatically. They want you to be real. They don't want you to be an image. They don't want to be
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  some person in the corner office driving, you know, a Porsche, you know, they wonder who you are.
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  And what are the challenges you face and who you are? You need leaders today need to be out
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  with their employees, not sitting in looking statistics sitting in their offices or having meetings
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  in their conference rooms. They need to be out with their people and employees today want to know
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  this person for real. Can I trust this person? And can I am I willing to give everything I've got
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  to this organization? Because if I don't trust the leader, I won't do it. And so that's the big change.
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  That's a huge change. And the reason I'm wrote the book for emerging leaders is I really feel like
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  we need to have this generational change from the, from the baby boomers, if you will, to the
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  Gen Xers and the millennials and eventually the Gen Zs to take over leadership of our organization
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  because they grew up in this, they understand. The other thing I would say Scott, there's been an
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  enormous changing expectation to our leaders. In the old days, you can just kind of put your head
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  down, do the job, delegate out all the work and make the numbers, make your quarterly numbers,
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  stock markets, please, and everything's fine. That's not true today. We're looking for leaders
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  to have a position on public issues to represent their employees in public. When George Floyd was
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  murdered here in Minneapolis, any CEO in the town that not only had to speak out, but beyond that
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  needed a real plan to recognize the flaws in the organization relative to diverse people and
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  how they weren't being treated properly and getting the opportunities. And that's what people
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  expected and frankly the CEOs in this town stepped up, but that's a big change to know where
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  you stand on things and your employees want to see that you're real and you're out there.
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  And Minneapolis was basically ground zero from one of the most topical social issues in the past
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  two years and obviously you had proximity to that and you had CEOs that had proximity to that.
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  But when you deal with something like that as a CEO, there's no playbook. You didn't learn,
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  you didn't even learn about this. I mean, probably before an HBS, maybe now there's,
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  there's more education and understanding about how to react and how to do things differently.
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  But outside of just improving your organization and improving a DE and I within an organization,
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  how do, how does a leader react? How does a leader take a stand? When should a leader take a stand?
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  Well, I think anything that relates to your mission and values, I think every corporation
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  has to be clear about its mission or its purpose, same thing and what its values.
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  And if it violates that and say you value diverse people and if it violates that, you better step
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  into it. The real backstory about JPEG at Disney is unlike Bob Iger, he didn't represent his
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  employees and then he shifted position in midterm and got himself in a political maelstrom with
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  the governor of Florida. But what the problem was, he didn't step out and take a stand on things.
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  So leaders today are doing that, not just because it's expected, because they're being chosen,
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  because they care about these issues. And that's really important. But I think you can't
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  speak out on everything. So you need to concentrate on issues that are really important in your
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  organization to its mission and its values. And that's what it comes down to. So that's the only
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  grounding you have. There, like you said, Scott, there's no crisis playbook for these. I think
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  there's no COVID crisis playbook that existed three years ago. There was no playbook for, you know,
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  a black man being murdered by a policeman and with a video that goes viral around the world.
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  There's no playbook for this. So that's why you have to know how to step up and you have to be
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  have experience to having led through crises, because if you haven't today, you're not going to
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  be ready when the big crisis comes along. And so something as close to home as George Floyd,
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  it makes a lot of sense for somebody to take a stand on. But when you look at other topical
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  global events like Ukraine, for example, well, you can't necessarily make a ton of changes within
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  your organization that are going to be directly tied to what's going on in Ukraine. So
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  should, for example, something like that should a CEO take a social stance on that, even if they
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  don't have international, like, you know, international reach, is that something that's, I guess,
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  would like hit that threshold for CEO speaks out, or does that start to seem like a distraction
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  to the core business? Both. I think they've been forced to. The work's coming out of Yale is kind
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  of calling people out. But I think, you know, in their outstanding companies like Cargill and
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  this community, Johnson Johnson, who may have the greatest respect are staying in Russia. Many
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  hundreds of companies like OpenSax, for sure, have done the board are pulling out. But I think each
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  company has to make its own decision, then say why? Jay and Jay would say, you know, our credo calls
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  for us to provide life-saving drugs to people. We can't pull those out. But yeah, I think people
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  had to take a stand, have to take a stand on that. Now, a trickier one is China because, you know,
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  you can easily give up your business in Russia where it's going, but it's pretty hard to give up
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  the Chinese marketplace. This is much trickier. And the Chinese government's been so punishing
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  of anyone who speaks out, look what happened to Jack Ma, who I featured in a previous book, a CEO
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  founder and CEO of Alibaba, former CEO, fantastic leader, you know, and he's been more or less isolated
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  and disappeared for weeks, months at a time. He was very, he was very outspoken and he got to the
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  point where he was almost too outspoken. And that's what I guess that spooked him a little bit.
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  Well, Morton spoke to him. I think he got taken down, so to speak, not, you know, not physically,
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  but I think he was isolated. But I think, you know, business leaders now in China and I frankly
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  trying to stay over the sand of the radar. Not many business leaders, American business leaders
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  or European are going to go out and criticize the Chinese Communist Party or President Xi himself.
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  They're trying to stay below that radar screen because it's so important. So I think some
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  pragmatism and good judgment comes in here. It's easy to say we disagree with Russia doing
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  it in Ukraine. China, you have to find a way to work with them. It's going to be the world's largest
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  economy. You can't just ignore it. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to
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  hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this
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  conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.