Hello, and welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, with me, Simon London. I think everybody wants to learn about leadership and with good reason. We all know from experience that the difference between a happy, high-performing team and a miserable, somewhat dysfunctional team often comes down to the quality of its leadership. And yet, what exactly is good leadership? How do you develop yourself as a leader? And, importantly, from a management perspective, how can organizations develop real depth of leadership? Not just among a few executives at the top but up and down the organizational chart and across business units and functions.

To answer these questions, I sat down in Zurich with McKinsey senior partner Claudio Feser and associate partner Nicolai Nielsen. Claudio and Nicolai are coauthors, along with Michael Rennie, of the new book Leadership at Scale.

Thanks for having us.

Happy to be here.

There are hundreds of definitions of leadership. If you ask ten people for a definition of leadership, you’re likely to get more than ten answers. To actually address it, we need to start from a definition. We need to define what we mean by “leadership.” The way we have defined “leadership” is as a set of behaviors that leaders exercise to influence organizational members to achieve a higher alignment on the direction that the organization is taking, to achieve a better execution of the strategy, and for the organization to continuously renew itself.

Alignment, execution, and renewal—that goes back to our work on organizational health. We learned that when organizational members are aligned on a strategy, when they execute consistently and effectively, when they continuously scan the environment for opportunities, and when they continuously learn and renew themselves, that organization tends to overperform, or outperform, over long periods of time. We decided to focus on a set of behaviors by which leaders align, improve execution, and improve the ability to renew an organization.

Correct. It’s about observable behaviors, because we lead through behaviors. Communicating effectively is a behavior. Being able to engage people by listening is a behavior. Giving a direction is a behavior. Leaders influence their environment—and organizational members—through a set of behaviors. And that’s our starting point.

If you develop a perspective about leadership as innate type of capabilities, there will always be a finite number of leaders. But the reality is, if you ask any leader to describe where they learned leading, they will always talk about their own personal experience, how they have grown, and how they have learned a set of behaviors by which they influence others.

Once, I had a conversation with a CEO, and I asked him why he was leading in a certain way. He wasn’t particularly strong in engaging, but he was very strong in directing. That was his way of achieving impact. After our conversation, he shared with me that he had a very painful experience as a young executive, where he had started to bond very closely with his employees. But then, when a cost-cutting program came his way, he had to fire lots of friends. That created with him a leadership style which was effective, but not very engaging. So he became a very directive leader.

A couple of thoughts I have: the reason we focus so much on observable behaviors is because leadership has to be looked at objectively. Observable behaviors make it very, very clear what we see happen on a day-to-day basis on the job. And that helps us analyze whether this is effective leadership or not. One more thought is that leadership is highly contextual, so it is about behaviors. But those behaviors are based on the context. So effective leadership in one context can be very, very different from effective leadership in another

But the key thing is, there are real projects going on through the leadership-development program. This is not just simulations. It’s not just sitting in a classroom.