The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out
Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan
Portfolio/Penguin (September 2024)

How to become a logical, practical, and humane leader

The Journey of Leadership helps you to accelerate your personal growth and professional development, it is worth every penny of its purchase price.

According to Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan, “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 their highest levels of excellence.” Some people seem to have mastered all the right executive skills and are confident that others will be eager to follow their leadership but, few (if any) are. If assigned as direct reports, they comply “without enthusiasm and energy.”

What’s the problem? Long ago, Theodore Roosevelt observed, “Your people won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” After extensive research and their own wide and deep experience with both McKinsey employees and clients, The Journey of Leadership‘s co-authors concluded “that on a deep, psychological level [the unattractive leaders] 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 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.”

As I worked my way through The Journey of Leadership, I was again reminded that companies annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those most profitable, with the greatest cap value in their industry segment. That is not a coincidence. However different these companies may be in most respects, all of them have C-level executives — especially CEOs — who “lead from the inside out.” What does that mean? Years ago, Southwest Airlines then chairman and CEO, Herb Kelleher, was asked to explain why his company was more profitable and worth more profitable and worth more than its ten major competitors COMBINED. His reply? “We take great care of our people, they take great care of our customers, and our customers take great care of our shareholders.”

Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan offer an abundance of valuable information, insights, and counsel that can help almost any leader become both more results-driven and more human-centric. In the Introduction, they observe:  “The winning formula is for leaders to be aware of all signals, both verbal and non-verbal, that they are giving, and of the weight they carry — to stay in touch with their emotions, be sensitive to how they interact with others, and ensure the authenticity of their actions. To add value, they listen, experiment, and learn from others, balancing competing commitments and short- and long-term objectives, keeping in mind the demands of their many stakeholders.”

In the Conclusion, Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan observe: “Getting people to be excited, to show initiative, and to follow you on your journey is both a huge challenge and an opportunity. The one thing we know is that you can’t achieve that by following yesterday’s playbook. As we argued in the beginning of this book, you need to learn to lead from the inside out. Leadership is now all about personal change, about being the change you want to see in the world, and then inspiring others to follow. Our hope is that The Journey of Leadership will act as an illuminating beacon on your own journey to becoming your best self.”

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The Journey of Leadership: First, highlight key passages Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to head notes and key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific or major issues or questions addressed or suggested in the material, especially the “In Summary” comments at the conclusion of chapters.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.