So what does good leadership actually look like? How do we find good leaders? And how are they trained and developed? Who are America’s best leaders today? And what can we learn from them? And, seriously, how can we do this? please Would you like to make more?
Over the next year, I’ll be exploring what works for leaders in politics, government, and business. I’ll start with Nels Olson. He’s a headhunter in Washington, DC, and he wakes up every day thinking about leadership: where to find them, how to identify them, and how to make them more successful. He came to Washington with a political science degree from SUNY Oswego, led the personnel office for President George HW Bush, and then worked for a public relations firm in Washington, DC. Since 1993, he’s worked for one of the top executive recruiters in Washington, DC.
But he acknowledges that this is a challenging moment for even the best leaders, and that he will ensure the worst ends quickly.
“There’s a reluctance to put yourself out there in corporate public office or in academia,” he says. “Anyone can post something on social media,” he says. “It can snowball very quickly and potentially bring down a leader. That didn’t happen 10 years ago. Now it can go from zero to 100 in a matter of hours.”
To describe Olson simply as a “headhunter” is as inadequate as describing Nancy Pelosi as the California congresswoman. Olson has led more than 1,000 executive recruiting efforts across the board of profit and nonprofit organizations, and speaks with the calm and collected manner of someone accustomed to holding executive-level positions and presenting to boards of directors.
Throughout his decades of work, Olson says three fundamental characteristics of successful leaders have remained constant: Great leaders combine integrity, vision and a willingness to follow. Harry S. Truman once expressed it similarly: “A leader has two essential qualities: First, he is going somewhere. And second, he can persuade other people to go with him.”
But while the fundamentals of being a great leader remain the same, the toolkit needed to be successful has changed and become more complex. “These roles are only getting more difficult,” Olson says. “The bar is only getting higher. Whether it’s politics, business or academia.”
Unlike the top-down management of the postwar era, Olson said, today’s leaders need to be much more tolerant of diverse opinions than in the past, partly because so many people now have a voice, whether they’re employees or not.
“In this day and age of mobile phones and so many other things, it’s very difficult to be a command-and-control leader because one mistake makes it public,” he says. “You need to address things head-on. You need a certain amount of openness and humility. You need to be willing to put yourself in people’s shoes and not be the type to overreact. All the successful CEOs I’ve seen don’t get upset when certain things go wrong. They know how to self-regulate.”
The result, he says, is a need for sophisticated communication and crisis management skills — skill sets that not all managers understand or excel at. “It’s not just a personality trait.”
Another ingredient in the recipe is intense curiosity. The best leaders today must be smarter about a wider range of topics than before. Several years of pandemics, geopolitical unrest, supply-chain disruptions, and partisan polarization have made it clear that events that seem far removed from a leader’s day-to-day work can wreak enormous damage on an organization. “Leaders need to be lifelong learners,” Olson says. “Instead of clinging to existing paradigms. Leaders now need to be able to adapt and pivot. Sophisticated boards are looking for people who have not just the credentials on their resumes, but also the emotional intelligence and level of intelligence to thrive in an ever-changing world.”
The best leaders are always rethinking themselves. Olson cites John Crowley as an example. A former lawyer and Harvard MBA, Crowley founded his own biotech company in 1998 to help search for a cure after his two children were diagnosed with a usually fatal neuromuscular disease. His family’s journey was eventually documented in a book and, in 2010, a film. In December, Crowley was named head of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, moving from the corporate world to the advocacy side. “After he sold his company, he really thought about what to do next, made a big change of direction, and is now learning new challenges,” Olson says.
The good news, Olson suggests, is that as confusing and perplexing as the situation is, big problems often attract the most ambitious leaders. “Leaders want challenges,” he says. “They get great satisfaction out of making change happen. They don’t mind messy situations.”
If that were true, Americans might call themselves lucky: It’s hard to imagine a more awkward moment than today.
