Name: TIAA CEO: This Is What Makes a Great Leader
Uploaded: 2016-03-29
Duration: 3 min 20 s
Description: The presidential candidates should take note.

 Roger, everyone is focused and fixated these days on leadership, especially with the presidential race intensifying. How would you describe what makes a great leader? I think the truth is what makes a great leader is someone who can really instill an excitement and a followership. So you can't be a leader if you don't have followers. And that certainly is coming through, as you point out, in the current presidential election. And so to my mind, the issues of great leadership are what are the things that are going to encourage large numbers of people to follow you and to trust you. Tell us a little bit more about the connection between followership and leadership. Sure. The connection between followership and leadership is you have to really understand what it is that people want to see in their leader. And I think people want to see four things. One of them obviously is some expertise. People don't want to follow an amateur. The second thing is people really want to understand the vision-- where you're going. The third thing is I think people expect their leaders to show some empathy, some understanding of where they are as followers. And then the final thing about leadership that I also think sometimes gets overlooked is a leader really has to have fortitude. The path is never easy. You get to a plateau. And then you see another big hurdle to overcome. I think followers want to see a leader who demonstrates the right kind of fortitude, who continues in a smart way to move forward. Some people say that some of the best leadership lessons come out of a crisis or a failure or making a mistake, not necessarily from your successes. Do you agree with that? And what are your thoughts on that? Look, I think leadership lessons come from life experience. And yes, you have to learn from your failures. You also have to learn what led to success. And in my own experience, I've been fortunate to have had certainly some failures that I learned from, but also a number of successes in which I could go back and think about, well, gee, what happened? Why did that work so well. Tell me about-- One of those? Tell me about one of those failures. I prefer to tell you about one of the successes. [LAUGHTER] The failures have really been in situations where I was uncertain of where I wanted to go. And that came through to the organization where the vision wasn't clear. I wasn't as steady as I wanted to be. And they could sense that. And so that's why I put a lot of weight on a certain kind of steadiness, a certain kind of transparency, and being clear about where you're heading. Roger, you have been a lawyer, an economist, a banker, a Fed policymaker. And I'm sure you've had many mentors in your remarkable career along the way. What's the best advice that you've gotten when it comes to leadership? So the best piece of advice I've ever gotten came from my father. And it was not the words. Was the actions. He was a very empathetic man, which I really admire because there is a time when you can sort of be a manly man. He was capable of doing that. But he was really also capable of listening and being empathetic and really understanding. And as any father would be, at least in my case, he was very, very steady and placid. And I think, though, it wasn't the words. It was modeling the behaviors that really mattered. 

The presidential candidates should take note.  

TIAA CEO: This Is What Makes a Great Leader

Finance

The presidential candidates should take note.  