Why Great Leaders Need More Than Good Judgment

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0:53Cornelia Choe:I'm Adi Ignatius.

0:55Marshall Goldsmith:I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:05Cornelia Choe:Alison, we hear over and over again that it has never been harder to lead a company. And a lot of that has to do with the challenge of charting the way forward in this hyper uncertain environment. So the impulse of many leaders is to act, to be decisive, to move at speed, which is a great approach, but not if you don't know where you're going.

1:24Marshall Goldsmith:Sure, you don't want to act without fully understanding the situation that you're in. But at the same time, you don't want to be paralyzed by over-analysis.

1:33Cornelia Choe:Exactly. So our guests today are making the argument that leaders should not rely exclusively on their own judgment because they cannot manage this environment effectively based just on their own experience and insight. So they need to find a way to both quickly and systematically bring additional voices and perspectives into the tent.

1:52Marshall Goldsmith:So important to let all the stakeholders weigh in, especially employees on the front lines of an issue, and to gather outside insights from human experts as well as maybe artificial intelligence, but to do that at speed.

2:06Cornelia Choe:Absolutely. So joining me today are two people who have long worked with CEOs and other executives. They are Cornelia Cho, who heads the Leaders Alliance, and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. They are co-authors of the new book, The Panoramic Leader, How Great Leaders See Differently. which offers a playbook for increasing the chance that you're on the right path, that you're better prepared to make consequential decisions. Here is our conversation.

2:37Cornelia Choe:Cornelia and Marshall, thank you for being on the HBR IdeaCast.

2:40Marshall Goldsmith:Oh, thank you for asking us. Thank you. It's such a pleasure, Adi.

2:43Cornelia Choe:There are a lot of books out there on leadership and leadership paradigms. Why this book and why now?

2:49Marshall Goldsmith:The biggest question we both got from leaders is, how do I lead in a world that's changing faster than I am? And as you know, change is coming from every direction all at once, AI, tariffs, geopolitics, and we're in constant uncertainty. The problem today is that we're dealing with change that we can't see yet or that is affecting us, but we don't know where it's coming from. So there's a lot of advice on how to deal with what you see. We're dealing with what you can't see yet and how to get on top of that before it affects you. And we found that leaders aren't able to see everything they need to on their own.

3:28Marshall Goldsmith:We need a panoramic view. And panoramic leadership is the practice of making better decisions by broadening our perspective with insights from stakeholders around us to create a more complete and accurate view of reality and then moving to action.

3:46Cornelia Choe:Yeah, I mean, you cite data about leadership that, I know it's not your data, but you cited that at least half and maybe considerably more than half of new executives fail in the first 18 months on the job. Why is it so hard? Well, number one, it's always been hard. But two, the world is changing too rapidly. And the old days, the pace of change compared to today was non-existent. I think somebody wrote a great book once called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. I forget his name, but it was very brilliant. And basically, the gist is what worked yesterday is not going to work tomorrow. In the old model of leadership, you know, let's go back in history.

4:22Cornelia Choe:Leaders knew more than the people. But today, the people know more than the leader. And Peter Drucker, ahead of his time, said, you know, the leader of the past had to tell the leader of the future, he knows how to ask. It's a new world out there. And you've got to be sensitive to all these zillion different people who are interacting in your life that you didn't have to care about in the olden days. Okay, so this gets into, I think, the meat of the book, which is we bring our experiences, we bring our talents. We also can get locked into a certain mindset or fail to see the complexity of the situation.

4:53So, you know, a lot of what you're talking about with panoramic leadership is developing a broader perspective and bringing in other people to give you those insights.

5:02Cornelia Choe:So talk about how to do that in practice and if it works, what benefits that gives you.

5:08Marshall Goldsmith:The problem is that the landscape is changing so quickly that a part of our internal maps, it's like our internal GPS that we use to make decisions made out of our values and what we've learned from our successes and our failures. This internal map is outdated at any given time, given the speed of change. So we're operating on partial maps. And the decisions we make look right, given the part of the map that we see. But today, it's no longer enough to be right according to what we see. We need to see the whole landscape. And this is especially relevant when people around us are changing real time in different ways, and we don't always know how.

5:50Marshall Goldsmith:According to a Grant Thornton study, 39 % of CIOs and CTOs believe that their workforce is fully ready to adopt AI, versus only 7 % of COOs. So forces pulling in different directions are creating problems for leaders, but we don't always have the awareness about it. Panoramic leaders are able to get up close to their stakeholders, add relevant learnings to their maps, but also bring different stakeholders together. So take the example of Piyush Gupta at DBS Bank. DBS operationalized and scaled panoramic leadership across the bank at four different levels. First, they brought together operations and technology by creating a structure called two-in-a-box, where leaders from both operations and technology co-led product platforms, and they were jointly responsible for implementing ideas from outside of DBS, like emerging technologies or products.

6:49Marshall Goldsmith:Panoramic leadership wasn't optional. For example, DBS organized customer journeys, and each journey leader was required to implement an idea from a competitor or outside the industry, and that was part of their KPIs. Most notably, at the top of the house, twice a year for an entire half day each time, the entire senior leadership team collectively were presented technologies and practices and trends from outside their company and industry. And some of these ideas moved forward and some didn't. But the most important part was that the senior leadership team was bringing their collective understanding together and their maps and their organizational muscle was growing to keep on looking and updating their maps.

7:34Cornelia Choe:So I want to make sure listeners understand that. So panoramic leadership, that's your term. If you had to boil it down, you know, it might be to view the situation, view the future through as many different perspectives as possible. So how do you do that? What are some of the tactics for building up those strengths? You talked about bringing a circle together. Who's in the circle? Talk a little bit tactically about how to integrate these new insights and points of view. Well, to me, the best leader I ever worked with that did this was my old friend Al Malali at Ford. He had a representative of every key stakeholder group in his management team of 16 people.

8:09Cornelia Choe:And so the stakeholders were represented in every meeting. And that's a very practical way to do it. He had representatives of the community, representatives of the customer, representatives of the suppliers, representatives of the union. Now, I'm going to go back to one comment you made. This is hard. And Alan is a very different and unusual guy in that sense. He had the discipline to go through this week after week after week after week after week. And I think the key to this is not going to some lecture theory or, you know, we should all get everybody involved. Talking about it is simple, but as you said, doing it is very, very hard work.

8:51Cornelia Choe:You have to make it part of your life, not an add-on or a motivational speech.

8:56Marshall Goldsmith:As leaders, we often believe that we're valued for having all the answers. And we often create our identity and our value around that. Today, even very intelligent and experienced leaders are making a lot of mistakes because it's hard to lead in constant change. And in that case, our new skill set becomes perspective integration and harnessing the insights around us. One of the best ways to become a panoramic leader is to move from being an expert to the chief investigator in your company.

9:27Cornelia Choe:Another thing you write about, and I like this metaphor, is the dangers of autopilot. You know, we get good at our jobs, and just as we get comfortable driving our commute every day, we are essentially on autopilot. We kind of know what we're doing, and we're probably missing a lot of signals and dangers and opportunities. Talk about that metaphor in terms of getting your leadership to another level and what it takes to get out of autopilot and get back into whatever you were before when you were younger and scrappier and maybe more effective.

10:03Marshall Goldsmith:So we're often looking to offload as much decision-making and repetitive thought as possible. And this is very helpful in a world that doesn't change and that's very stable. But today, our world is anything but stable. We're driving on an open road and even the institutions that we've known so far are changing today. So our lane markers are disappearing. And one of the best ways to move off of autopilot is to pause and use our curiosity and our courage to get up close to stakeholders and to ask ourselves what experiences might they have had that would lead them to think the way they do. And the closer we get, we see more options and we see more solutions.

10:48Marshall Goldsmith:And so instead of using fight, flight, or freeze, getting up close to situations and to people can reveal a lot more information, which can help us move off of autopilot and move more into action.

11:01Cornelia Choe:So I'm in the C-suite. I'm the leader of a medium-sized business company. I'm inspired by this. I fear the pace of change. I feel that maybe I don't have all the tools, all the perspectives to lead through it. What do I do? What's the first step?

11:18Marshall Goldsmith:So on Monday morning, I would say first start with a perspective audit and ask yourself, who's not at the table? Who is an important stakeholder to the company, but I'm not familiar with them? I haven't spoken with them in a while. Make a list and schedule interviews if you can. It's not always possible to get up close and understand stakeholders. So perhaps there's an intermediary or someone that we know in common, or perhaps we can read about this group or this person. And after that, panoramic leadership is all about zooming in and zooming out. Zooming in to stakeholders to get a better understanding of what they're thinking and why.

11:57Marshall Goldsmith:and zooming out to incorporate their insights into our own map so that we can expand what we understand and get a clearer picture of reality.

12:07Cornelia Choe:One thing I would suggest, a great proponent of the daily question process, every day you physically look at questions and you say, for example, who are these important people? So every day this is in your head, because if you don't keep it in your head, you're going to get lost. Now, back to illustrate the degree of difficulty. I've been doing this myself for 27 years. I had someone call me on the phone every day to make sure I do it. Why? My name is Marshall. I'm too cowardly and undisciplined to do anything I teach by myself and I need help. Well, I think I'm not that worse than anybody else.

12:42Cornelia Choe:In order for leaders to do this, they have to have a discipline. The hard part is sticking with it day after day and after day. And as Cornelius said, establishing it as a regular discipline of life, not a kind of add-on activity. Now, to what extent is this about getting buy-in as opposed to unearthing truly new approaches to the business?

13:05Marshall Goldsmith:Buy-in is important. Before looking at buy-in, it's important to understand the entire map and the series of parameters that we're facing. And we have three questions that are very helpful to quickly take an assessment before making decisions. And the first is, who sees this differently? The second is, what do they see? And the third is, what assumptions am I making that they could challenge? And to really use our judgment to assess whether we want to incorporate some of the insights we've heard into our map or what we believe or not. And we're not obliged to create a comprehensive assessment of every perspective out there or to create a complete job.

13:51We want to be able to make better judgments and better decisions.

13:55Marshall Goldsmith:And after making a decision, when we move to action, it's helpful to not only understand what our stakeholders are thinking, but to bring their perspectives together, especially if they're working within our company so that they can understand each other's perspective or at least be aware of them.

14:14Cornelia Choe:There's a process here, but it also requires very skillful leadership. I mean, you know, to create an environment where people genuinely feel, I could say anything and it will be treated as productive and constructive. You know, another thing that's easy to say and is hard with real life people sort of sitting around a table together with different hierarchies engaged. You know, I think it does take an extraordinarily empathetic leader or confident leader or something to pull this off successfully. Yeah, I would say a couple of thoughts on this. First is, as you said, it is very hard. And I think to naively believe that you have power over someone and they're going to automatically tell you the truth when you ask a question is a little childish.

15:01Cornelia Choe:That's not the real world. And in spite of all the talk about this, I've done surveys on LinkedIn. There's zero proof that leaders really are that much more open than they used to be. So just two suggestions I would have very specific for leaders. Suggestion one is don't add too much value. When people give you an idea, learn to sit there, shut up, listen, take notes, and say thank you, and fight this urge to talk. Because if you talk, what happens is, boom, now it's your idea. They salute the flag and they go do it. Don't add too much value. And then number two is learn to listen, take the ideas, incorporate the ideas, and let people know you're not going to do everything they suggest.

15:43Cornelia Choe:And then just take responsibility. One implicit conflict is, you know, I feel that in this moment, which you've identified as, you know, I don't know if it's scientifically things are moving faster than ever, but it sure feels like it. And leadership sure feels harder and we see a more rapid turnover of people at the top. But there's this underlying conflict that, you know, a lot of leaders are saying we need a bias toward action, right? It's all about speed. How do you balance these two imperatives? Because I know you can say, well, you know, we want speed and we want this kind of comprehensive development of multiple perspectives.