Episode 553: Robert Siegel
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Systems Leadership: Balancing the Cross Pressures in Modern Business
How are effective leadership practices evolving to keep up in a continually changing world? What can be learned from the leaders of companies like Stitchfix or Waste Management? How can AI in education be handled in a way that is open and enriching to all?
Robert Siegel is a lecturer at Stanford University GSB and author of the books The Systems Leader: Mastering the Cross-Pressures That Make or Break Today's Companies and The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical.
Greg and Robert discuss the evolution of leadership, particularly in the context of managing crises and rapid technological advancements. Their discussion explores the different things that must be balanced in leadership roles, such as innovation vs. execution and strength vs. empathy. Robert also emphasizes the importance of systems thinking, adaptability, and statesmanship in modern leadership.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
Is statesmanship in short supply?
32:17: This notion of statesmanship or stateswomanship of stewardship is, it doesn't deny the ambition that we have as leaders. It doesn't deny who we want to be and what we hope to accomplish, but it's also about looking about everybody beyond us. And we have to lead men and women who agree with us and disagree with us, and we have to lead men and women. With whom we agree and disagree. Like we don't get to choose who we lead, Greg. Like we have to lead everybody. And if we've gotta get them from here to here, to me, that's what leadership is right now. And I don't think we're seeing this with a lot of the people who are put up there constantly in the mainstream media or on social media. But in the book I've got 15 to 20 leaders, all of whom are successful. And we can look at them and say, huh, well if they could do it, so can I.
What leadership looks like now
06:44: Leadership today—in a world especially that's moving so quickly—that's where people have to be able to be more adaptable, internalize certain dualities that maybe existed separately inside of a company in the past that now need to exist inside of us internally. And so I think that things are different. The ability and willingness to adapt, I think, that's constant. But what you have to adapt to depends upon the times.
Is it harder to be a leader today?
08:09: Most leaders today are not trained to be thinking in kind of this level of speed, nor are they trained to understand what happens in different functions in an organization. In the old days, you could come up through engineering or through marketing or through manufacturing, and you would've teammates who would handle the other functions. Well, now we need to understand, like, what's the connection between what we do in one function versus the other function? How do we see internal and external? I think that's harder.
Investing time in yourself is leading smarter
32:01: A leader who says, I don't have time for this, they're probably spending time on the wrong issues, like where we spend time in the past isn't where we need to spend time in the future. And so making some time to invest in oneself, reading, finding trusted partners outside of the company. Who you can talk to and learn from. And, by the way, those people can be your peers. They can be people who are older, they can even be people who are younger.