Chapter 7
Leading to a Great Place to Work For All
We define the key leadership behaviors for building a Great Place to Work For All, based on our newest research on effective leadership.
Who Is the For All Leader?
So far, the chapters in this book have presented a composite For All “super leader.” Someone who leads with the humility of NBA champs Steve Kerr and Steph Curry, and with the authenticity of EY’s Beth Brooke-Marciniak—one of the most senior “out” executives in the world. A leader who has the agility to navigate an organization of more than 260,000 employees into the future of technology, like AT&T’s Randall Stephenson. A leader who has the courage to say what’s never been said before in the workplace about race—and inspire others to do the same—like Tim Ryan of PwC. A leader who is willing to spend $6 million (and counting) to create a fairer workplace by balancing pay inequities, like Marc Benioff at Salesforce. Who leads with dignity and respect for each employee, like Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson. A leader who is willing to tear down the status quo to open the doors wider in the tech industry, like WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner.
A For All Leader is someone who looks to employees across the company for the next great idea; who leads with values first, especially in the face of adversity. One who builds connectivity within and across teams; who can help inspire a sense of purpose and pride in employees; who elevates employees to achieve all they ever thought they were capable of, and then some.
We admit, it’s a tall order.
While these examples are lofty, they shine a light on what’s possible, on the fundamental qualities leaders need to navigate the emerging business landscape. In the new world of work, transparency trumps backroom deals, connectivity and care trump a “me first” attitude, and purpose trumps profit. Human potential is the name of the game, fairness is the playbook, and the companies that are most inclusive win.
And, the good news is, everyone can play, regardless of their company’s size or industry. Mayvenn, Inc., which offers a mobile platform that allows stylists to sell hair extensions, was recognized as one of the Best Small and Medium Workplaces in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their CEO, Diishan Imira, started this mission-driven company with the goal of bringing some of the profit from the multibillion-dollar hair extension industry back into the pockets of the community that purchases them.
Imira said, “Hairstylists are some of the most important people we have. I want to give them the recognition they deserve. As of mid-July of 2017 we have created 55,000 new entrepreneurs whose fastest-growing revenue source comes from us.” With guiding commitments such as to “value all of our customers, and invest in our community,” fully 100 percent of Mayvenn’s 38 employees say the company is a great place to work.142
Or, look at GoFundMe, an online fundraising company and recognized Best Workplace, where 100% of their 143 employees report that it is a great place to work.143 Here, CEO Ron Soloman is “driven to make a real, meaningful impact in the world, leveraging technology and human compassion to lend a helping hand.”144
These one-off examples may seem inconsequential, but collectively, small companies pack an enormous punch on the broader scale of U.S. business and the corresponding human experience of work. Small companies (companies with fewer than 500 employees) make up fully 99.7 percent of employer firms in the U.S., and they employ nearly half of the nation’s workforce.145 It’s critical that leaders from businesses of all profiles understand that the For All ideals apply to them. Being a leader of a great workplace is not a function of your company’s size or resources. It’s a function of how you treat the people who work there. And as we’ve seen, there is a clear business case for treating those people well. When leaders are more inclusive, more inspiring, and more caring, they win on outcomes like talent retention, innovation, and revenue growth. As mentioned earlier, we found when employees in a high-trust culture experienced a caring workplace, they were 44 percent more likely to work for a company with above-average revenue growth.146 There are hard-nosed business reasons for taking the “soft stuff” seriously.
The data is in, and it’s in everyone’s best interest for leaders to take a close look at themselves and see how they measure up against the new standard—the For All standard.
The For All Leadership Model
We’ve shared that just 15 percent of the world’s one billion full-time workers are engaged at work. As Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, astutely noted, “Employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees—especially the stars—join a company and then quit their manager.”147
A Great Place to Work For All must have great managers for all. As described in Chapter 3, the ubiquitous presence of great managers at a company relies on a diverse executive team that models how to build meaningful human connections while executing business operations and analytics. With an effective leadership team at the helm, managers throughout the company are better equipped to foster a great place to work for all their employees.
But what are the day-to-day leadership practices that will make it happen? To understand how managers are leading their teams to a Great Place to Work For All, we dug into our data from hundreds of companies over many years. Our analysis covered a robust sample of 75,000 employees and more than 10,000 managers working primarily in the U.S., across industries including retail, hospitality, manufacturing, technology, finance, and health care. We reviewed employees’ ratings of their workplaces as well as their open-ended comments about their managers. In analyzing the data, we looked for patterns and traits distinguishing great leaders from the not-so-great.
Based on those employee evaluations and comments, we identified five distinct leadership levels, which we’ve characterized into personas based on prominent themes.
Level 1: The Unintentional Leader
Level 2: The Hit-or-Miss Leader
Level 3: The Transactional Leader
Level 4: The Good Leader
Level 5: The For All Leader
Together, they represent the For All Leadership Model. With each leadership level, a higher percentage of employees report they consistently experience a great workplace. Moving from level to level, we also found a corresponding improvement in the areas of innovation, productivity, employee retention, and organizational agility.
Our research shows that while For All Leaders surpass other leaders across all areas of trust, pride, and camaraderie in the workplace, the most dramatic differences are:
Working with teams, including seeking out peoples’ input and involving them in decisions
Recognizing people, from calling out their accomplishments to helping them get ahead in their careers
Being someone people want to follow because they are confident that the leader is competent, honest, and reliable
In these three areas, the differences our research uncovered between the best and the worst leaders are remarkable. Employees who identify their managers as For All Leaders are up to eight times more likely to give them high ratings in the areas noted above, compared to employees with managers at the lowest level.
Results across retention, productivity, innovation, and agility increased incrementally across all five levels as well. When comparing employees with a Level 1 Unintentional Leader to employees with a Level 5 For All Leader, the improvement is particularly dramatic. Employees with a For All Leader demonstrated:
353 percent higher productivity
300 percent greater agility
325 percent greater readiness to innovate
128 percent greater desire to stay
Figure 19
Leaders Who Level Up Get Results
While not all leaders are necessarily able to evolve from Unintentional to For All, a jump from one level to the next is worth the effort. Even incremental improvements have a broad positive impact on the company and the people who work there. For example, employees with a Level 2 leader are 60 percent more likely to have a positive experience of the workplace than those with a Level 1 leader. They also demonstrate a 105 percent increase in innovation and a 145 percent improvement in productivity. Figure 19 shows the improvement in these areas moving from level to level.
Figure 20
The For All Leadership Model
When we put these results into the context of each of the five leadership personas, the reasons for these differences become clear.
The pie charts in Figure 20 show the percentages of employees who reported they have a positive experience of their manager, their teams, and of the workplace overall, broken out by what type of leader they have.
Blue represents the percentage of employees who report a consistently positive experience of their manager, their teams, and the workplace overall. Under the For All Leader, 93 percent of employees report they consistently experience a great workplace; this number falls to just 28 percent across employees whose boss is the Unintentional Leader.
Gray represents the percentage of employees who report a sometimes positive and sometimes negative experience. Under the For All Leader, just 5 percent of employees report this relatively neutral experience; under the Unintentional Leader this jumps to 30 percent.
Black represents the percentage of employees who report a consistently negative experience of the workplace. Under the Unintentional Leader 42 percent of employees have a negative experience of their manager, their teams, and the workplace overall; under the For All Leader, this falls to a mere 2 percent.
Looking across the charts, it’s easy to see what we mean by the For All Leader. More than 9 in 10 employees with these leaders experience a great place to work, nearly all the time. Within these teams, it is a great place to work—for all.
Charting the Leadership Journey
Now we’ll take a deeper dive into each persona, examining how the different leadership styles affect the people and organizations they work with. By looking at the specific behaviors associated with each type of leader, we can see what changes would enable the leader to move up to the next level.
Level 1: The Unintentional Leader
Common employee experience:
“I don’t get paid enough to put up with this!”
The Unintentional Leader is easy to spot. These are leaders who don’t seem conscious of the impact they have on others, so their behavior can hurt the people they work with and the organization. They often fail to inspire confidence. Employees reporting to an Unintentional Leader might feel like passengers on a bus whose driver doesn’t have a destination in mind and doesn’t tell the passengers what’s going on.
Nobody sets out to be an Unintentional Leader. People end up that way for various reasons, including some not entirely of their own making. They may have been so great at their job, they were promoted to supervise people doing the same type of work—and then not given the training needed to lead. They could have amazing technical skills but lack the people skills a leader needs to inspire and motivate. They could be dealing with a health issue, addiction, family crisis, or other personal problem that hinders their ability to bring their best self to work. They may mistakenly believe that being a leader means acting like a drill sergeant: barking orders, and keeping their compassion and humanity under wraps.
“I am not saying that she is a horrible manager,” one employee says of their Unintentional Leader. “All I am saying is that she needs to relax a little sometimes and talk to us without yelling or being so mad.” Another says, “When I have asked a question or brought up a concern, [my manager] makes me feel like an idiot for asking.”148
As you can expect, employees find working for an Unintentional Leader demoralizing, a circumstance that affects productivity, teamwork, and turnover. According to our research, close to three quarters (72 percent) of people who work for an Unintentional Leader do not consistently have a positive experience of work. As compared to the teams of Level 2 leaders, teams reporting to Level 1 leaders are 59 percent less likely to go above and beyond what is required of them on the job. They are also 36 percent less likely than employees working for Level 2 leaders to say they want to stay in their current job. Keeping an Unintentional Leader on staff hurts an organization’s finances in the long run as the higher voluntary turnover (especially among top talent) directly affects the bottom line.
Think back to the example of Uber, whose former CEO was caught on tape cursing out an Uber driver, and his company’s documented lack of regard for female engineers’ claims of sexual harassment. The damage done not only to these employees but also to the company overall was devastating, as hundreds of thousands of customers joined the #DeleteUber movement once these and other events became public. Ultimately, based on these and other egregious leadership errors, the board of directors realized that Kalanick could not stay on as CEO without doing further damage to the company he had founded.
You might be an Unintentional Leader if you . . .
Think in terms of “employees” versus “people” who have full, complex lives
Take credit for work you didn’t do
Withhold information from direct reports
Are too consumed with worries about personal matters to care about the job
Have not made changes after receiving negative people-related performance review feedback
Reveal your frustrations by raising your voice or being personal in your criticism of others
Leveling Up
The news for the Unintentional Leader isn’t all bad. Small changes can result in enough improvement to move up to the next level—with great positive impact for the company and its employees. Such changes could include getting proper training, acting in a more approachable manner, or making an effort to collaborate with employees more often. Adopting a more open, accepting attitude could dissolve employees’ fears and animosities, which could in turn improve their confidence in their manager’s abilities. It could also help break up the toxic environment, allowing people to focus less on getting through the day and more on the task at hand, making it less likely they would want to find another job.
However, there’s only so far an organization should go. Even if an Unintentional Leader is also a star performer, keeping someone like this in a leadership role is bad for business. In the long run, a company is better off offering them a short window to do better—a 30-day probationary period, for example—and parting ways or removing leadership responsibilities if they don’t improve.
Level 2: The Hit-or-Miss Leader
Common employee experience:
“Anybody home?”
The Hit-or-Miss Leader isn’t terrible—at least not all of the time, and not for everyone they work with. That’s the thing about this type of leader—they’re on or off, hot or cold, a good friend or ally to some but not to others. Unlike an Unintentional Leader, they don’t actively hurt an organization, but neither are they actively supporting their team or performing their duties to the extent the organization needs. A Hit-or-Miss Leader doesn’t always step up when they should. “It’s extremely demotivating when managers allow bad behavior because they are fearful that it may cause difficulties for them,” one employee says of this type of boss.
As with an Unintentional Leader, lack of adequate training or people skills could cause a Hit-or-Miss Leader to be oblivious to how their actions or inactions affect the people around them. Think of Michael Scott, the self-absorbed boss from TV’s The Office who’s friendly until he isn’t. They may be checked out during the workday because of family issues or other problems. They may fall short of their own aspirations as a leader as they struggle with extra responsibilities brought on by a merger, a layoff, or keeping up with rapid expansion or change.
Because they often play favorites, intentionally or unintentionally, a Hit-or-Miss Leader may fail to hold people accountable for doing what they’re supposed to, or not stand up for people or teams they manage. Likewise, they may not work well with other teams, leading to communication breakdowns. “This can be very frustrating and sometimes it seems like the managers aren’t even talking to each other,” another employee says of their Hit-or-Miss Leader boss.
As a result, a Hit-or-Miss Leader’s effect on the workplace is—you guessed it—hit or miss. Employees who work for this leader type are slightly more inclined to be ambivalent or feel negative about work (53 percent) than feel good about what they do (47 percent). Because Hit-or-Miss Leaders connect with some people more than others, they create an atmosphere of uncertainty, one where people aren’t sure they can count on their coworkers. This also leads to a broader erosion of trust, since a climate of doubt among employees is counter to a high-trust culture.
Employees with bosses at this level are 31 percent less likely to say they experience cooperation at work than employees of leaders at the next level, the Transactional Leader. On the other hand, because a Hit-or-Miss Leader creates a less toxic workplace than what people experience under an Unintentional Leader, employees are 36 percent less likely to leave, improving voluntary turnover and with it the bottom line.
If PwC’s Tim Ryan had been a Hit-or-Miss Leader, he would never have spoken up about the racial injustices roiling the country. Taking that kind of public stand is the antithesis of a leader who doesn’t want to make waves.
You might be a Hit-or-Miss Leader if you . . .
Often feel like you’re in over your head
Can’t focus due to current problems in your personal life
Go out to lunch or socialize with the same team members all the time
Have trouble relating to several people on your team
Have had direct reports transfer to other departments, complain about you to your boss, or leave for another job
Have received warnings about not hitting goals or improving your people leadership performance
Leveling Up
A Hit-or-Miss Leader is far from a lost cause. For these bosses to move to the next leadership level they must eliminate favoritism, communicate regularly with people in and outside the teams they manage, keep everyone feeling involved, and routinely show they appreciate people’s efforts. If a Hit-or-Miss Leader can do that, the people they work with will gain faith in their integrity and put more effort into their work, which will improve cooperation and productivity.
Level 3: The Transactional Leader
Common employee experience:
“They get the job done—and nothing more.”
More than anything, the Transactional Leader values checking things off the list, especially things related to their own goals. They’ve risen above some negative behaviors associated with Unintentional and Hit-or-Miss Leaders and are good at what they do. But they are mainly concerned with checking tasks off a to-do list or hitting key performance indicators and consequently are not as forward-thinking or charismatic as leaders at higher levels. Though they are heading in the right direction, a Transactional Leader’s style of working and communicating is still inconsistent, and they don’t attempt to forge the personal connections necessary for employees to feel empowered and engaged. “A lot of policies and changes come down as management edicts,” one employee shared about this type of boss.
A Transactional Leader could be a creature of habit, clinging to old patterns cultivated before digital advances and other innovations that have changed how work gets done and the requirements of the job. They could reflect the way they are treated by their own boss or a bureaucratic organization that doesn’t give managers much power. “Middle-level management is unable to set and communicate strategies, and makes decisions accordingly,” one employee said.
In the environment a Transactional Leader creates, people take pride in their work and can be counted on to do what they’re told. That level of competency also applies to teams they manage, which are good at executing specific, known tasks. Unlike people who work for Unintentional or Hit-or-Miss Leaders, a majority of people (62 percent) with Transactional Leader bosses feel good about their jobs. But because these managers don’t always support thinking outside the box, teams are 25 percent less likely to be innovative as those with leaders at the next level up.
Employees working for Transactional Leaders also report more politicking and backstabbing at work than the higher levels, due in part to their boss’ nonchalant attitude. They may feel they don’t have a voice or don’t get enough information about what they are supposed to be doing. “Answers provided by management to date are very vague,” one employee says about their Transactional Leader boss. Even though most people with Transactional Leaders are happy at work, 16 percent have a negative experience, and another 22 percent could take it or leave it.
Think back to the example of Marriott in Chapter 5 and the value placed on every employee, regardless of position. A housekeeping associate at a Marriott-owned Ritz-Carlton property described how her supervisors and coworkers supported her after both her parents died. At another organization, working for a Transactional Leader, her experience could have been completely different. Instead of the sympathy she was shown, a by-the-book Transactional Leader wouldn’t have wanted to get involved in an employee’s personal life. It would have meant doing away with cordial conversations to open up and be authentic. The Marriott associate’s bond with the company is no doubt stronger today because of the compassion shown by her boss.
You might be a Transactional Leader if you . . .
Value getting things done over talking to people
Give orders more than you listen to employees’ concerns or challenges
Don’t know much about what’s going on in people’s personal lives
Feel like a small cog in a bureaucratic machine
Are recognized more for your technical competency than your soft skills
Have had direct reports describe you as efficient but cold
Leveling Up
For a Transactional Leader to move to the next level, they have to stop operating on autopilot and start building good people skills and habits. It could mean working to communicate with direct reports more consistently, listening to employees and welcoming their input on decisions, and showing people how their role fits into the big picture. To improve, a Transactional Leader also needs to show their sincere interest in employees as people, so individuals feel like they’re being managed in a fair and reliable manner.
Level 4: The Good Leader
Common employee experience:
“I stay because of my manager.”
The Good Leader has a distinct edge over leaders at the lower levels. They are consistent, inclusive, and sincere. They are clear about expectations for people’s roles, understand that mistakes happen, and realize people have lives outside of work. Employees frequently describe a Good Leader as easy to talk to, understanding, fair, and the reason they stay. For many people, there’s very little practical difference between working for a Good Leader and working for a For All Leader. “Immediate management is excellent, and I wouldn’t be here if not for them,” one person said about this type of boss.
While a Good Leader has a lot going for them, they haven’t reached For All Leader status. For all their good qualities, they may feel that the ultimate responsibility for reaching goals lies with them, not their team. Thinking that way may make them less comfortable being open and vulnerable about their own failings, which could prevent them from connecting with some people. A handful of holdouts don’t see them as completely competent or reliable communicators. A Good Leader’s status as not quite For All is shown in our data. While 80 percent of employees with a Good Leader have a great experience of work, 13 percent are neutral, and 7 percent have a negative experience. Even with a Good Leader boss, people are 25 percent less likely to say they look forward to coming to work than people who report to a For All Leader.
Overall, though, a Good Leader is good for business. Under their watchful eye, employees work well individually and together. People are willing to be flexible, and adopt new skills when the circumstances require it. Employees are 28 percent more likely to give extra than those who work for a Transactional Leader. A company’s bottom line benefits from these leaders because fewer employees want to leave. In fact, 13 percent more people say they prefer to stick around for a long time than people who work for Transactional Leaders. They’re also good at helping people understand how they fit into an organization and helping them advance in their careers.
Let’s look to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner—a quintessential For All Leader—to illustrate a small yet consequential difference between Level 4 and 5 leaders. As described earlier, Brunner decided to practice open book management, sharing the company’s financials and key performance indicators with the entire workforce so they could understand how their jobs fit into the business. If Brunner had been a Good Leader instead of a For All Leader, she might have decided that only managers or sales reps needed to see financials. As a result, the employees left in the dark would be less aware of how different groups work together toward company goals, and unclear how their jobs affect the bottom line.
You might be a Good Leader if you . . .
Help employees develop in their careers and recommend them for promotions
Have been a mentor
Can talk to anyone on your team about most issues, whether work-related or personal
Haven’t been able to establish a good rapport with a few people whom you just can’t seem to warm up to
Think it’s important for others to see you as a leader
Receive generally good performance reviews, including feedback from peers and direct-reports
Have been promoted because of your superior management skills
Leveling Up
For a Good Leader to make it to the top, they have to address whatever is stopping them from connecting with the holdouts on their team so everyone feels heard in decisions and feels they can speak up when it matters. To improve, a Good Leader can’t just focus on today. They must take the long view and focus both on the future and on how teams across the company fit together to achieve goals. Also, they must be able to articulate an organization’s goals in a way that helps people feel inspired and connected to them. Finally, leaders at this level must abandon any ego attached to being the boss, and subsume their own interests in the service of helping others shine.
Level 5: The For All Leader—A Great Leader For All
Common employee experience:
“My manager truly has my best interests in mind.”
For All Leaders have a lot to brag about. After all, they’ve made it to the top of the leadership persona hierarchy, their people love them, and the teams they lead are more successful than teams managed by leaders at other levels.
But here’s the thing about For All Leaders: they’d rather leave the bragging to others. If you’re familiar with the concept of the servant leader, you’ll recognize it in these managers, who prefer to lead from behind, enabling the people who work for them to do their best work. For All Leaders treat all people with dignity, regardless of position. People who work for these leaders see them as hard working and leading by example: they walk the talk. Employees also see them as honest, ethical, and true to their word. One employee describes their manager, who is a For All Leader, as “an amazing, intelligent, transparent, and helpful [leader] who WANTS us to succeed.”
For All Leaders aren’t micromanagers. They’re happy to have people work autonomously, and welcome feedback and others’ input on decisions. Showing that they’re responsive and open to others increases their own influence. Construction firm TDIndustries, a FORTUNE 100 Best Company to Work For, makes employee empowerment part of its corporate communications mantra: “Everyone participates—no one dominates.”
For All Leaders are fair, though fairness in pay and other matters doesn’t necessarily equate to treating everyone the same. Fairness also takes into account the socioeconomic systems that historically have favored some people over others and an awareness of how all employees might perceive a leader’s actions. At the 100 Best Workplaces, which have an abundance of For All Leaders, employee ratings of fairness have risen more dramatically than any other area in the past 20 years, outpacing advances in respect, credibility, and the other workplace dimensions we study.
The results For All Leaders achieve—or rather, the results their people achieve—are remarkable. Their teams demonstrate productivity that is more than three times higher than those under Unintentional Leaders. Employees led by For All Leaders are also up to three times better at innovating and working at a speedy, agile pace than people who work for leaders at the lowest level. People with For All Leader bosses are also far more likely to want to stay with their companies for a long time.
It’s common for employees to say For All Leaders are the best bosses they have ever encountered. For All Leaders make everyone feel welcome and treated fairly and establish a strong sense of collaboration within teams as well as through different areas of the organization. They stand out for their ability to reduce politicking and favoritism to nearly imperceptible levels, perhaps because they do a great job of getting feedback from everyone and involving them in decisions.
For everything they do right, For All Leaders aren’t perfect. They are still human, capable of oversights and mistakes. One element that sets them apart from Good Leaders, though, is their ability to inspire loyalty, performance, and growth in others. People who report to For All Leaders often describe doing the best work of their careers. When For All Leaders are at the helm, employees are more inclined to believe that compensation is fair, that colleagues work well together, and that work is an open, friendly, welcoming place. “I can talk about any issues and suggestions with my manager and team members,” one employee said.
Again, we can look to WP Engine’s Heather Brunner as an example of a For All Leader. Her decisions to remove a college degree requirement from the application process and to train all employees how to read the company’s financials stemmed from her conviction that the company would be made stronger with a wide variety of perspectives at the table—and by leveraging the full strength of all their employees’ human potential. “One of the things I tell our team is that we’re a company of equals,” said Brunner. “The only reason that I’m CEO is just time, and different experiences I’ve had. I’m no smarter, I have no more potential. You have all those things.”149
You might be a For All Leader if you . . .
Surround yourself with smart, engaged people motivated to do their best
Lead teams that make innovative products and gain above-average business results
Lead teams that work well with other groups throughout the organization
Often hear people who report to you say they love their jobs
Can recall at least a few instances where you have supported a direct report in succeeding but haven’t felt the need to take credit for your input
Have little to no voluntary turnover on teams you manage
Are frequently asked to be a mentor or have helped multiple people advance in their careers
Receive positive performance reviews or 360 evaluations
Have been promoted on the basis of your leadership skills or teams’ successes
Are invited to speak about leadership and what your teams have accomplished, or run workshops on the topic
Remaining a For All Leader
Being a For All Leader isn’t easy. Constantly changing business needs, personnel, market conditions, and other demands of the job mean there’s no such thing as a status quo. Retaining a For All Leader mindset means constantly reevaluating what people and teams need to be successful—what needs to be done, on the part of the leader, to help the team accomplish their goals. To remain open and flexible, For All Leaders may need to work on their own personal growth, through training, meditation, or other means. It could also take regular reminders of the inherent goodness of the people they are leading, to put problems that come up into perspective.
And regardless of where leaders fall on the spectrum, it’s critical to have an accurate understanding of how their teams experience them—for the sake of employees and for the business. If companies are committed to building Great Places to Work For All, all leaders must be guided by accurate data and analytics that give them this understanding. Informed by data, leaders can take targeted action toward continuous improvement.
For All Leaders Move Beyond the Boundaries of Business
Beyond the five personas we’ve described in this chapter, there is another level to the For All Leader that transcends a single team or even an organization. This is when a person recognizes the power they have to make a bigger difference in the world by using their position as a platform for inspiring change. For inspiring other leaders to become For All Leaders too.
This type of leadership takes a great deal of courage and conviction. In his first week on the job as chairman at PwC, Tim Ryan was advised not to start an honest dialogue about race, but he made the decision to do it anyway, because he knew it was the right thing to do. One could argue that he risked his position of power by doing so. But by turning his position into a platform for large-scale change, he gave voice to the experience of his own employees and inspired many of the country’s top leaders to publicly pledge to start the dialogue at their own companies.
Before Beth Brooke-Marciniak, EY global vice chair of public policy, came out as gay, she was strongly advised by some of her closest confidants not to go through with it, given her senior role as a global business leader. But she took the risk because she believed it was more important to use her platform to deliver a strong, positive, and honest message to gay teenagers about what they could achieve. She said that delivering that message was far more important to her than any other consequence. “Much to my surprise,” she shared, “I was embraced, and seemingly handed an entirely new platform to make more of a difference than I ever could have imagined.”
Ryan and Brooke-Marciniak are examples of business leaders using their platforms to promote positive societal change. A look at the opinions of the FORTUNE 500 CEOs shows this is a role that is only becoming more imperative for top leaders. Just 4 percent of this elite group’s 2017 cohort agreed with the statement: “I believe my company should mainly focus on making profits, and not be distracted by social goals.” And over half (58 percent) agreed that “as a CEO, it’s important to take a stand on some public issues,” a number that is steadily rising.150
This falls in line with the American workforce’s growing belief that business leaders should step up in this way. Public relations firm Weber Shandwick reports that roughly half of millennials believe CEOs “have a responsibility to speak up on issues important to society,” as compared to just 28 percent of Gen Xers and baby boomers.151
The fact is, being a great leader in the ways we’ve described is better for business, better for people, and better for the world. You’d be hard-pressed to find a leader who wouldn’t want to be named as having the For All leadership traits—and the corresponding teams—that we’ve described. So you may be asking yourself, why aren’t more people For All Leaders?
This is a question we have been asking as well.