Lessons - True North Is the Only Leadership That Scales | Bill George - Former Medtronic CEO

In this lessons episode, explore how finding a true North shapes purposeful leadership and long-term fulfillment beyond external success. Discover how deep self-awareness clarifies values and career direction. Understand why authentic leadership builds trust and resilience inside organizations, and uncover how mission-driven principles guide leaders through uncertainty, growth, and crisis. So the concept of true North, I want you to describe that concept, and I think that that's, that would be the epitome of finding your purpose and your calling in a professional and personal sense, correct? Is that what true North means? Absolutely. True North is who you are at the deep, at your deepest level. It's the belief that you have, that's your race whether you have the values that you live by, the principles you lead by, and where you find real joy and satisfaction and fulfillment in your life. Again, it's not about the external motivations like money, fame, and power. Those things will come along, by the way, but you have to find the right place for you, which we call your sweet spot, where you are highly motivated by mission values and see, that wasn't true at Honeywell. The mission was making money in those days. That was some time ago, 30 years ago, but you know, and you weren't your common engineers, come, you really couldn't be yourself, and I think today it's all about being authentic, and that's what younger leader, younger people in the organization, the millennials, which are more than half of your employees, are looking for. They want you to be real. They aren't interested in some of those terribly impressive. They're much more interested in someone who cares about them. It's interesting though, because when a CEO is real and authentic and vulnerable, that's super scary, because then it opens up all the flaws in the business, and it makes things seem not as, and in reality, things probably aren't as great as the CEO would like them to be. So for a leader, actually, I want to double down on True North first, and then I want to understand how they can best do that while building and scaling an organization. So first, a leader that's, so you have somebody who wants to lead an organization, whether or not they're building it from the ground up, or they've worked their way up, and they're trying to figure out where they want to place themselves and position themselves as a manager, or an executive VPC, sweet director, whatever. How do you discover your true North? How did you discover your true North outside the fact that your wife called you out on being miserable and not being happy and not being in the right spot? How can a leader effectively figure out and define their true North so that they can make more meaningful career decisions? Well, I think you have to spend a lot of time developing yourself awareness. It starts with understanding your life story, who you are or where you come from. Those are your roots. It's like a giant tree is nourished by its roots, your values and the principles that you and beliefs you have. But beyond that, then you kind of deal with the difficult times as we started out asking a question, difficult time. Well, those define you much more than the good times. The good times you tend to think you're better than you are, and it's when everything gets stripped away that you realize who you are, you look yourself in the mirror. And I strongly advocate two practices for everyone, including all the CEOs who we work with from MBAs to CEOs. And that's one, take 20 minutes a day for some form of introspection. I'm a meditator. I've been meditating for 45 years. It could be some form of mindfulness. It could just be going for a long walk, taking a jog, something kind of clear the mind, put all the electronics away, and think about how did I show up today? Was I the kind of leader I wanted to be? I was excited about what I was doing. I feel fulfilled. And those are really important questions to ask yourself every day. That's the first one practice I recommend people add. The second one is get honest feedback. Can people around you that tell you what you don't want to hear? That'll tell you the truth or how you're coming off. I had a lot of people around me and met 20 people around me. Obviously, Bill, you didn't handle that meeting well today. A lot of people are upset. You know, you need people around to tell you the truth. And I think 360 feedback, particularly from your subordinates and your peers, is the most valuable thing you can get. And every class I teach at HBS, so I could feedback. Someone's kind of painful. But that feedback is how you learn. Otherwise, you can be deluding yourself about how well you're doing. That's the honest feedback. And then let's, so then to follow up on that, you figured out who you are as an individual. You have a feedback loop in place. You have time set aside for self awareness introspection. So you've now slotted yourself into an organization in a spot where you want to be with a team that you want to work with. But that whole concept of authentic leadership and even like radical candor and transparency for a leader that's usually probably a very scary thought. So how do you effectively action that in an organization without jeopardizing the organization? Well, I think that's a very good question because it is scary. And I know for a long time, I try to be the guy that had all the answers. And then you're not really using the people you work with. I think it's extremely important, Scott, for leaders to admit their mistakes. Because if you don't admit your mistakes, then the people working for you can't admit theirs. And that's a form of vulnerability. And or to say, I need your help. I don't know how to solve this problem. Will you help me? And people invariably will help you if you're willing to admit that. But if you think you act like you have the answers when everyone knows you don't, you're going to be in trouble. So I think that opening up, now you just don't go to a town hall with 10,000 people. And you know, I totally do that. But you can be very comfortable with people you're closest to. And you need to know who those people are. And that's why it's so important that people have around you, both in your key leadership roles, but also people who will mentor and guide and support you. Yeah. And what has, and when you look at this, the average leader and what they're dealing with in organizations, let's let's look at what a leader would have to deal with 30 years ago versus what they're dealing with now. So what is the difference in how you lead an organization, what are the norms and what what is the sort of the status quo what leadership is. And then also, why are some of the principles that are true North principles timeless? So what has changed? What has stayed the same and how did these had these principles effectively? These will be applicable in right now and also in, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now. With 20 years ago, we were admiring the command and control style, the all powerful white American male, if I may say, you know, and Jack Welch is epitome of that, but there are dozens of others who tried to emulate that style. And I think everything has changed because today, the people you work with have changed dramatically. They want you to be real. They don't want you to be an image. They don't want to be some person in the corner office driving, you know, a Porsche, you know, they wonder who you are. And what are the challenges you face and who you are? You need leaders today need to be out with their employees, not sitting in looking statistics sitting in their offices or having meetings in their conference rooms. They need to be out with their people and employees today want to know this person for real. Can I trust this person? And can I am I willing to give everything I've got to this organization? Because if I don't trust the leader, I won't do it. And so that's the big change. That's a huge change. And the reason I'm wrote the book for emerging leaders is I really feel like we need to have this generational change from the, from the baby boomers, if you will, to the Gen Xers and the millennials and eventually the Gen Zs to take over leadership of our organization because they grew up in this, they understand. The other thing I would say Scott, there's been an enormous changing expectation to our leaders. In the old days, you can just kind of put your head down, do the job, delegate out all the work and make the numbers, make your quarterly numbers, stock markets, please, and everything's fine. That's not true today. We're looking for leaders to have a position on public issues to represent their employees in public. When George Floyd was murdered here in Minneapolis, any CEO in the town that not only had to speak out, but beyond that needed a real plan to recognize the flaws in the organization relative to diverse people and how they weren't being treated properly and getting the opportunities. And that's what people expected and frankly the CEOs in this town stepped up, but that's a big change to know where you stand on things and your employees want to see that you're real and you're out there. And Minneapolis was basically ground zero from one of the most topical social issues in the past two years and obviously you had proximity to that and you had CEOs that had proximity to that. But when you deal with something like that as a CEO, there's no playbook. You didn't learn, you didn't even learn about this. I mean, probably before an HBS, maybe now there's, there's more education and understanding about how to react and how to do things differently. But outside of just improving your organization and improving a DE and I within an organization, how do, how does a leader react? How does a leader take a stand? When should a leader take a stand? Well, I think anything that relates to your mission and values, I think every corporation has to be clear about its mission or its purpose, same thing and what its values. And if it violates that and say you value diverse people and if it violates that, you better step into it. The real backstory about JPEG at Disney is unlike Bob Iger, he didn't represent his employees and then he shifted position in midterm and got himself in a political maelstrom with the governor of Florida. But what the problem was, he didn't step out and take a stand on things. So leaders today are doing that, not just because it's expected, because they're being chosen, because they care about these issues. And that's really important. But I think you can't speak out on everything. So you need to concentrate on issues that are really important in your organization to its mission and its values. And that's what it comes down to. So that's the only grounding you have. There, like you said, Scott, there's no crisis playbook for these. I think there's no COVID crisis playbook that existed three years ago. There was no playbook for, you know, a black man being murdered by a policeman and with a video that goes viral around the world. There's no playbook for this. So that's why you have to know how to step up and you have to be have experience to having led through crises, because if you haven't today, you're not going to be ready when the big crisis comes along. And so something as close to home as George Floyd, it makes a lot of sense for somebody to take a stand on. But when you look at other topical global events like Ukraine, for example, well, you can't necessarily make a ton of changes within your organization that are going to be directly tied to what's going on in Ukraine. So should, for example, something like that should a CEO take a social stance on that, even if they don't have international, like, you know, international reach, is that something that's, I guess, would like hit that threshold for CEO speaks out, or does that start to seem like a distraction to the core business? Both. I think they've been forced to. The work's coming out of Yale is kind of calling people out. But I think, you know, in their outstanding companies like Cargill and this community, Johnson Johnson, who may have the greatest respect are staying in Russia. Many hundreds of companies like OpenSax, for sure, have done the board are pulling out. But I think each company has to make its own decision, then say why? Jay and Jay would say, you know, our credo calls for us to provide life-saving drugs to people. We can't pull those out. But yeah, I think people had to take a stand, have to take a stand on that. Now, a trickier one is China because, you know, you can easily give up your business in Russia where it's going, but it's pretty hard to give up the Chinese marketplace. This is much trickier. And the Chinese government's been so punishing of anyone who speaks out, look what happened to Jack Ma, who I featured in a previous book, a CEO founder and CEO of Alibaba, former CEO, fantastic leader, you know, and he's been more or less isolated and disappeared for weeks, months at a time. He was very, he was very outspoken and he got to the point where he was almost too outspoken. And that's what I guess that spooked him a little bit. Well, Morton spoke to him. I think he got taken down, so to speak, not, you know, not physically, but I think he was isolated. But I think, you know, business leaders now in China and I frankly trying to stay over the sand of the radar. Not many business leaders, American business leaders or European are going to go out and criticize the Chinese Communist Party or President Xi himself. They're trying to stay below that radar screen because it's so important. So I think some pragmatism and good judgment comes in here. It's easy to say we disagree with Russia doing it in Ukraine. China, you have to find a way to work with them. It's going to be the world's largest economy. You can't just ignore it. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.