When people ask me, “How can I become a values-based leader?” I always respond with my four principles: self-reflection, a balanced perspective, true-self-confidence, and genuine humility. As the first of the four, self-reflection is the foundational principle of values-based leadership, encouraging regular (ideally, daily) introspection about our values, priorities and goals, as well as our behaviors and interactions with others.
The other three principles build upon that foundation: a balanced perspective that seeks to understand others, especially those whose views differ from our own; true self-confidence to recognize our strengths and acknowledge our weaknesses; and genuine humility, which carries the double duty of showing respect to everyone and never forgetting who we are, where we came from and all of those that helped us along the way.
Today, as many of us prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving and focus on what we are grateful for, I’d like to focus on genuine humility. As I addressed in an earlier blog, the more genuinely humble (i.e., it’s not an act) a leader is, the more the team will relate and engage. There are other benefits for us, as well, in remembering where we came from and everyone who helped shape us.
My Story
I think back to my upbringing in New York and Pennsylvania, although my dad’s job as a salesman meant we moved all over the place. As the oldest of five, with three younger brothers and a sister, I was expected to step up and help out around the house and with my siblings. You might say I fell into a leadership role pretty early.
Eventually, we moved to Minneapolis where I graduated from high school. From there, I went on to study mathematics at Lawrence University, where I met my wife, Julie. We moved to Chicago, and I enrolled in Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management to earn an MBA in finance.
After graduating from Kellogg and spending several years at Northwest Industries, I found my way to a health care company that told me their priority was to make a difference in people’s lives. My reaction? Sign me up! I went to Baxter International with the intention of staying two years—and ended up staying twenty three years!
After several years as a financial analyst, I moved into operations and then back into finance. I had the opportunity to lead several Baxter businesses and eventually became CFO. Reaching the C-suite was beyond what I had ever expected in my career. Had I become a manager, I would have been thrilled. Now that I was CFO, I couldn’t make it all about me. As a values-based leader, I needed to see where I could make a difference.
I decided to focus to help develop the culture and values for the organization. The basics were in place, but there were a lot of assumptions at the time about what those values meant. My role was to communicate the values clearly and, when someone failed to uphold those standards, to hold them accountable.
This evolved into what we called the 3Rs: respect, responsiveness, and results. Respect spoke to how we treated each other and the people who relied on our products—literally, there were those whose lives depended on what we provided. Responsiveness called us to be timely and thorough with every question or request, whether from a supplier, a vendor, a customer, a colleague, or anyone else. Results were not measured only in such tangibles as margins and profitability, but also in how we were acting in the world as a corporate citizen.
At the pinnacle of my 23 years at Baxter, I was chairman of the board and CEO of the company I had joined in my 20s. When I left, I was proud of my team and all we had accomplished. Most important, I didn’t forget who I was. With genuine humility, I knew I was not my job nor did my CEO title (or any other title, for that matter) define me as a person.
Thanks to the grace that comes with genuine humility, I was able to look forward with optimism and an open mind to what I should do next.
Second Act and Beyond
It took about five minutes (or so it seemed) between the announcement I was leaving Baxter to the phone call from Dean Don Jacobs, the long-time Kellogg Dean who died in 2017 at age 90. Dean Jacobs asked if I would consider teaching at Kellogg, and of course I said yes. My only request was that I teach values-based leadership.
The rest is history. Twenty years later, I’m still at Kellogg—the place where, 45 years ago, I received my MBA. I’m still teaching, writing, and speaking about values-based leadership (including with a new book—Your Values-Based Legacy).
When I look back on my life, I see all the people who shaped and influenced me: my parents, grandparents, and other family members; my teachers, from elementary school through high school, college, and graduate school; my colleagues at Baxter, in the health care industry, and now at Madison Dearborn and our portfolio companies. And so many countless others, including students and those who attend my speeches and presentations (I’m still learning as much as I teach).
With genuine humility, I can appreciate my story, but not because it is about me. Rather, because it acknowledges and celebrates every person I’ve been blessed to know along my journey to become a values-based leader.
Harry, I’m thankful for this enlightening post. I’m an aspiring AI Ethicist (way to early in the game to claim that title in full), and the AI implementation model I’ve developed requires values-driven leadership as central to successful development, deployment, and monitoring of AI. Generative AI is one of the rare examples which makes hyperbole impossible, Gen AI will have more impact than the atomic bomb for the good and the bad. People are intrigued when I posit that humility will be one of the main determinants of GenAI’s impact on business and society.