Lessons in leadership
In the premiere episode of Leading Matters, hosted by Tina Seelig, Executive Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, John Hennessy shares his leadership journey. As a faculty member, entrepreneur, former president of Stanford University, and chairman of Alphabet, Hennessy discusses guiding teams to success and inspiring innovation.
The episode explores the Knight-Hennessy leadership model, highlighting traits like vision, courage, curiosity, and humility. Hennessy shares pivotal career moments, emphasizing problem-solving, historical insights, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Join us for the first of this six-episode series, uncovering the essence of effective leadership and the foundational traits that support it.
Hosts
Tina Seelig is Executive Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, the largest, university-wide, fully-endowed graduate fellowship in the world, and Director Emeritus of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She teaches courses in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and has led several fellowship programs in the School of Engineering that are focused on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Seelig earned her PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford Medical School, and has been a management consultant, entrepreneur, and author of 17 books, including inGenius, Creativity Rules, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. She is the recipient of the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Olympus Innovation Award, and the Silicon Valley Visionary Award.
John Hennessy is co-founder and Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars. He is Chairman of the Board of Alphabet and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Hennessy has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1977 and previously served as the President of the university for 16 years after roles including chair of Computer Science, dean of the School of Engineering, and university provost.
He co-founded MIPS Computer Systems and Atheros Communications. He and Dave Patterson were awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for 2017 and the National Academy of Engineering Draper Prize in 2022.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
[00:00:00] Tina Seelig: Welcome to Leading Matters, a podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a multicultural and multidisciplinary graduate fellowship program at Stanford University that focuses on leadership.
[00:00:23] I'm Tina Seelig, your host and executive director of Knight-Hennessy. Throughout these six episodes, I'll talk with John Hennessy about his experiences in different leadership roles, including as a faculty member, entrepreneur, president of Stanford University, and founder of Knight-Hennessy Scholars.
[00:00:42] Hello everyone. It's a pleasure to welcome you all to Leading Matters at Knight-Hennessy Scholars. Welcome John.
[00:00:48] John Hennessy: Thank you, Tina. Delighted to be here.
[00:00:49] Tina Seelig: Knight-Hennessy Scholars is a multidisciplinary and multicultural fellowship program for graduate students from all seven schools at Stanford University.
[00:00:58] We provide scholars with up to three years of financial support to pursue their graduate studies at Stanford, while providing them with a leadership development program that prepares them to address complex challenges facing the world.
[00:01:09] Now, John, different people define leadership in different ways. I'm really curious how you define leadership. Are there some basic concepts that relate to leadership, no matter what type of group or organization you're leading?
[00:01:22] John Hennessy: Well, Tina, I think the most important skill for a leader, the most important role that they play, is to help a team really go someplace that they want to get to. They know that there are benefits if they can change an organization, move to a different place. But they're not exactly sure how to get there. And the job of the leader is really to help inspire them to lead the team, to go to someplace new. And to accomplish something outstanding.
[00:01:51] Tina Seelig: Great. Well, we've had four hundred and twenty-five Knight-Hennessy scholars so far. Starting with our first cohort in 2018, and this fall, we're going to be welcoming ninety new scholars. These six podcasts, we're going to be exploring the traits and the behaviors that we have in the Knight-Hennessy leadership model. And we're going to be hearing from you, John, about how you developed and experienced these traits over the course of your career.
[00:02:14] Your personal leadership journey has been so incredibly interesting and impressive. Full of examples of really making meaningful change in your roles as a professor and a dean and a provost and the president of the university, as well as being an entrepreneur. And being on many boards and now as the chairman of the board of Alphabet. At what point in your leadership journey did you start seeing yourself as a leader?
[00:02:38] John Hennessy: Well, it was a slow process. It began relatively early on. You're a leader when you become a faculty member. You're leading your research group and you're working with the graduate students to really try to do something outstanding. And then slowly you get more responsibilities among your colleagues as you develop the opportunities and help them move forward in interesting ways.
[00:03:02] But for me, it was a slow journey that sped up quite a bit near the end, perhaps, as I moved through a number of positions more quickly. But without that beginning part of leading in a small group, I think it would have been very hard for me to be prepared to lead when there was a larger group and more complex questions being faced by a team.
[00:03:24] Tina Seelig: Did others identify the leadership potential that you had before you saw it in yourself? Or were you there chomping at the bit saying, put me in coach, you know, I want a bigger leadership role?
[00:03:34] John Hennessy: I was definitely not chomping at the bit. I was very focused on my research and my teaching. And the chairman of electrical engineering asked me to take on a role leading an interdisciplinary lab called the computer systems lab that combined faculty from computer science and electrical engineering, working on developing computer systems. And that was my first real opportunity to develop leadership, to begin to recruit faculty, to help young faculty develop. And that was an important growth journey. That was my major leadership position for probably six or seven years.
[00:04:10] Tina Seelig: I know that you embody the traits and the behaviors that we outline in our Knight-Hennessy leadership model. And this model includes nine traits that we strive to reinforce in the community. Such as vision, courage, curiosity, and humility, as well as six behaviors, such as creativity, collaboration, decisiveness. And then there are three goals for graduating scholars, including being part of a multicultural community and a commitment to the greater good. What do you think were the traits and the behaviors that you demonstrated, that people saw in you and identified to see you as an emerging leader?
[00:04:47] John Hennessy: I think probably the key characteristics they saw was my willingness to work to recruit and develop great faculty. And then to also recruit terrific graduate students into our programs. The university is really about people and they're the core of what make an institution great. It's not all the beautiful buildings or the grounds. It's the people in the university. And I was really dedicated to not only recruiting great new young faculty, but helping them succeed and develop. So I think that was a key advantage that I had and led to some early successes.
[00:05:24] Tina Seelig: I love that you were focused on making other people successful. It wasn't about you, instead, you were putting the focus on other people and helping them become successful and to achieve their goals. I know, I can tell you, I felt that when you were president of the university and I was a member of the community.
[00:05:42] Was that your conscious goal? Did you really think about that? Like, my goal is to make other people in this community successful.
[00:05:49] John Hennessy: Certainly. I think that's not just something that applied to the role that I had. It's an observation that applies to most leadership roles. Because leaders have to make the organization they're leading successful. And they do that by making individuals and teams successful.
[00:06:05] So for me, I discovered that I really enjoyed that role, that I liked helping people be successful, that I celebrated their successes. Whether it was a student winning a major award or a faculty member winning the Nobel Prize. Of course, I didn't do the work to win the Nobel Prize, they did. But I helped create an environment where they could achieve that incredible success.
[00:06:29] Tina Seelig: As someone who's taught creative problem solving for decades. I'm curious what role you think that problem identification and problem solving plays in leadership?
[00:06:38] John Hennessy: Well, certainly it plays a key role, and I'd say in several aspects. First of all, really trying to understand what problem you're trying to solve. And why you're trying to solve that problem is crucial. And figuring out which of the really important problems that really would make a difference if you solve them, but then figuring out how you solve that. And I like to think of problem solving in two different ways. Certainly there are crises, there are problems you have to, difficulty you have to resolve. But there are positive aspects. How can I position the university or the organization to do something really extraordinary and what steps are necessary to make that happen.
[00:07:16] Tina Seelig: Yeah. So obviously problem solving can be proactive too, both seeing and seizing opportunities, not just solving problems that come your way. What percentage of your time did you spend creating the vision and looking at problem solving as seeing big opportunities? And how much were you reacting to problems that were coming your way?
[00:07:35] John Hennessy: Like many things, it's cyclic. You have times when you're dealing with a crisis and it is all consuming and you're trying to address that issue. And then you have times where you're really trying to move an organization forward in a dramatic way. That's a time when you're more reflective and you're more thoughtful.
[00:07:54] And in fact, what I've discovered is you have to have your mind clear at that point. If all you're thinking about is the current crisis that's boiling over, you can't get the kind of creative juices going that are necessary to think about a new vision. So I spent a lot of my time, particularly summers and break time during the school year, were focused on crafting the vision rather than on solving the problem that was the problem of the week.
[00:08:21] Tina Seelig: What were some of the big visions that you pondered when you were on your breaks?
[00:08:26] John Hennessy: I think probably the big things we thought about, I would write a thought paper actually, at the end of that, so I could share my ideas with people, that was a vision for what the university was going to look like, which led to a major effort to build out multidisciplinary programs across the university. Knight-Hennessy was conceived of the same way, something I began to think about over a period of time and conceive of to develop into a thought paper that was called Project S at the time.
[00:08:54] Tina Seelig: I also think that one of the most interesting things about your journey is that you didn't just stay in academics. You spent time outside of the university developing a startup technology company. Did you find that having that experience in industry helped shape the way you led in academics?
[00:09:11] John Hennessy: For me, it was absolutely invaluable. I mean, I think first of all, I learned decision making under the pressure of time, because a startup can't be paralyzed by having to make a decision and things are not perfectly black or white. It's not exactly clear, it's gray, like lots of decisions you have to make in life. And so in a startup company, learning to do that because you've got time pressure, then helps you understand how you can do that in a large organization where you have the same kind of not black or white kinds of decisions to be made. So I think there's a great learning that went on there about how to lead and how to go through a crisis. I had my first crisis in our startup company. We had to do a layoff, we had to reset the company. Later on, when we faced a similar financial crisis in the university, I had been through that journey once. And I understood some of the key principles that were critical.
[00:10:03] Tina Seelig: That's so interesting. The trial by fire in this fast moving, high stressed environment of a startup that set you up to be much more prepared to deal with the crises in the university. I also think you bring a really interesting perspective because of your love of history. You know, sitting in your office, you're surrounded by lots and lots of history books and biographies. How your knowledge and your love of history has shaped the way you think about your role as a leader?
[00:10:28] John Hennessy: Well, I certainly look to people in history and see what their motivation was and how did they accomplish change. When I look at how did they face up to a crisis. You know, how did Washington get the Continental Army through the crisis of 1776 and the horrible winter in Valley Forge? How did Sarah Josephine Baker reform medical care and the care of children in New York City at a time when vast numbers of children were dying at young age because the very simple kinds of things that were understood by public health authorities had not become the established practice.
[00:11:06] Tina Seelig: One of the things that I notice in leadership in general, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, is that sometimes people wait to be anointed. They wait for someone to give them a leadership role before they start making leadership type decisions and behaving as a leader. I'm a strong believer that you shouldn't wait for someone to put you in. You should be looking around and seeing the problems and the opportunities around you. Then you defacto become a leader no matter what role you're in. What do you think about that?
[00:11:37] John Hennessy: I've always encouraged people that I've worked with to take leadership positions. As a leader, you don't want to micromanage your team. You want your team to grow and take advantage of various opportunities. And then when you're in that position, the question is, what can you do? What change can you make? What do you want to leave as a legacy for your leadership in an organization?
[00:12:04] And that involves stepping up. I remember when I was in the interview for president, I said, look, don't pick me if you want somebody who's going to mind the store. Because I'm not just gonna mind the store. I'm gonna try to do bold new things for the university.
[00:12:18] Tina Seelig: I always tell my students, you don't get the job, you get the keys to the building, and you got the keys to a very big building. You know, once you're inside, you can sort of look at all the opportunities there and see where you can take it. I love that.
[00:12:29] One of the issues you just sort of brought to the surface is the difference between leading and managing. What do you think is the difference and how do you kind of fit on that scale of leader versus manager?
[00:12:41] John Hennessy: Well, I'm definitely on the leader side of that equation. Not to deny that management isn't part of what a leader has to do. It is part of what a leader has to do. You have to coach people, give them feedback, hire the right people. I mean, there are management aspects of the job. But once you've got the team and you've got the group you want, it's about leading. It's about getting them to go somewhere really ambitious. And that's not a management role. That's a leadership role.
[00:13:08] Tina Seelig: So how do you go about picking people to complement you? Because, you know, if you need to have people who are leaders and managers and people with different skills. How do you go about filling out a team to make sure that everyone can get to the finish line that you all agree as the goal?
[00:13:24] John Hennessy: I think you're right. You need people to complement your skills. And I was blessed when I was president to have the same provost for sixteen years. He's a philosopher, so very different than a computer scientist, although he's a logician. So we had some overlap in that regard, but that meant he had a different set of leadership skills. He was the most patient individual I've ever met in higher education, and that was absolutely crucial.
[00:13:49] The other thing we had to do is form a strong working relationship. So we could trust each other and we knew that we didn't have to duplicate or coordinate on every single little decision. But we could divide up the task of helping to lead the university.
[00:14:04] Tina Seelig: Interesting. Yes, I think having people with very, very complimentary skills, but shared values is really important. I know from my experience, it was really great to have everyone on the team feel like they're doing quote unquote, the easy job. Meaning they're doing the job that is really tuned to them. I know that was my experience when I started my first company, it was a small company and everybody looked at everyone else and said, gosh, you know, I'm so appreciative that you're doing that because I couldn't do that. They felt themselves that they were doing the thing that they were really tuned to. And therefore, everyone really appreciated everybody else's contributions. Is that what you strive for?
[00:14:43] John Hennessy: That's certainly what I strive for. We strive for that at the university. We certainly have strived for that in building the team at Knight-Hennessy. To get that kind of complimentary ability where everybody is in the lane they belong in and they're doing a great job in that lane.
[00:14:58] And that makes for a real, a team effort. Think of it as a relay. You have to pass the baton off and you've got to pass the baton off well. And, and run your leg of the race or swim your leg of the race. And I think if everybody does their job exceptionally, then you win the race.
[00:15:14] Tina Seelig: That's where the magic happens. When the team, you know, sort of the old teamwork makes the dream work. I'm curious if there were moments in your career where you really felt that the team was so highly tuned to the problems you were addressing. I know personally, I feel that way about the KHS team right now. It really is so beautiful to work together. I'm curious about other places where you've had that experience.
[00:15:36] John Hennessy: Certainly we had that experience during most of the time we were leading the university. As I mentioned, I had a great provost. But also getting great deans so that we could accomplish something. And having a working ability among the deans that they all, certainly each of our deans worried about their school and their responsibility for what their school was doing and achieving. But also thought about the greater good of the university. And that was critical to doing that. And when you get that, then it's really magic, you can accomplish marvelous things.
[00:16:07] Tina Seelig: Speaking of accomplishing marvelous things, KHS is quite an incredible endeavor. And just over the last six years, it has come to life in such an interesting and exciting way. Can you share with everybody your motivation for starting Knight-Hennessy Scholars?
[00:16:23] John Hennessy: My primary motivation arose at a time I took a very brief sabbatical from the presidency and I began to think about the outside world and what was happening in higher education. As well as the crises we were facing around the world.
[00:16:37] The collapse of Arab Spring, the refugee crisis, not only in the United States, but globally. Paralysis in Washington, several major scandals on the corporate side, including the 2008 financial crisis. And even some in nonprofit sectors where leaders went awry. I said, why aren't we doing a better job in higher education of preparing young people to lead in these complex times and be successful? And that was really the beginning of what eventually developed into Knight-Hennessy Scholars.
[00:17:10] Tina Seelig: Well, I'm delighted that you did and we get to work together on all of this, including the leadership model, which we're going to be diving into through these six episodes. Why do you think it's important to call out specific leadership traits and leadership behaviors in a leadership model?
[00:17:26] John Hennessy: I think the traits and the behaviors are complementary in the sense that the traits create a foundation for the skills and characteristics and tools that leaders use. So you need a strong foundation if you're going to lead and particularly leading through difficult times, which we typically face. But then I think calling these out in the leadership model really helps us focus and think about how we develop program, so we can strengthen those characteristics and those traits in our young leaders.
[00:17:58] Tina Seelig: It's also important that the characteristics that we have in our leadership model are not just skills and traits that are only developed when you're in a large leadership role. But they can be developed at any place and at any time in your life. Things like being curious and open minded and empathetic and courageous. These are things you can practice at any place in the world, no matter where you are in your career.
[00:18:21] Now, our students come to Knight-Hennessey Scholars really excited about addressing some of the biggest problems facing the world, such as climate change, curing diseases, education equity. How do you think people should go about finding the problems that they are going to tackle? How do they decide where their passion is? How do they decide what they're going to focus their energy on?
[00:18:41] John Hennessy: So Tina, I think the people I know that have been most successful have exhibited two characteristics in choosing what they work on. First of all, they are passionate about what they're working on. They want to solve that problem, they're driven to solve it.
[00:18:55] Secondly, the skills they need to solve the problem, the approach they need aligns with their skillset. So they're picking a problem, that, A, they can really make progress on and contribute to. And that they are driven to work on. I used to tell our freshmen, you should work on something that gets you out of bed on Saturday morning early. Not because you need to be there, but because you really want to make a difference on that problem, on that issue, attacking that aspect.
[00:19:26] Tina Seelig: You know, it's interesting. If you're a curious person, everything is really fascinating. I'm sure that if I was focused on the sewer system of New York, it would be fascinating. Or if I decided to dive into the philosophy of ancient Greeks or how to build a robot. And so for me, one of the biggest issues is picking something where you're really curious, but also it is tuned to your skills. If you find something where you're really skilled and where you're really passionate, and when there's a market, that's where your life's work really shines and where you develop a real career.
[00:20:02] John Hennessy: Yeah. So I certainly agree. We sometimes talk about T shaped people, Tina, people that have real depth and expertise, but also have that top bar on the T. That means they're curious about other things and they can interact with people and talk about their work and talk about other people's work in an intelligent and thoughtful fashion.
[00:20:21] Tina Seelig: I think it's one of the things that we get to do at Knight-Hennessy is bring people together with so many different disciplines. The amount of cross pollination across these ideas is fascinating and I know that the students really value that.
[00:20:34] So, how do you coach students who come to your office and have their whole life planned out? I know that this happens, you know, to me frequently, is people come in and they've got their, you know, forty life, forty year life plan in front of them. What is it that you tell people when they come in and they've got a whole game plan for the future?
[00:20:51] John Hennessy: I tell them that, first of all, I think it's just fine to have a long-term goal of where you want to get in your life. But to have a step-by-step plan is not likely to be followed because you simply never know where one particular step is going to lead. And I ask them to think about, what do they want in that first step? And think about how are they going to grow? What are they going to learn? What kind of team are they going to work with, which will help them develop their skills? And that's what they should be looking for in that first step. And then after that, we'll see where the path leads and that's what students should really try to embrace.
[00:21:31] Tina Seelig: When you were a PhD student, how did you pick the project that you ended up working on?
[00:21:35] John Hennessy: Yeah, that's a fascinating question. It was a question of a bit of curiosity and luck. And as you sometimes say, sometimes luck comes your way and you need to grab it, right?
[00:21:45] What happened was a person who was working at Brookhaven National Lab came in with the project. It was the very early days of the very first microprocessors, which were only eight bits at the time, and they were just coming out. And he was interested in using them to control an X ray bone density scanner. This was something that had never been done. The software didn't exist. I said, well, that's an interesting problem. And that became my thesis topic.
[00:22:12] Tina Seelig: I think that's such a great example because you could have said, oh, that's interesting. And then turned in another direction and gone back to what you were working on. But you were willing to pursue that curiosity and the rest is history.
[00:22:24] I have a similar situation that happened when I was doing my PhD. I would go home and make dinner, and I was super curious. I was doing my PhD in neuroscience and go home and make dinner. And I thought, gosh, I know what's happening in great depth in my lab. But I really don't know what's happening in my kitchen. And I made a list of all the questions I had, you know, for example, like, gosh, most liquids, you heat them up, they turn into a gas, but you've got a liquid egg, you heat it up, it turns into a solid. What's going on here? Or why does popcorn pop? Or why does onion makes you cry?
[00:22:51] I started making a list of all the questions I had. And at that point, way back then, I couldn't find the answers to these questions. So I decided to write a book about it. And so I started writing this book on the chemistry of cooking while I was in graduate school. And that ended up taking me on a really interesting journey that was very exciting and also surprising that would never have happened if I hadn't followed that path. Can you share an opportunity of other places where you took a path that was not well laid out that led to interesting opportunities?
[00:23:24] John Hennessy: One of the fascinating things that happened to me, I had just become Dean of Engineering. And one of my colleagues, Teresa Meng, came to me with some technology she had developed as part of her research. And the technology involved building a low power GPS system that could be used in the field with minimal battery consumption. She observed that really what she had done is built a low power radio. And she said, I have this interesting technology, but I don't know what to do with it. It'd be great to start a company, but what problem would we solve? So we spent some time visiting people around Silicon Valley.
[00:23:59] At that time, the technologies which were doing wireless networks had all failed. They were too expensive, they were too battery, they consumed batteries too quickly. So we slowly developed this idea of really trying to build wireless technology using this invention she had. We went out, started the company.
[00:24:19] In the end, we became one of the leaders in developing early Wi-Fi technology and the company took off and was incredibly successful. But only because we were able, it was an ambitious thing. In fact, when we went to talk to the venture capitalists, one of the venture capitalists who had an expert person who came in said, oh, you're five years too early. You're five years ahead of your time. This is too big a risk. It won't work yet. He was wrong. And Teresa was right.
[00:24:45] Tina Seelig: That's so interesting. I'm always fascinated with the types of risks that people are willing to take. And do you take on a project that has a high likelihood of success or you take on a project that has, is going to be really meaningful if it is successful?
[00:25:00] John Hennessy: I have always pursued a little bit of both routes. I do want to try and get up at home plate and hit a few home runs. But I probably want to take a few singles in between so that I can guarantee I'm advancing people around the bases, while also taking some opportunities to really do something remarkable and hit the Grand Slam, right?
[00:25:21] Tina Seelig: Right. My PhD advisor used to always tell me, you need to have your bread and butter project. The one that you know is going to be successful and is going to lead to some meaningful results. But you can have your pie in the sky project that you're working on the side. That if it is successful has low probability. But if it is, it's really, really going to be impressive and impactful.
[00:25:42] So let's go back to leadership because here we are together working on this leadership program. People ask me all the time, can you really teach leadership? And what do you think? Can you do that?
[00:25:53] John Hennessy: I like an analogy here. Think about a newborn baby. They don't know how to say any words. They don't know any, even the idea of language, they don't understand. And somehow they learn something, which is one of the key characteristics of what makes humans different from other forms of life on this planet, the ability to converse in a complex language. If we can teach language, we can teach almost anything. I believe you can teach leadership. There are skills, there are traits to be reinforced in our leadership model, and there are specific skills you can use. Those are the tools that leaders use.
[00:26:28] Tina Seelig: I couldn't agree more. You can teach math, you can teach science, you can teach sports, you can teach art. Of course, you can teach leadership. And one of the things we do at Knight-Hennessy is to give the students an opportunity to practice leading. And one of the projects that I'm most excited about is our KHeystone Projects. And the students get a chance to pitch ideas for projects in the fall, anything they're interested in, they want to tackle. It could be something they know a lot about or something they want to learn about. Teams get formed around these projects. We give them a little bit of support. We help them find mentors and we see what happens.
[00:27:00] In the spring, there's the KHeystone Projects Showcase. And it's really exciting to see what they accomplish starting with essentially a blank canvas and a question. I'm curious, what are some of the projects, John, that you found most exciting?
[00:27:13] John Hennessy: Well, I think we've seen projects develop in a whole series of different areas. I mean, one of the ones I've been excited about is the Education Justice Academy, which really tries to work on the problem of how do we prepare people to join school boards. How do we give them the skills they need to be a successful school board member, understand budgeting and hiring principals and supervisors and things like that. Something that we haven't paid attention to.
[00:27:38] Even though school boards are the number one way people begin a public service career or involvement. We've had projects working on the homeless situation in the Bay Area, a very difficult problem. We've got a new project going on trying to address the shortage of mental health counselors in the U.S. So these are all tremendous projects, and I think several of them will go on to big successes later on.
[00:28:04] Tina Seelig: It has been so exciting to see the evolution of this project. When it started, we had maybe a dozen projects in our community. And this year we had three times as many. And we're even piloting starting to offer funding for students who are going to be going out and starting these ventures, our global impact funds. In fact, last year we gave out two grants to students who were starting projects as nonprofits once they graduated.
[00:28:29] John, this has been a wonderful start to our multi week conversation. The next five episodes, we're going to dive into the traits and behaviors in our leadership model. And in the next episode, we're going to be talking about curiosity, empathy, and humility, and how these are fundamental traits for a leader.
[00:28:45] John Hennessy: I'm looking forward to it, Tina.
[00:28:50] Tina Seelig: There are four takeaways from this episode.
[00:28:53] One, the hallmark of good leadership is helping other people reach their goals and making them successful.
[00:28:58] Two, start acting like a leader before being designated one. Look for opportunities to contribute and lead.
[00:29:05] Three, when you build a team, look for people who complement your skills. People who are different than you.
[00:29:11] And four, to choose what you work on from the intersection of your skills, your passions, and the market.
[00:29:16] Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Leading Matters. Please follow and like us wherever you listen to podcasts. And stay engaged with Knight-Hennessy scholars through social media @KnightHennessy and on our website, KH.Stanford.edu.
Photo credit: Micaela Go
