Why curiosity, empathy, and humility matter in leadership
Tina Seelig and John Hennessy explore the essential traits of curiosity, empathy, and humility in leadership. Through personal anecdotes and insights, they discuss how these qualities shape effective leaders and foster a culture of openness and understanding.
No matter your industry or role, this conversation offers valuable lessons on navigating complex challenges with empathy and wisdom.
Five key episode takeaways:
- Open-ended questions can unearth insights and opportunities.
- In a diverse community, give everyone a chance to voice their opinions and share their experiences.
- You're never going to convince everyone you've made the right decision. But you do have to convince everyone that you've made a reasonable decision.
- Humility comes from knowing you're doing the best job you can. But you might not always be right.
- As a leader, you should have strong opinions loosely held.
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. I'm Tina Seelig, your host and executive director of Knight-Hennessy.
[00:00:27] 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, John.
[00:00:43] John Hennessy: Hello, Tina. How are you today?
[00:00:44] Tina Seelig: I am great. Today, we're going to talk about some of the traits in our leadership model. We're going to talk about curiosity, empathy, and humility.
[00:00:51] Now, these are all really different, but they're closely related. And they really all point to the willingness and ability to place yourself in a larger context. I'm really interested to know why you think that leaders should be curious, empathetic, and humble.
[00:01:06] John Hennessy: Well, Tina, I think leaders have to be open to the opinions of others and to really understand the community, the organization they're leading. And that begins with humility, realizing that everybody in the organization has a contribution to make, and you need to appreciate that. It begins with curiosity, understanding the roles that people are playing in the organization. And of course, empathy, understanding the individual journeys and struggles that people are going through. So those are key characteristics, I think.
[00:01:39] Tina Seelig: For me, it's also all about deeply understanding that my point of view and my knowledge is not the complete picture. As a result, we all need to pay attention and ask a lot of questions. Sometimes we have blind spots and past experiences that prevent us from seeing a different perspective that's really important. One of the most important opportunities and challenges at KHS is that we have a really, really diverse community with very different experiences. People coming from all over the world, from different disciplines. It certainly isn't always easy, but it's incredibly valuable to be in the company of those with different points of view.
[00:02:14] Running a university means that you, by definition, are working with those from across disciplines and very different perspectives. Can you share a situation where you needed to really listen and understand a different perspective?
[00:02:26] John Hennessy: When I had become the new provost of the university, there was a brewing crisis among a number of women faculty at the university who felt that the university was in some way systemically not treating women equitably. And I wasn't sure that there was anything systemically wrong. But I thought I had to understand what the concerns really were.
[00:02:49] So I organized during the six months, roughly, a series of lunches with every single woman on the faculty got invited. And what I heard was that there were individual problems and they were things where various parts of the university were not adhering to our principles, our goals, and our ambitions as an institution, the things we strive for.
[00:03:10] They may have been following the letter of the law, but they were not following the spirit of the law, the way we think about operating the university. I ended up meeting with those resolving all those issues with various parts of the university. And I think we got through the problem, but the key was to listen. And just because I had never experienced anything that I viewed as unfair treatment doesn't mean that other people in the university didn't have that experience, and hearing from them directly made a big difference.
[00:03:36] Tina Seelig: That's a great example. I know that at Knight-Hennessy, we are acutely aware of the need to teach people how to listen to different perspectives. It's actually baked into our program. For example, all new scholars participate in weekly storytelling to build their communication skills as well as their empathy. And during weekly presentations, the scholars learn about each other's lives. And we give them prompts from the leadership model, such as courage, resilience, and trust.
[00:04:00] It's been really fascinating because throughout the year, all the new scholars get to hear everybody's stories and builds a lot of empathy. Now, I know, John, you were able, when you were president, to interview the Dalai Lama. Pretty amazing opportunity. Why don't you learn from him about curiosity, empathy, and humility?
[00:04:19] John Hennessy: Well, first of all, the Dalai Lama is a very humble guy. He starts by talking about what brings joy in life and the importance of respecting all forms of life. He's a person who exudes joy, and that's an amazing thing. He's got a sense of humor. You don't think of the Dalai Lama as somebody with a sense of humor, but he has an amazing sense of humor.
[00:04:41] One of the things he said about meditation is, he says, well, you know, some of my friends in other religious orders can meditate for hours, he goes, not me. He goes, I get hungry, I wanna drink water, a fly lands on me, he goes, I give it five or ten minutes.
[00:04:59] Tina Seelig: That's great. I know that he also talks a lot about being, remaining flexible and open minded and having, assuming other people have good intentions.
[00:05:08] Are there examples when you were the president where you needed to sort of act like the Dalai Lama, you know, be very open minded and empathetic when problems came to you that you might not be familiar with?
[00:05:20] John Hennessy: Certainly, actually, early on in my presidency, a group of students started a hunger strike arguing to implement a living wage at the university. And first of all, of course, you're empathetic. These students, they obviously were really concerned about the issue, the fact that they would go on a hunger strike. And you're president of the university, you care about their health and their well being. So trying to understand what they were concerned about. And what we didn't understand was everybody at the universities paid more than the living wage guidelines. So what's the problem?
[00:05:52] Well, the students found some workers who, while they were university employees, their work had been structured in such a way that they never became permanent employees and therefore never attained the university's wage scale. And this was another case where we were not doing the right thing. Perhaps we were doing the legal thing, but we were not doing the morally right thing in this particular part of the university. And the students brought a worker in and talked about this problem. And then we solved the problem and said, look, we have a set of rules here. We have a set of rules because we care about people in the community, and we have certain guidelines that we want to follow. And that eventually solved the problem.
[00:06:33] Tina Seelig: I often think about the amount of effort and time that goes into teaching empathy at the d.school, where I've taught for many years. And doing empathy interviews to really understand a problem deeply.
[00:06:44] The key is to ask open ended questions, to eliminate your preconceptions, and to really, really allow someone to let you into their world. Listening carefully to what someone says, capturing what they're actually doing. Understanding what they're thinking, trying to figure out how they're feeling. You end up gaining a tremendous number of insights with set stage for really addressing interesting problems and seeing opportunities.
[00:07:09] I'm really interested to know how you identified opportunities as a president. I'm sure you were out there talking to everyone. I know that you had a policy of meeting with every faculty member. And you did this weekly through all of your years as president, meeting with faculty members over lunch. I'm curious what new opportunities surfaced that you would not have known if you had not been having these meetings.
[00:07:34] John Hennessy: Certainly it is that method of getting out there and meeting with people. Um, sort of in the middle of my presidency, we discovered that a few faculty had made some interesting breakthroughs in terms of tools to study the human brain and the operation of brains in fundamental neuroscience. How does the brain really operate?
[00:07:53] And these technologies enabled us to understand things we hadn't done before. One called optogenetics, another involved building miniature microscopes that would go on the heads of mice to observe neurons firing in the mouse's brain. And that meant that we thought there could be a great opportunity to really move forward dramatically in neuroscience.
[00:08:14] And since we already had lots of great individual people, we wanted to kind of pull that effort together and try to make the whole greater than the sum of parts, and really develop these technologies and capabilities, so that we could work on one of the most critical problems of all time, which is understanding how the human mind works.
[00:08:33] Tina Seelig: You know, it's funny, as you know, of course, I did my PhD in neuroscience. I often joke, you know, if someone had told me at the beginning, we don't know how the brain works, it would have saved me a lot of time. We're still working on that, but, uh, yes, I guess it's job security for all those neuroscientists.
[00:08:47] How long do you stay in a problem space thinking about what problem you're actually solving before you start trying to look for solutions? This is something I think about a lot. The idea of spending time framestorming and framing the problem before you start trying to find solutions. Is this something you think about?
[00:09:07] John Hennessy: Certainly there are cases where that's really crucial. When I started as president, we had had a crisis around the medical school and the hospital. We had decided to take apart a merger that we had tried with UCSF to fix the financial dynamics of both schools. Both hospitals were suffering at the time.
[00:09:27] And then when that was taken apart, the question we really had to ask ourselves, what do we want to be? What kind of hospital service do we want to be? Where do we want to be viewed in the community in terms of providing clinical care? How much do we want to expand? And that was the start of a conversation to really think about redirecting our activities so that we could be both financially viable. But also had the respect and admiration of both our academic colleagues and our patients.
[00:09:58] Tina Seelig: This must have taken a tremendous amount of empathy and curiosity because there were so many different stakeholders with really different perspectives here. I'm really interested to understand how you surfaced all of these different perspectives and how long this all took.
[00:10:13] John Hennessy: Well, I spent a lot of time working with the faculty. At the time we were doing a new dean search, and that began a process of engaging with the faculty and understanding what the issues were and what the problems were.
[00:10:25] But I also spent a fair amount of time on the phone, talking to other leaders at other institutions about how they had organized their activities around this. And trying to learn from them about how to think about going forward for our organization. In the end, we dramatically restructured the way the hospital was organized and its leadership and how it reported in and reformed its board. And those all made big changes over time that really turned the situation around.
[00:10:56] Tina Seelig: I remember this very clearly. This was a very, very long drawn out process. People were picketing in the streets. People had very, very different points of view. How do you deal with this when you have people who have such very, very different perspectives? I mean, you can be as empathetic as you want, but the community is diverse and are bringing very different points of view and needs to the table.
[00:11:20] John Hennessy: Step one is giving everybody a chance to voice their opinion and their views on it. Whether that's through town halls or individual meetings. Some way of letting people make their opinion known. Then try to figure out a rational solution that benefits the community at large that's sustainable because you want a long term solution, particularly if it's a moment of crisis.
[00:11:45] And then articulating your rationale behind that. You're never going to convince everybody a hundred percent that you've made the right decision. But you have to convince everybody you've made a reasonable decision given the inputs and the situation.
[00:11:58] Tina Seelig: How different is this in a university versus a large company? Clearly there's different types of decision making that happens in these different types of organizations.
[00:12:08] John Hennessy: It's certainly the case that a CEO in a company has more power than a university president. The faculty do not really think they work for the president. They may work for the university and for their field, but there's a different relationship.
[00:12:22] Despite that, despite that difference, the truth is, neither is a command and control situation. There are very few people who lead by authoritarian command and control. They lead by really trying to pick a rational direction and inspire the team and convince people that that is the right place for the organization to go, or to resolve a crisis they're in the middle of.
[00:12:47] Tina Seelig: I have actually on my whiteboard in my office four words to remind me about different types of decision making. One is command, the next is consult, the next is collective votes, and the fourth is consensus. And it's really important whenever you make a decision to figure out what type of decision is this.
[00:13:05] Is this a command decision? Like I'm going to actually make this decision and I have the authority and the responsibility to do it. Is this a decision where I really need to consult other people and get their input? Is this a time when we're going to collect votes? Is this a democracy? And we just decide, okay, based on who gets the most responses, or is this a consensus where actually everyone has to agree? Are there decisions that fall in these different categories in your experience as a president?
[00:13:32] John Hennessy: Certainly. I mean, I think when we, for example, hire faculty. It's some combination of consensus and voting. Normally the search committee will reach a decision on the base of consensus. The faculty in the department will then vote on it, but normally votes are very unanimous often, or very close to that.
[00:13:51] That doesn't work as organizations get larger and larger. You simply can't make decisions that way. You've got to move more to a consultative model of decision making. There are very few cases where we've ever used command. When people are in danger or there's something that's really difficult, then command can be appropriate. But otherwise it's not a decision making process that I think leads to successful long term leadership.
[00:14:19] Tina Seelig: I guess if something's illegal, you can say, we just can't do this, right? This is impossible. I also really like the concept of strong opinions loosely held, you know, taking a position and exploring its implications, but being open to ideas that help you consider to change your mind.
[00:14:33] You know, this is why we need to be surrounded by a diverse team where people can help you. I know this happens in our meetings all of the time, when we've got our team there, someone will bring something up. Have a strong opinion and it gets batted around and we often end up in a really different place than when we started.
[00:14:49] So let's talk a little bit about humility. I actually, considering everything that you've accomplished, your humility is just so remarkable and I'm wondering how you practice humility when you're in a position where your role requires a lot of confidence. How do you demonstrate humility when you're in actually in a powerful position?
[00:15:10] John Hennessy: Well, I think humility can be demonstrated in a number of different ways. Certainly one thing I've tried to do throughout my career is to let others shine, don't let my shadow be cast over the efforts of other people. So stand back and let other team members get credit for things they've done. That's an important part of it.
[00:15:32] I think also being humble about what changes we can make. How we can approach problems and thinking about things. I'm in favor of ways of trying to move organizations forward even if the steps have to be fairly modest in size in order to make forward progress.
[00:15:50] Tina Seelig: I think the other thing is that depending on the decision, I may not be the smartest person in the room, right? There might be someone who knows a lot more about a situation. So being willing to be wrong. And also demonstrating when you are wrong and giving also grace to other people when they make mistakes. You know, life is complicated, problems are hard. We don't often have all the information. And so humility comes from being willing to understand all of those complexities.
[00:16:18] I know that personally, I often say that I wouldn't want to be a day younger than I am because I learned so much every day. And humility comes from knowing that you're doing the best job you can and that you may not always be right. Are there role models in history who have demonstrated great humility?
[00:16:35] John Hennessy: My great role model for humility is Abraham Lincoln. He's a person who many people thought was not qualified to be president of the United States. And yet he led the country through its greatest crisis of all time and made one of the most important changes of all time. When he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, his cabinet didn't want him to do that. But he seized the opportunity at that moment. And he said, oh, I can do something now that I couldn't have done before and change the country.
[00:17:05] Tina Seelig: What an inspiration. It's also an interesting problem for a young person who's trying to build their credibility and build their platform and build their confidence. How does a young person demonstrate humility when they want to share their successes with the world?
[00:17:23] John Hennessy: There's nothing wrong with sharing your successes and your accomplishments, Tina. That's a matter of fact and record, and that's useful. What you have to avoid is sharing them with such a loud, overwhelming voice that it doesn't allow other opinions to be voiced and people to question your decisions or what you're trying to advocate for.
[00:17:46] Tina Seelig: I'm a huge fan of introducing other people and shining a light on them. I know that this is, you do this as well. But it's such a great thing to be a great introducer, so that you can shine a light on someone and sing all of their praises. It's much better to let someone else sing your praises than to do it yourself. And so having other people around you who are willing and able and excited to elevate you is really important. So, John, I am a huge fan of yours. It is a joy to work with you. I learn something new from you every day.
[00:18:19] John Hennessy: Thank you, Tina.
[00:18:23] Tina Seelig: There are five takeaways from this episode.
[00:18:26] First, open ended questions can unearth insights and opportunities.
[00:18:31] Second, in a diverse community, give everyone a chance to voice their opinions and share their experiences.
[00:18:37] Third, you're never going to convince everyone you've made the right decision. But you do have to convince everyone that you've made a reasonable decision.
[00:18:45] Fourth, humility comes from knowing you're doing the best job you can. But you might not always be right.
[00:18:51] And finally, as a leader, you should have strong opinions loosely held.
[00:18:57] 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
