Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Leaders need to serve themselves. This is the leadership hack of Barbara Humpton, CEO of Siemens in the United States. While leaders need to serve their leaders, their customers, their partners, and their teams, they also need to serve themselves. Self-care can manifest in a lot of different ways, but for Barbara, it's about sleep. Oftentimes, sleeping on a problem can greatly increase your potent...

Ryan Hawk is the host of one of the most popular management and leadership podcasts in the world called, The Learning Leader Show. The show was chosen by Apple Podcasts as an "all time bestseller" in 2020 and it has received acclaim from Forbes and Inc. Magazine. He is also the author of Welcome to Management: How to Grow From Top Performer to Excellent Leader. It was named one of the 100 Best Man...

Leaders need to become lighthouses. Why? A lighthouse is something that shines light into a sea of uncertainty. It guides other people so they don't hit rocks and can find their way back home. But as a lighthouse, you need to remember that without ships in the water, you're not very valuable. It means you should always guide other people. You have to take other people along on this journey with yo...

Laurent Therivel is the CEO of UScellular, the fourth largest wireless carrier in the United States with 5,000 employees across 23 states. Previously he spent 12 years at AT&T where he most recently served as CEO of AT&T Mexico leading 18,000 people. Becoming the CEO of a company during a pandemic comes with a unique set of problems. A role that usually requires a lot of face to face interaction w...

Whether you are a leader or an employee, self-awareness is extremely important. One of the best ways to be externally self-aware is to be open to feedback. There are 3 ways you can get better feedback: Ask for it. Have a conversation with your leader or manager about what the feedback process looks like. Have open communication and set up the parameters around what the feedback will look like. Int...

Mark Lashier is the CEO of CPChem, a company that produces petrochemicals and plastics with 5,000 employees around the world. 50% of the company is owned by Chevron and 50% is owned by Phillips Petroleum. Mark has served in leadership roles at Chevron Phillips Chemical and Phillips Petroleum for three decades. With the challenges that we have all had to face over this past year, we have seen organ...

I love the way my wife Blake Morgan talks about customer experience. She says that we need to figure out how we can make our customers' lives easier, even if that means our lives get a little bit harder. But what happens in most organizations is the exact opposite. We are willing to make the lives of our customers harder so that we can make our lives a little bit easier. We need to flip that aroun...

If there is one thing that's true about being an entrepreneur, it's that you have to get used to rejection and failure. These things are a part of the game when you have your own business. Entrepreneurship is all about innovation and curiosity and you can't have those things without failure. The important thing is knowing how to deal with this reality and not letting it stop you from moving forwar...

Today, leaders need to be servants. We used to have this traditional idea of the pyramid where the leader sits at the very top and tells everybody else what to do. But we're starting to see this kind of inversion of the pyramid where the leader is at the bottom propping everybody else up. This is called servant leadership. When you show up to work every day, your job is to help make other people m...

I've had the privilege of speaking with around 500 leaders over the years on The Future of Work Podcast and I have really learned a lot from each one. On the show, they share tips, advice, lessons they've learned, as well as an inside look at what it's like to lead their organization.  This past year really brought a lot of challenges for every single leader around the world. We had to learn how t...

Culture is usually the hardest thing for organizations to figure out. It's something you can't see or touch. Culture is how employees feel working for the organization. I'll never forget the story of when President Kennedy visited NASA Space Center. In the middle of his tour, he saw a man walking down the hall with a mop and a bucket. President Kennedy stopped the tour and went over to the man and...

Kathy Mazzarella is the Chairman, President, and CEO at Graybar, a wholesale distribution company that's been around for 151 years. The company has around 8,700 employees and $7.5 billion in revenue. She has been with the company for 41 years and has been president for 9 of those years. Kathy Mazzarella has a great story of how she first started at the company she now leads as Chairman, President,...

The world of work has changed a lot.  We live in a world of uncertainty where employee tenure is no longer a thing. The best way to navigate this world is to be a super perpetual learner.  That means constantly learning new things at a rapid pace and applying those things on a regular basis.  You need to keep up with the pace of change or you will be left behind.

Aaron Cooper is the Interim CEO at Groupon, an online marketplace with around 4,000 employees globally. Prior to that he had worked in several other roles at Groupon including president of North America, Chief Marketing Officer, head of Global Travel, Head of North America Services and Head of North America Goods. Before Groupon Aaron held a lot of marketing and leadership positions at Orbitz and...

You can start being an intrapreneur now! When most people think of an entrepreneur, they think of an individual who went off on their own to start a successful business. But being an entrepreneur can also be applicable inside of your organization--it's called being an intrapreneur. One of the things that make entrepreneurs unique is their ability to push through obstacles and challenges that come...

Shellye Archambeau is the former CEO of MetricStream, a Silicon Valley based governance, risk, and compliance software company, and the author of the new book, Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers, and Create Success on Your Own Terms. She also serves on the boards of Verizon, Nordstrom, Roper Technologies, and Okta. Under her leadership MetricStream was recognized for growth and...

People are always reluctant to change. It's human nature. But if you want your team to adapt to new technologies, there is something you can do. To get your team to embrace new technology, you have to educate them. It's not just about giving them the tools or training them how to use it--it's about helping them understand why and how these technologies will improve how they work. Change is hard. T...

Melissa Smith is the CEO of Wex Inc. a provider of payment processing and information management services in the US, Canada, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They have around 5,000 employees and under Melissa's leadership the company has gone from $50 million to $1.7 billion in revenue. Melissa began at Wex Inc. in 1997 as a senior financial analyst and she worked her way up to being CF...

Being self-aware is one of the most important skills to have as a leader. It will help you identify your weaknesses and work on them. How do you know if you're self-aware? There are a couple of signs. 👆 The first sign that you are NOT self-aware is if you are constantly defensive. You're always having to defend yourself and defend your position to anyone who critiques you. Also, if you have a rep...

Kate Johnson is President of Microsoft US, a $45 billion division  including all of Microsoft's solutions, services, and support revenues across public and private sectors in the United States. Kate is responsible for a team of 10,000 people and she is currently very involved in Microsoft's culture journey led by CEO Satya Nadella. Prior to Microsoft Kate served as the Chief Commercial Officer for...

Self-awareness is one of the most important things to have as a leader. An effective way to practice self-awareness is to know what others think of you. Other people's opinions of you are often very different from your opinion of yourself. You need to encourage people to give you constructive feedback. But you can't just call people up and ask what they think of you. Once you collect this informat...

Carrie Birkhofer is President and CEO of Bay Federal Credit Union, a non profit financial cooperative with 225 employees. She's been the CEO there for 25 years and under her leadership the credit union has grown from $70 million to $1.4 billion in assets. This year has brought on a lot of challenges for leaders in every industry. Some leaders have struggled and even failed. Others have really embr...

Improving your strengths and working on your weaknesses is not as hard as people think. When I was younger and was trying to make decisions in my life, whether it was who I wanted to date, where I wanted to live, or even the company I wanted to apply for, my dad would always say, "Jacob, take out a piece of paper, fold it in half and write down the pros and cons on each side of the paper." What yo...

Michael Watkins is the Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the IMD Business School and the co-founder of Genesis Advisors, a global leadership development consultancy based in Boston where he coaches C-level executives of global organizations. He is also the author of 11 books including the international bestseller, The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Fast...

To be successful in the future of work, leaders must have a growth mindset. One way to identify if a person has a fixed mindset or a growth mindset is by how they tackle problems. For example, if you have a fixed mindset, when you run into a challenge or are faced with a roadblock, you try to tackle it the same way over and over. When those attempts don't work, you get frustrated and quit. But whe...