Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1302 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here.
Preamble
This blogpost takes insights from a McKinsey article. Link at the end.
Leadership Is Not What You Think: Seven Misconceptions Every Leader Should Reconsider
Leadership is one of the most discussed subjects in business. Yet leadership remains remarkably difficult to define, and even more difficult to practice.
A recent McKinsey Author Talks conversation with Mike Grossman, a six-time Silicon Valley CEO and former McKinsey consultant, challenges some deeply held assumptions about leadership and success. Drawing on nearly three decades of leadership experience and his book Failure Is an Option, Grossman argues that leadership is much less predictable than conventional wisdom suggests. Hard work matters, but luck matters too. These ideas deserve serious consideration because they challenge the heroic image of leadership that dominates popular culture.
Misconception #1: Hard Work Guarantees Success
One of the most deeply embedded beliefs in professional life is that hard work inevitably produces success. Work hard. Be disciplined. Perform consistently. Eventually, success will follow. There is truth in this philosophy, but only up to a point.
Grossman’s experience led him to a more nuanced conclusion: hard work improves the quality of what you do, but it does not guarantee the outcome. Luck, timing, market conditions, competitors, economic shocks, relationships, and circumstances outside our control can profoundly influence results.
The implication is not that effort is irrelevant. It is that leaders should define themselves by the quality of their decisions and actions, rather than allowing outcomes alone to determine their sense of worth.
Misconception #2: Successful Leaders Control Their Destiny
Leadership mythology often portrays successful CEOs as master strategists who anticipate everything and deliberately engineer their success. Real life is considerably messier.
Grossman describes luck as having played an enormous role in his own career, including an unexpected moment during his McKinsey interview that ultimately changed the trajectory of both his professional and personal life.
The lesson is not to wait for luck. It is to recognize that luck is always part of the equation. Good leaders therefore prepare well, make intelligent decisions, and remain adaptable when circumstances change. They also build organizations capable of absorbing uncertainty.
Misconception #3: The CEO’s Job Is Primarily About Making Big Decisions
Popular images of CEOs focus on dramatic decisions: acquisitions, product launches, reorganizations, major investments, and strategic transformations. But the reality is much less glamorous.
Grossman describes business as an endless sequence of problem-solving exercises. Leaders continually examine facts, interpret changing circumstances, make decisions, observe what happens, and adjust. This is an important shift in perspective.
Leadership is not one great decision followed by victory. It is thousands of decisions made under imperfect conditions. The best leaders therefore develop a capacity for continuous adjustment. They do not become emotionally attached to yesterday’s strategy simply because it was their strategy.
Misconception #4: The Best Leaders Always Know What to Do
Another leadership myth is that confidence means certainty.
The CEO enters the room. Everyone looks at the CEO. The CEO knows the answer. But experienced leaders know that reality rarely works that way.
The most difficult decisions often involve competing legitimate interests. Grossman describes situations in which financial logic and the interests of other stakeholders pull in different directions. These are not simple right-or-wrong decisions. They are shades of gray.
Leadership therefore requires something more valuable than certainty: judgment. Judgment means making the best decision possible with incomplete information while accepting responsibility for the consequences.
Misconception #5: Business Success Should Always Come Before Personal Values
Perhaps the most powerful part of Grossman’s reflections concerns integrity. He describes an investment situation in which an investor wanted him to replace his best friend and business partner as a condition for investing. He refused.
Financially, accepting the condition might have appeared attractive. But he believed doing so would violate his values. His conclusion was unequivocal: integrity has to win when financial advantage conflicts with fundamental ethical principles.
This is an important lesson because leadership ethics are rarely tested when the correct answer is obvious. The real test occurs in gray areas. Leadership character is revealed in precisely those moments. A leader’s values are not what appears on the wall. They are what the leader is unwilling to compromise when compromise would be personally advantageous.
Misconception #6: Strong Leaders Are Emotionally Detached
There is another outdated image of leadership: the unemotional executive who makes decisions objectively and moves on. But Grossman’s experience suggests that leadership is deeply personal. He recalls regret over a failed negotiation that had significant consequences for himself, his family, his business partner, and his team. The decision remains emotionally painful even years later. This does not indicate weak leadership. It indicates that leaders care.
A CEO who feels none of this may actually be less equipped to lead responsibly. The challenge is not eliminating emotion. It is combining empathy with sound judgment.
Misconception #7: Optimism Means Believing Everything Will Work Out
Leadership literature often celebrates optimism. But blind optimism can be dangerous.
Grossman proposes something more useful: fact-based optimism. His analogy is a football kick returner running down a field while constantly responding to changing obstacles. The player does not pretend that getting tackled is impossible. Instead, he continuously evaluates the situation and asks what he can do next to maximize the chance of success. This is a powerful model for executives.
Fact-based optimism is fundamentally different from positive thinking. It combines realism with agency. The leader acknowledges reality without surrendering to it.
What Difficult Times Reveal About Leadership
Perhaps one of the most encouraging insights from Grossman’s experience is his observation that adversity can bring out the best in people.
When organizations face serious difficulties, employees can become remarkably selfless, empathetic, and collaborative when they believe in one another and in the values of the organization.
This challenges another common assumption: that crises primarily expose organizational weaknesses. They certainly can. But crises can also reveal organizational character. People discover who they can trust. Leaders discover who takes responsibility. Teams discover whether collaboration is real or merely something written in a corporate values statement. Culture is tested when survival becomes difficult.
Leadership Is a Journey of Continuous Learning
Grossman’s story also highlights the importance of mentors. He credits former Intuit CEO Bill Campbell as a significant mentor and says that in difficult moments he often considers what Campbell would have advised.
This reminds us that even experienced CEOs need people who challenge, guide, and influence them. Leadership development never really ends. Leaders must therefore continue learning, not only about business but about themselves.
Sum Up
Perhaps the greatest misconception about leadership is that it is primarily about winning. It is not. The mythology of leadership celebrates the spectacular victory. Real leadership is often quieter.
As Mike Grossman’s experience suggests, leadership is not the art of controlling outcomes. It is the discipline of making the best possible choices, learning continuously, preserving integrity, and helping people move forward, even when the path ahead is uncertain.
That may be a less glamorous definition of leadership. But it is probably a more truthful one.
Concluded.
Disclaimers: Pictures in these blogs are taken from free resources at Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Google. Credit is given where available. If a copyright claim is lodged, we shall remove the picture with appropriate regrets.
For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, any claim is lodged, it will be acknowledged and duly recognized immediately.
Reference:
