Science Reveals Traits Every Founder Must Cultivate
It’ll change you how lead your company.
Famous CEOs over the years include Steve Jobs of Apple, Jack Welch of General Motors and more recently Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft are hardly flawless. They knew or know how to manage their strengths and weaknesses. It’s an approach aspiring leaders can take too.
Professor Deborah Ancona, the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, is a professor of organization studies and the founder of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
She helped create the 4-CAP+ model, which teaches executives and leaders how to build on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses or flaws. This model offers four capabilities that every leader must reflect on.
1. Making Sense
Change is inevitable, but successful leaders make sense of the context within which they must operate. In 2014 Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft. At the time, the company had many critics who accused it of over-relying on legacy products and risking irrelevancy.
Nadella traveled around the company talking to employees, customers, and partners. He also explored how other large, successful organizations were evolving. Ancona says,
