What World Famous CEOs Teach Us About Leadership
A December 2025 article in Inc. magazine profiled a number of CEOs including some world renowned names like Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon. The point of the piece was that, among other attributes, one necessary component for sustained success is self-awareness. What other advice did these business titans share, and what can we “regular people” take away from it?
Please tune in this week as Wayne reviews the article and offers four tips for getting the most out of yourself – the very individual the article says is “the hardest person to manage…” The counsel delivered by the CEOs may sound a little familiar to regular viewers as it touches on avoiding complacency, admitting weaknesses and shoring them up by building out great teams and getting outside perspectives in a systematic way. What are your thoughts? Please share them with us at [email protected].
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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.
This week I want to talk about what world-famous CEOs can teach us about leadership. This came from Inc Magazine, December of 25 by Marcel Schwantes. I hope I pronounced that right. And the subtitle was The World's Best Performing CEOs Treat Self-Awareness as a Superpower. So a bit of an unveiling there. Quote from the article, "The hardest person to manage is yourself." And that is absolutely true. We tend to evaluate ourselves by thinking about our intentions. We tend to evaluate other people by their actions.
It's harder for us to be objective. I mean, let's face it, everybody thinks they have the prettiest baby. That's just the nature of being a person. We tend to actually overestimate ourselves and not always evaluate ourselves based on our outcomes. So the CEOs in consideration in this particular article were Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan Chase, Reed Hastings from Netflix, and Larry Fink from BlackRock. And you say, "Wayne, man, those guys are... I know they're successful and they lead successful businesses, but they're pretty controversial." Well, they wouldn't be in the headlines, they wouldn't be in this article if they weren't controversial. It also shows that success isn't quite as clear cut as we may want it to be. We're not all that movie star type, the knight in shining armor on the white charger rushing to the rescue. Real life isn't quite that simple, is it?
Now what about this is important to you? Well, what can these business titans teach us? What do they know that maybe we don't know? What are they applying in their own business lives that maybe we can learn from? Number one, seek truth that you do not want to hear. Don't get complacent. How many times have we said in these vlogs complacency is a business killer. Do not get complacent. And if you're starting to hear yes, yes, yes, yes all around you all the time, you might need to seek out some feedback from other people who are not quite as inclined to always be the yes man or the yes woman. Ask the question, what am I not seeing? Who's telling me only what I want to hear?
Number two, turn feedback into a system. Schedule regular meetings for feedback. They talked about one of the CEOs who actually scheduled biannual meetings for direct feedback on all of the activities that have happened in the preceding six months. And it was a scheduled thing. It was a regular feedback session. Everybody knew it and it could prepare for it. And informal feedback is great, but sometimes you need to build it into a better system to make sure you're hearing things from other people that you may not be considering yourself.
We've had a number of our members, we have this assessment that all the peer group members undertake, it's business health assessment we call it. And some of the members, when they're hosting their peer groups, they'll do the business health assessment and they'll call after their peer group meeting, they'll call back a year or two years later and they say, "I want to redo it. I want to see if we've moved the needle." What they're looking for is evaluative feedback. Yeah, we learned from our peer group. They told us to do X, Y, and Z. We did. Did it move the needle on morale? Did it move the needle on how effectively we communicate with our employees? So getting that regular feedback is a great thing. 360 degree review is another way that individuals can get feedback from their peer group inside their companies.
The third thing, admit you have weaknesses and build around them. So when you use the names of business titans like that, you think, ah boy, that's a genius. That's a superhuman to be able to have the kind of incredible success that person had. No, they're human beings too. They're tall or shorter. They have characteristics. None of us are perfect. And so they have weaknesses, but what they do is they compliment their weaknesses. And that's so critical.
I knew a CEO who was fairly disorganized in his personal life and also at work. Guess what he did? He hired a super competent executive assistant who was incredibly organized. And man, she kept him straight. I mean, she did a great job of using her strengths to add to his so that together they made a super team. And that's what you're looking for there.
Number four, get an outsider's mirror. They talk in the article about coaching, mentorship, boards, because these big companies have boards. Maybe think of what? Peer groups. Get outsiders mirrors. Well, that's what your peer group does for you, right? If you want more information on peer groups, contact Charlotte. But that for me has been not just a business changer, that has been a life changer for me since I joined my peer group and now I've already forgotten, has it been 13 years ago? So anyway, I can't think of anything better than I've done, any decision that I've made in my business career that has paid more dividends than me joining a peer group of ironically peer group providers.
Okay. So let me close here. "The higher leaders rise, the less feedback they naturally receive and the more intentional they must be about finding it. The most successful CEOs build mechanisms for truth telling into their calendars, cultures and conversations. They listen hardest when the news is hardest to hear because in every season of leadership, the ultimate differentiator isn't brilliance, it's self-awareness." Where do you get self-awareness? Generally from the lens of other people. So what do you think? Email me, [email protected].
This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.
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