Executive Development Leadership Lessons Learned

On September 14th, I co-chaired the inaugural meeting of the 'Executive Development Community' in Silicon Valley along with Shelley Greenwald, Director of Global Leadership Development at Palo Alto Networks.

Senior development and HR executives from Altais, Chime, Cisco, Cohesity, Flex, Google, Impossible Foods, Juniper Networks, LinkedIn, Medidata, Meta, Stryker, Synopsys, and Zscaler were in attendance.

Key takeaways from Behnam Tabrizi's (Stanford University) keynote on ideas from his new book "Going on Offense: A Leader's Playbook for Perpetual Innovation":

1. Future proof yourself and your organization.
2. Iterate with uncertainty to achieve rapid transformation.
3. Most important skill is the ability to change/pivot quickly.
4. The War for Talent is overrated; it's about unleashing internal talent.
5. Success doesn't necessarily breed future success; it can breed complacency.
6. Leaders, in the era of AI, need to become masters of learning AND unlearning.
7. Leaders need to co-elevate, co-adapt, and co-learn with their teams.
8. Leaders should be inspiring excellence, not demanding excellence.
9. Exec Development should take organizational transformation, personal transformation and ecosystem transformation into account.

Takeaways from Palo Alto Network's Chief People Officer Liane Hornsey's fireside chat on "Why Executive Leadership Development is so Critical yet often Deprioritized?"

1. One size exec development doesn't fit all! Personalization is key.
2. Leaders need to show kindness and empathy.
3. What makes a great leader - a great listener.
4. Not focusing on executive development during times of change is bonkers!
5. If you hire everyone using the same criteria, you will never have diversity.

Other lessons from our discussion: 

1. Some of the best results are not from formal training, but from going through projects, experiences, and most importantly, exposure.
2. To achieve perpetual innovation, give people "the why".