My bosses cautioned me about my candor. Now my GE career is over, and I'm telling you that it was my candor that helped make it work.
Interpretation
Candor, or honesty, is crucial in leadership, even if it can come with risks.
In this quote, Jack Welch reflects on the importance of being candid in a leadership role. Although he faced cautions from his superiors about his open and honest communication style, he ultimately believes that this very candor was pivotal to his career's success, suggesting that transparency can foster trust and effectiveness in leadership.
In practice
During a team meeting to discuss project progress, I shared my candid thoughts using Jack Welch's quote to emphasize the value of honesty.
You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum if you will. Getting it done in the short-range, and delivering a long-range plan, and executing on that.
I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.
A leader's role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize and excite.
Control your own destiny or someone else will.
The idea flow from the human spirit is absolutely unlimited. All you have to do is tap into that well. I don't like to use the word efficiency. It's creativity. It's a belief that every person counts.
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
I kind of do not like the word chef. Chef, giving you a sense of hierarchy and power. To be a good cook and to be a good leader, it has to come from within and to understand others.
When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.
Empty values statements create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility.
Great leaders don't need to act tough. Their confidence and humility serve to underscore their toughness.
It is an art in itself to compose a starting team, finding the balance between creative players and those with destructive powers, and between defence, construction and attack β never forgetting the quality of the opposition and the specific pressures of each match.
Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.
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