This month we sat down with our new CEO, Francesco Buquicchio, who graciously shared insights about the direction and requirements of leadership today. As a first-time CEO, Francesco is focused on how to keep himself and others in the mindset of continual learning and growth so needed in today’s world. He is keenly aware of how difficult and lonely this journey is for those at the top.
On Complexity
Q: When you look at what leaders are facing in terms of complexity and the tsunami of challenges and circumstances surrounding them, what skills and competencies do they need most?
A: The world is moving from complicated to complex. The way I like to describe complicated is that there is a solution. You work out the equations, you do all the work, invest resources and, finally, there is a solution. Sending people to the moon, for example. It is very complicated, but it can be done.
Now with complex, no matter how many resources you throw at it—how much money, people, etc—there is not an existing solution. Instead, you need to be sensing. You need to be agile. You need to be adaptive. None of this is either a skill or comes with previous experiences. So, the answer is not in a specific skill or competency. The answer is in searching for the potential in people.
We center on four drivers of potential: determination, engagement, insight, and curiosity. It is curiosity that is becoming more and more important in this climate of heightened complexity. Increasingly, this is the driving force which will distinguish the most impactful leaders.
Prioritizing Deep Listening
Q: What is your recommendation to a CEO who might feel lonely facing all this and wondering, “What is my plan, what am I going to do now?”
A: So, this is the one thing I am trying to tell myself everyday—to stop assuming that I know all the answers, also to stop assuming that I even know the questions that I am going to ask. That is all for the complicated world. In the complex world you cannot make these assumptions; you must approach the situation with total openness.
This really means that leaders need to cultivate and practice deep listening. Deep listening is a skill that is fueled by the utmost curiosity. Because the questions you might ask may already bias the answers you get, you want to get to the listening without asking the questions, to tease people’s responses while you are in deep listening mode. It is like fishing, you just put it there and you wait for the answers to come.
Deep listening is deep, but it also is very wide. You want to teach the entire organization to practice that idea. You never know where the next new perception or critical insight will come from. It can come from the most unexpected place.
Leaders are realizing this. That is why in our recent CEO study a majority of respondents chose “cultivating an organizational culture of openness and curiosity” as the number one means towards tackling the challenges they are facing—market disruption, talent acquisition, AI, and climate change chief among them. The cultivation of this curiosity begins with leaders, by their own examples and priorities.
Permitting the Discomfort of Unlearning
Q: How do you teach yourself how to quiet old habits and reflexes as a leader?
A: In order to apply deep listening, you need to get rid of a lot of the things that you have learned in the past. You need to unlearn. For most leaders, including myself, this is probably the hardest part of the journey. It is difficult for a number of reasons. For one, all our life we have been taught to learn, nobody teaches us how to unlearn. But if we don’t unlearn, we don’t create the space for the new mindsets we need.
On top of this, most leaders are successful because of what they have learned, what they have acted upon, and this has become part of who they are. So, it is very difficult to let go. What I do is try to really talk myself into the fact that I am not what I know. And this is frightening sometimes. Because the reason you have been put in the leadership position is for your experience, your skills, for what you have done, your track record, and what you know.
So, letting go and unlearning is complex and very uncomfortable. We face the fear: Am I throwing away a piece of me? No one ever taught us how to do this. It often takes coaching to practice (this also helps solve for part of the lonely component of CEO leadership). What I am doing a lot now with myself and my coach as well as with those I coach is to recognize that I am not throwing things out, instead I am making space, so I can add things.
I look at myself and other leaders as containers. Basically, the concept you want to invite is that you want to make your container bigger. This way you can host and gather the things you need to make yourself able to sense and be adaptive. To create more space in your container, you do two things. You unlearn and you also really stretch yourself to grow and expand your capacity for dealing with the new things that have been thrown at you.
A Word on AI
Q: There is no question that AI is one of the great challenges of the present moment. How do you think AI will influence leadership?
A: If I knew, I wouldn’t be in a complex world! But what my intuition says is that AI can solve and make the complicated much more efficient. I think what AI won’t be able to do, at least from what I have seen so far, is to help with the complex, because the complex is really about sensing; it’s about the unspoken, the unwritten. That still depends upon human capacity and connection. The technology might become much more, but so far, it’s just a very big machine that can actually simplify the complicated.
Connections and Conversations
Q: How do you think we can get better at conversations?
A: I think what has happened in the last decade probably is that we have become more connected on paper while, basically, we have become much better at broadcasting. And broadcasting doesn’t mean communicating. It doesn’t mean being connected.
I don’t think we are very good at this moment in time at having a real conversation, because conversing means listening and talking. As a society, we have been perfecting the muscle of blasting information, and outwardly feigning communication. But to really communicate, it takes real exchange, real listening. With the polarization of the world, we seem to have lost that, and it is concerning.
To counteract this, CEOs need to use the weapon that is working against them, in other words, to broadcast that this is a problem and that deep listening should be the goal. They can do this by creating platforms that enable listening across the organization, and by making people decisions based not only on experience but on the potential for curiosity and, finally, on taking the risk on unlearning.
It’s walking the talk. At the end of the day, behaviors speak louder than words, right? And decisions around how you pick your people, and how you build your bench, really speak to how you lead. Your bench needs to be filled with people who are seen and recognized as great listeners.
On Courage
Q: What do you want your message to be as you begin this role?
A: Well, I think I have touched on it, but it is around the lines of being brave. In accepting to unlearn, you are being brave. You are acknowledging that you are more than your track record, more than your skills, more than your experience. It’s all about really embracing this identity shift.
And this is also the message that I will advise all leaders to tell their people, that they are much more than their skills, or competencies, and their experiences. These are important, without question. As we move forward, we are all adding the complex to the complicated. Our progress will be greatly dependent upon our willingness to unlock our curiosity, to unlearn, and to listen deeply to each other.
