Cover of 713: Ken Chenault - Leadership Lessons from 17 Years as American Express CEO: How to Earn the Top Job, Hire Great Leaders, Build Culture, Challenge the Status Quo, and Lead with Character

713: Ken Chenault - Leadership Lessons from 17 Years as American Express CEO: How to Earn the Top Job, Hire Great Leaders, Build Culture, Challenge the Status Quo, and Lead with Character

713: Ken Chenault - Leadership Lessons from 17 Years as American Express CEO: How to Earn the Top Job, Hire Great Leaders, Build Culture, Challenge the Status Quo, and Lead with Character

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The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Join 10's of thousands of Learning Leaders all over the world and sign up for "Mindful Monday." Connect on Social: Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 LinkedIn This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Ken Chenault was chairman and CEO of American Express for 17 years, and Warren Buffett called him "the gold standard for corporate leadership." Today he's chairman of General Catalyst. His new memoir is Equal to the Task. Key Learnings "The only thing that you can control is your performance, so focus on your performance." His father's answer whenever Ken complained about a barrier. Ken says what makes it empowering rather than harsh is that it's both accountability and control at the same time. "Ken, never forget that you are equal to the task." First day of kindergarten, Ken froze, started crying, and ran out of the room to hide under a bench. His father found him, pulled him out, sat him on his lap, put a hand on his shoulder, and said it. At five, Ken had no idea what the words meant. They became a measuring stick anyway. What his father actually meant took decades to understand. Equal to the task is a challenge, not a reassurance. You still have to work for it. "If you wish to be a king, you need to have followers. A king looks after his people." Ken's teacher in grade school, Mrs. Lacraw, called him down and told him that isn't what kings do. It wasn't enough to protect the hill. He had to protect people. That became his North Star: judge a leader on the quality of their followership. Ken is emphatic that he's all about outcomes and driving results. The question is how those results were achieved and whether they'll endure. The Followership Tree. Who are the best-performing people who came out from under this leader? Who do other people look up to? Who delivers on an ongoing basis? Coaches have coaching trees. Ken looks for a followership tree. Does this person train, develop, and attract the best people to work for them? Trust is the core requirement, and everything flows from it. Intelligence and drive are givens on Ken's list. Trustworthiness is the thing that has to be there first. Then: is this person willing to go against the status quo? It's the attribute that surprises people most when he names it, because what he's really screening for is courage. So he asks directly. "Take me through when you had to go against the existing product set, the existing strategy. How did you do it? How did you go about it? Why did you do it?" Decisiveness and caring is not a contradiction. The best leaders connect with the hearts and minds of people. Being caring doesn't mean you're afraid of the hard call, it means you're more effective when you make it. "You could not imagine Amex without membership rewards." Membership Rewards was built in stealth mode. At the time, the culture at American Express held that rewarding card members for using the product was a form of discounting that damaged the brand's prestige. Ken disagreed, assembled a team across the company, and deliberately kept it quiet for about four months because he was afraid the traditionalists would kill it. He describes it as feeling like a startup. It launched in the early nineties and became one of the foundations of the company. Take the assignment nobody wants. Ken decided American Express needed to re-engineer, meaning changing its processes and its structure. Most people avoid those projects because they're high risk and they can end a career. He took it because the company needed it done. He never set out to be CEO. His objective walking in was to stay a few years and learn. He thinks making the top job your goal is dangerous: you start optimizing for what's best for you rather than the company, you stop taking the risks worth taking, and you can freeze. The marker that mattered wasn't promotion. It was someone saying, "Ken, you can make that decision. Ken, you can handle that." The hardest thing to delegate is judgment. The way he earned it was by doing the assignment well and then working out its broader implications for the company. "The role of a leader is to define reality and give hope." From a biography of Napoleon. Ken thinks about it every day in regards to leadership. Defining reality is what earns you credibility. It doesn't mean having all the answers. It means being present, aware, and engaged, and doing real diligence with people inside and outside the company to find out what's actually happening. But reality alone isn't leadership. Consultants can define reality. The second half is the specific, tangible reasons to be hopeful: a strategy, a product, ...
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