Why Great Leaders Need More Than Good Judgment

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Adi Ignatius** (0:17)
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I'm Adi Ignatius.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:55)
I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:06)
Alison, we hear over and over again that it has never been harder to lead a company. And a lot of that has to do with the challenge of charting the way forward in this hyper-uncertain environment. So the impulse of many leaders is to act, to be decisive, to move at speed, which is a great approach, but not if you don't know where you're going.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:25)
Sure, you don't want to act without fully understanding the situation that you're in, but at the same time, you don't want to be paralyzed by over analysis.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:34)
Exactly. So our guests today are making the argument that leaders should not rely exclusively on their own judgment because they cannot manage this environment effectively based just on their own experience and insights. So they need to find a way to both quickly and systematically bring additional voices and perspectives into the tent.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:53)
So important to let all the stakeholders weigh in, especially employees on the front lines of an issue, and to gather outside insights from human experts, as well as maybe artificial intelligence, but to do that at speed.

**Adi Ignatius** (2:06)
Absolutely. So joining me today are two people who have long worked with CEOs and other executives. They are Cornelia Choe, who heads the Leaders Alliance, and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. They are co-authors of the new book The Panoramic Leader, How Great Leaders See Differently, which offers a playbook for increasing the chance that you're on the right path, that you're better prepared to make consequential decisions. Here is our conversation.
Cornelia and Marshall, thank you for being on the HBR IdeaCast.

**Marshall Goldsmith** (2:40)
Oh, thank you for asking us.

**Cornelia Choe** (2:42)
Thank you. It's such a pleasure, Adi.

**Adi Ignatius** (2:44)
There are a lot of books out there on leadership and leadership paradigms. Why this book and why now?

**Cornelia Choe** (2:50)
The biggest question we both got from leaders is, how do I lead in a world that's changing faster than I am? And as you know, change is coming from every direction all at once, AI, tariffs, geopolitics, and we're in constant uncertainty. The problem today is that we're dealing with change that we can't see yet, or that is affecting us, but we don't know where it's coming from. So there's a lot of advice on how to deal with what you see. And we're dealing with what you can't see yet, and how to get on top of that before it affects you. And we found that leaders aren't able to see everything they need to on their own.
We need a panoramic view.
And panoramic leadership is the practice of making better decisions by broadening our perspective with insights from stakeholders around us to create a more complete and accurate view of reality, and then moving to action.

**Adi Ignatius** (3:46)
Yeah, I mean, you cite data about leadership that, I know it's not your data, but you cited that at least half and maybe considerably more than half of new executives fail in the first 18 months in the job. Why is it so hard?

**Marshall Goldsmith** (3:58)
Well, number one, it's always been hard, but two, the world is changing too rapidly. And the old days, the pace of change compared to today was non-existent. I think somebody wrote a great book once called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. I forget his name, but it was very brilliant. And basically, the gist is, what worked yesterday is not going to work tomorrow. In the old model of leadership, let's go back in history, leaders knew more than the people, but today the people know more than the leader.
And Peter Drucker, head of his time, said, leader of the past, we ought to tell the leader of the future, we ought to ask, it's a new world out there. And you've got to be sensitive to all these zillion different people who are interacting in your life that you didn't have to care about in the olden days.

**Adi Ignatius** (4:41)
Okay, so this gets into, I think, the meat of the book, which is we bring our experiences, we bring our talents, we also can get locked into certain mindset or fail to see the complexity of the situation. So, you know, a lot of what you're talking about with panoramic leadership is developing a broader perspective and bringing in other people to give you those insights. So talk about how to do that in practice, and if it works, what benefits that gives you?