It takes a lot of hard work to become an effective leader.
"You have to be systematic about training yourself," said DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston on Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It.""That means figuring out what you don't know and learning it — and no one is going to do that for you."
Current and former business leaders have given great career advice on the podcast, including finding funding to launching startup to hiring the right people. In this episode, we pulled the best tips for how to be a great leader in any industry.
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Here's the master class episode from top executives on leadership:
Former CIA director John Brennan says leaders should spend their first few months on the job learning as much about the organization as possible.
John Brennan: "The most important thing for anybody who's going to be taking on that responsibility, is use your first period of time, whether it be six, nine, 12 months, to learn as much as you can about the organization that you're running. Understand how it interacts within itself, how it inter-operates with the rest of the intelligence community and the US government. You really need to have that in-depth understanding and knowledge in order for you to have the wisdom to be able to leverage it for the best of the country's security. And there is a distinction between knowledge and wisdom in my mind. I felt that when I joined the agency, I had a fair amount of knowledge about the Middle East and Arabic and terrorism and other things. But wisdom is using that knowledge and having the ability then to see opportunities, risks, challenges, things that you need to do."
DropBox CEO Drew Houston says leaders need to be prepared to have their job description changed while the company grows, and they need to train themselves to be ready for those changes.
Drew Houston: "At first you have to be systematic about training yourself, and what you really want to solve for as a founder is making sure that your growth curve stays ahead of the company's growth curve. And so that means figuring out what you don't know and learning it, and no one is going to do that for you. The challenge, especially as a company that is scaling, is that your job as a CEO changes every 12 to 18 months — it's just that no one taps you on the shoulder and tells you that. So, for example, in the beginning, you're just spending time building a prototype, and it's all about creating the product. But then once you have a product, you need users. How do you get distribution, how do you grow? That's a whole different challenge. And then the scorecard changes again once you have distribution, then you need revenue, and then you need a working business model. Then you get competitors, and then it's not just revenue, but it's cash flow or profit. So as in real life, the scorecard changes at these different break points and points of adolescence or maturity in the company. That's probably the most bewildering part of the job is that your job changes so much. Just when you think you're getting good at the old job, you have a new one that is totally unfamiliar."
Oath CEO Tim Armstrong says leaders should not be afraid to take risks and fail.
Tim Armstrong:"In a CEO job, you have to be OK with risk and you have to be OK with failure. I have a saying: "You have to fail toward a goal." As long as you're failing, if you know what the goal is, it's OK to fail in that direction. And that's the advice I got from people."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider