What does it take to develop leaders prepared to face the challenges of exercising transformative leadership in our fast-paced global community? What are the specific skills to be honed for a cohort of diverse leaders, each possessing unique passions and particular interests? What is required of effective leaders to be collaborative in both spirit and fact, while true to him or her self?
The practice of leadership requires a finely tuned balance of skill, knowing and character.
At The Wexner Foundation we believe leadership is fundamentally about change, and have focused our work around a set of core values that serve as a beacon for our work.
Embrace differences
We engage Jewish leaders in North America and public service leaders in Israel with vastly diverse backgrounds. We embrace this diversity, and carefully craft even the most difficult conversations across difference.
Give others the benefit of the doubt as to their sincerity and integrity. This forms the baseline of respectful engagement with each other.
Celebrate imagination
Imagination and curiosity are required. Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Plenty of smart people fail to knock on the door of their own imagination, fail to color outside the lines of current organizational perimeters and cling to what is instead of asking what might be.
Develop emotional intelligence
Place a high premium on developing and shaping emotional intelligence — the ability to be self-reflective, self-aware, to self-coach in group settings, and to manage our desires, fears and vulnerabilities.
Open to new ideas
The pace of change, especially within organizational life, can be measured. Many like the idea of change, as long as it happens somewhere else.
Adaptive change requires a steadfast commitment to the long view, to a long process.
You need to move forward on many organizational fronts. Be attentive to ideas that emerge from the margins and those in the mainstream, with a delicate combination of urgency, optimism and patience.
Keep it fun
Laughter fuels the human spirit and energizes leadership. Though a serious undertaking, leading should be engaging; it should be fun.
A light-hearted sense of self serves the leader well. A good natured and reflective leader can hear feedback and criticism with an open mind and heart.
Foster humility
We focus on the quality of humility, a prerequisite for listening. Humility enables us to embrace our own shortcomings, blind spots and to constantly evolve. Humility paves the path to effective collaboration.
Flipped on its head, if a leader believes he or she is getting it all just right, why bother talking to anybody? Such an individual, regardless of individual ability, wouldn’t thrive in our leadership circles.
Collective intelligence, ideas and solutions emerge from open collaboration and even lively competition.
In seeing these characteristics come to life, they become far more than an impressive list of characteristics or platitudes on the page.
Our program alumni, who now number in the thousands, actively strive to live by them; and at The Wexner Foundation we check our work against this demanding list.
Our chairman and founder, Leslie Wexner, pushes us to know our stuff as leaders. Skills and values, he reminds us, are woven carefully into the character of any effective leader.
