This much I know: 9 leadership lessons from global CEOs  

Stay calm

TV Narendran, Tata Steel

“You don’t need to thump a table to achieve what you want to achieve. As long as you’re clear about what you want to achieve, and you’re able to communicate that, you can pull people towards it.”

Be the Chief Facilitating Officer

Marco Arcelli, ACWA Power

“My North Star is that my job as a CEO is not more important than anybody else’s job in the company, and I try to communicate that. When I started, I told everybody: ‘I’m not the CEO here, I’m the CFO – Chief Facilitating Officer. I would like you to tell me what your problems are. What do you need from me and your organization to help you work better?’ That’s my style.”

Find your authentic voice

Dolf van den Brink, Heineken

Dolf van den Brink says environments where leaders feel pressured to appear tough, even if it doesn’t align with their core selves, do not work. “That creates a distortion in how you show up and how you lead people, and people feel it.”

Trust your gut

Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, Novo Nordisk

“I have an intuition for what works and what doesn’t. I still look at facts and listen to my team, but I’m very much driven by my gut feeling. That’s handy as a CEO because there’s a lot of ambiguity. You don’t have all the facts, yet you are the one who has to decide.”

Tolerate disagreement

Margherita Della Valle, Vodafone

“All companies need tension and discomfort to be successful. To win, we need the intensity of a high-performing organization, which means being able to disagree with each other.”

Be a stress absorber

Arnaud Vaissié, International SOS

“Resilience is all about being able to be very agile, not to panic, to absorb stress. The job of the CEO is to be a stress absorber because you will diffuse anxiety.”

Keep some energy in reserve

Markus Krebber, RWE

“You cannot operate at 100% capacity all the time because you need 100% the moment you get into an unforeseen crisis. I always have 15-20% reserves. That also calms you down because you know even when a crisis comes, you have some more to put into it.”

Bring hearts and minds with you

Jakob Stausholm, Rio Tinto

“You go out and say: ‘Now I’m the CEO, we’re going to do this.’ And you know what happens? Absolutely nothing. You must cultivate deeper connections and bring hearts and minds with you.”

Play as a team

Carsten Knobel, Henkel

“You’re not winning this game alone. You can have many individual players, but if you’re not working as a team, it’s not possible to win.”