In unpredictable times, says Ann Drake, Founder of AWESOME and President and Founder of Lincoln Road Enterprises, effective leadership doesn’t come from increased control. Rather, it comes from embodying principles that empower leadership teams to consistently do the right thing, stay the course, and keep facing the unknown with a strong sense of “we.”
“The nature of change has changed,” Drake said in her address on leadership principles to students in the Executive MBA (EMBA) Leadership Capstone program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University on January 10, 2020. Given such “continuous discontinuity,” she continued, we can no longer plan our way to success. However, we can prepare ourselves and our teams to keep facing new challenges by adhering to certain tenets.
For Drake, who honed her leadership philosophy by serving as CEO of a highly successful third-party logistics provider and supply chain consulting firm for nearly 25 years, those tenets include authenticity, genuine caring for people, consistency and clarity.
“Stand for something. Do the right thing. Take the high road. And be willing to make the tough calls.”
“I think leadership is taking people where they wouldn’t go themselves,” said Drake. But people will supersede their fears, she added, when they feel cared about and part of something bigger.
Drake delivered the keynote address as part of a two-day Capstone event framed as a “deep dive” into leadership education for Kellogg EMBA students. The Capstone is an experiential learning course that aims to connect Kellogg students with companies working through real-life business problems, such as taking a new product to market. Often, Kellogg alums volunteer their companies to host these Capstone experiences. Drake received her MBA from Northwestern in 1984.
Drake’s talk was a distillation of her beliefs about the most important elements in driving organizational outcomes and influencing others. She condensed her values-based approach to principled leadership as, “Stand for something. Do the right thing. Take the high road. And be willing to make the tough calls.”
Drake’s talk on “The Leadership Imperative” was paired with a presentation earlier in the day by Bernie Banks, Ph.D. Banks is the Associate Dean for Leadership Development and a Clinical Professor of Management at Kellogg. In his presentation, Banks shared his philosophy of leadership as well, emphasizing the importance of principles in developing leaders skilled in eliciting excellence from their teams.
Banks also discussed the importance of amassing what he called the “right experiences” in one’s leadership development. If principles lay the groundwork for one’s leadership philosophy, said Banks, right experiences are the laboratory for strengthening one’s capabilities through real-world application. He encouraged students to construct an “experience map” for themselves that would provide a plan to achieve their career goals.
Drake credits her time at Kellogg as critical to her development as a leader. “It gave me the tools and the mindset and network to call upon and be called upon to make things happen,” she said. At Kellogg, “I learned to dream big and think boldly. It was transformational.”