Author Talks: The five ‘cross-pressures’ that define leadership

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Christine Y. Chen chats with Robert E. Siegel, management lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, about The Systems Leader: Mastering the Cross-Pressures That Make or Break Today’s Companies (Crown Currency/Penguin Random House, June 2025). Siegel explores the traits of a systems leader, the complexities of navigating dualities and disruption, determining customer needs and the best methods for service improvement, and ensuring alignment on goals and purpose. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why did you write this book?

The idea behind The Systems Leader arose from a course, Systems Leadership, that I’ve taught for the last eight years here at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. I taught the class with my former boss, Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric.

When we started the class, the idea was this: What are the leadership skills required to be successful in today’s world, where every product and service is connected? Eventually, as COVID struck, then ebbed, we realized we’ve been entering a world of constant crisis and increasingly rapid technological change.

The CEOs, who we brought from all over the world, or the executives, whether they were from small companies or large companies, were all wrestling with these issues. No matter what they did, they felt as though they were being pulled in “cross-pressures”—or diametrically opposed, 180-degree directions.

The ways in which these CEOs had to lead their organizations or even their teams differently became the foundation of the book. After studying roughly 100 different companies, we decided to formalize our findings. And that’s what led to the writing of the book.

What is systems leadership, and why is it important in today’s world?

A systems leader fundamentally does two things: masters certain dualities and internalizes them, and understands action and reaction within systems—between functions inside a company or between a company and its ecosystem.

Regarding dualities, they understand both hardware and software, horizontal and vertical—the notion of having a platform that can scale globally, yet having a product that can be customized quickly on the front end for customers.

The systems leader has the ability to navigate through that mindset of internalizing these dualities, and they also have certain other characteristics. They act and behave like a product manager. With a “product manager’s mindset,” they understand what customers need and know how products get built. They also understand the go-to-market motion and that process of how you sell a product and serve customers better.

Systems leaders are also very good communicators. They understand how to set context in a very, very convoluted world. Finally, they run toward disruption. In a world of constant crisis, we know that things are constantly changing, and great systems leaders understand you can’t hunker down and just wait for this to pass. You actually have to run toward the disruption so that you can position your company and your team where they need to be in the future.

What does it look like when someone is not a good systems leader?

There’s a chapter in the book that I call “Un-serious Behaviors in a Serious World.”

We see a pattern of behaviors and a focus on trivial goals. You see people ignoring changes they don’t like. They don’t want to understand how the younger generation is getting its news. You see people acting with disdain toward customers. You can even see that in some of the behaviors of well-known leaders. They try to take advantage of their customers, as opposed to serving them well.

We see people indulging in self-righteousness in both business and in politics. In the class, I observed that there are a lot of great leaders who actually don’t act that way, who are hugely successful in their companies and in what they do. We can learn from how they’re managing in this world of constant crisis and rapid technological change.

What can we learn from good systems leaders? How do they deal with what you call cross-pressures?

The five cross-pressures that I discuss in the book are not the only cross-pressures. However, these five arose from our eight years of research.

1. Priorities. How do you balance execution and innovation, and not just at a company level, but at an individual level?
2. People. How do we promote and model both strength, the idea of holding people accountable for deliverables without being a taskmaster, and empathy, finding that balance between talking about our feelings and getting things done?
3. Sphere of influence. This concept relates to understanding the internal and external.
4. Geography. This refers to seeing the dynamic between local and global. In an interconnected world, we’re not going to be able to just focus on one area, city, community, or country alone. Everything will remain interconnected.
5. Purpose. How do we balance the ambition we feel as individuals, but also with statesmanship or “stateswomanship”—being a steward of our organization? How do we ensure that we model those behaviors but still hold true that we as individuals want to be ambitious and have successful careers?

As we highlight the five cross-pressures in the book, I try to share specific examples of leaders I thought did a particularly good job in each of these areas and the lessons we can learn from them.

None of the leaders that I discuss in the book are perfect. They talk about some of the things they’ve gotten wrong and what they’ve learned. A key element is that in those stories, you see people who were wrestling with hard issues and then trying to move their organizations forward.

What is an example of a leader who is able to successfully work through cross-pressures and tensions?

One of the leaders we studied is a woman named Kathy Mazzarella, who runs Graybar, a company which was originally part of Western Electric. Graybar has roughly $11 billion in revenue and 10,000 employees. Kathy was described as someone who is “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

She’s the great leader who actually promotes strength and holds people accountable but also shows her humanity. She was the one who taught our class that “leadership’s about everybody but you.”

When Kathy is in a meeting, if there is someone who’s not performing, her first question is, “Do I have a skill set mismatch, or is there something going on in this person’s life that I need to be aware of to know what’s going on and how they’re dealing with it?”

How has the evolution of globalization affected leadership today?

Globalization 1.0 was about labor arbitrage. We’ll do our manufacturing in China, we’ll put low-cost software engineering in Eastern Europe, and we’ll put low-cost customer service in India. Now, we’re seeing companies really operating more like mesh networks, where there are equal nodes on the network, and the companies can collaborate with centers of excellence.

You see people who understand that everything is interconnected in the world, and you might have not only customers and suppliers in different parts of the world but also teammates in different parts of the world. They understand the dynamic between global and local.

With globalization 1.0, the displacement of labor and capital led to a global populace: Brexit in the UK, yellow vests in France, Bolsonaro in Brazil, the first Trump administration here in the US. A lot of people lost their jobs, and that led to rising populism.

Great leaders today understand that dynamic. We studied Khaldoon Al Mubarak, CEO of Mubadala, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, based in Abu Dhabi. One of the things Khaldoon taught us, and taught me, is, as he says, “The DNA of Emirates is trade.”

Fifty years ago, before oil was discovered in the UAE, they were pearl traders. They would trade with their neighbors in or around the Middle East. The ability to make sure that they have no exclusive alliances, and that they try to be friends to all, is put into the DNA of the country.

Now, following the discovery of oil and their shift to a global economic powerhouse, they’re still caught between a lot of these dynamics. China’s their largest customer, and yet the United States is their security guarantor. Khaldoon has to think about the citizens of the UAE and their needs. He also must consider how to make sure that their large external partners don’t get caught betwixt and between them.

Another leader we studied is Bill Winters, CEO of [the global bank] Standard Chartered. Standard Chartered does a lot of business in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. For example, if Coca-Cola wants to go to Angola to set up a bottling plant, Standard Chartered can help make that happen.

Yet Bill is very aware of the sources of global complexity. For example, he might be told in one country, “You need to give us the data for the customers.” And one law in one country might conflict with another law elsewhere.

Since he’s beholden to these rules, he tries to figure out how to navigate these conflicts between both a local and a global dynamic. His way of handling the situation is to engage in a lot of discussion and negotiations behind the scenes, rather than out front. It’s a very deft way of addressing the dynamics of understanding what’s happening in a particular country or in a particular region, while understanding interactions on a global basis.

How can leaders navigate the cross-pressures of statesmanship and ambition?

It’s about purpose. I was very much influenced by William Damon, professor of education at Stanford. He developed a great definition of purpose that says, “Purpose is basically an act of commitment to accomplish goals that are meaningful to the self but also of consequence to the world beyond the self.”

We find that today our leaders have to lead on nuanced issues in a world that seems to have very little time for nuance. I was very influenced by Henry Kissinger’s last book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, about leaders in the 20th century.

Someone asked me, “Rob, how would you define the attributes of a great statesman or stateswoman?” I actually came up with six attributes.

1. They possess gravitas of personality and purpose.
2. They have intelligence and wisdom about the seriousness of the times.
3. They are dependable in times of volatility. They are people who you want around you in difficult moments.
4. They bring a moral guidance without hectoring or lecturing others who have different perspectives.
5. They drive change beyond the self.
6. Leaders show up. They show up on time, and they’re ready to work.

There are a couple of leaders we studied who really did a good job of embodying these attributes. The first one is a gentleman named Jim Fish. Jim is the CEO of Waste Management, one of the largest recycling and refuse companies in the United States.

They have roughly 26,000 employees and 22 million customers. Jim progressed through the CFO branch of the organization. He knows that it’s important to reach his “numbers” and understands that better than anyone. Yet he’s human.

Jim sends a monthly newsletter to his employees, Fish Food for Thought. In the newsletters, he’s very transparent about who he is. He says that his priorities, in this order, are his faith, his family, and his job. He doesn’t try to proselytize or change anyone, but he wants to show who he is, as evidenced in his newsletters.

For example, there was a school shooting by Waste Management’s headquarters. Instead of writing about gun control, he showed his human side. He just wrote about how he was hurting as a father, that he was so upset that these things still keep happening.

Another example is that during COVID, he felt pressured to fire people who wouldn’t get vaccinated. Yet he wasn’t sure that this was the right way to approach the situation. So he sent out a letter to the employees that read, “Hi, I’ve done a lot of research and discussion with my doctor, and I’ve decided to get vaccinated. I want to encourage all of you to go get educated and then make the right choice for you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, you’re not going to get fired.”

He thought, “I’m not going to fire somebody in the middle of a pandemic on a very, very complex issue. We’ll have to navigate through how we deal with people who are vaccinated or not.” Yet he stood his ground and said, “I’m going to empower my employees to make the decision that’s right for them.”

When Jim went to the factories or out with the truck drivers, he observed that to most people, whether they did or didn’t get vaccinated was of secondary import to them. Rather, they found meaning in being treated like adults and responsible people.

Jim’s philosophy is, “Whose brand is it anyway?” He doesn’t think that it’s his brand. He thinks the brand belongs to the employees.

At the other extreme is Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box here in Silicon Valley. I studied Aaron, who is very different from Jim. He’s one of the great young thinkers in Silicon Valley. I had the good fortune of teaching with him for five years. Aaron believes that if a customer calls Box at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday, then Box, as an enterprise software company, is obligated to answer the phone.

Aaron has a very young labor force, and there are many issues related to work–life balance with Gen Z. When Aaron speaks with his employees, his attitude is, “Look, I’m not going to make sure you have to pick up the phone every Saturday night. But if there’s a crisis, we respond to our customers.”

If an employee says to him, “Well, I don’t ever want to pick up the phone on a Saturday night,” Aaron would be very gentle and say, “That’s OK. I respect that. That’s not who we are as Box. Let me help you try to find another place where you can have the life you want to live.”

He’s very clear on what he’s trying to accomplish, and if there’s not a good fit, he can deal with people with kindness. He’s not going to say, “Oh, well, we’ve got to allow everybody to have work–life balance, because that’s what we’re seeing and hearing more of.”

He believes the number-one priority is to serve the customers. But by the same token, he can be kind to people if that’s not exactly what they’re seeking.

Both Jim and Aaron are leaders who do a good job of balancing that ambition and statesmanship or stewardship that we all aspire to see in all our leaders.

Are there any characteristics that you find consistently across all good systems leaders?

The best leaders start with an acknowledgment of how much they don’t know and just how hard things are. We see leaders who tend to be bombastic, and they say, “This is how it is, and here are the five things you need to do to accomplish whatever.”

All the leaders we studied, who are successful by any figure of merit—the success of their companies, the seniority they’ve reached in their organizations—they’re all normal people. I like to use the phrase “humble authority.”

They make us sit up a little bit straighter when they walk into the room. But they’re also kind and thoughtful about it. We see that they do the hard jobs themselves. If something is new and difficult, they don’t just delegate it and hope their team deals with it. They get their fingernails dirty, whether that involves layoffs, learning a new technology, or making sure that a product gets delivered on time to a customer.

These leaders have the strength to say out loud, “I don’t know, but we’re going to go get the answer together.” You see them finding a “trusted view” inside and outside the company who will talk to them and tell them the truth about themselves, their products, the companies, and whose advice they can rely on.

They’re very aware of where they spend their time. This is so not only because time is so precious, but also because they know that where they spend their time is a signal to everybody else as to what is important. Lastly, they understand the difference between skill and luck.

There were times in my career when I had the right skills at the right place at the right time, and there were times when I was just lucky. And if I had to choose between skill and luck, I’d choose luck every time.

But these leaders were aware of the times when the forces were with them, and they had the wind behind them. That actually helped their careers, as opposed to them thinking that they’re just the smartest person in the room. I found with all of these people, those attributes really made them very strong systems leaders.

Was there anything that surprised you while you were working on this book?

In terms of the reaction, when I teach systems leadership now, I see people nodding.

They’re thinking, “Yeah, this is what I’m feeling inside my company, that no matter what I do, I’m going to get it wrong, or I’m going to get canceled if I say the wrong thing,” and of how hard it is to lead in these volatile times.

The first surprise I’ve found is that people aren’t alone. Everyone is feeling this way. The second thing is that over the last eight years, I’ve found so many leaders who model good behavior, who are very successful and smart, and who are ones we can learn from.

I was shocked by how many great leaders there are, and how little we read about them. These people are running big companies, small companies, and they’re on every continent.

We can choose to be exactly the leaders we want to be. We can choose to be bombastic, we can choose to be kind, we can choose to be aggressive, we can choose to find that balance. There’s not a single way or a single model for how we as individuals need to lead our teams. We need to lead people with whom we agree and disagree, and people who will agree with us and disagree with us.

We don’t get to choose who we lead. We have to lead everybody. We have to get them from where we are to where we’re trying to go as a team. Leaders can do this. We can embrace crises and cycles. We know that what’s in front of us is going to be different from what’s behind us, and crises are also opportunities for us to try to grow our organizations and to grow ourselves.

Watch the full interview

Visit Author Talks to see the full series.

Learn more