Satya Nadella-led Microsoft has come a long way in the last few years. There was a brief period of time when Microsoft was losing the perception battle but Nadella seems to have turned things around. The Microsoft CEO recently made an appearance at the Economic Summit organised by Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research. Nadella spoke about what real leadership is.“Just saying, ‘Well, my team is great and everybody else sucks,’ that’s not leadership,” Nadella said. He further explained that, “In a multi-stakeholder, multi-constituent world, you’ve got to bring people across your enterprise and outside together.”
According to a report by CNBC, Nadella touched upon other aspects of leadership as well. Nadella said that no one will be perfect but every day he asks himself if he’s better than he was yesterday.
Speaking on what qualities leaders have or what leadership is, Nadella said that “Leaders have this innate capability to go into situations that are uncertain, ambiguous and bring clarity…leaders are not people who go into a confusing situation and create more confusion.” For Nadella, leaders absolutely have to “have to hold themselves as accountable.”
He further said that leaders actually create energy. “You know when you’ve met someone who’s a leader because you walk out saying, ‘Wow, I want to join the parade. I want to be part of that team.’”
Giving an example of leadership in pandemic, Nadella said, “Leaders don’t say, ‘Give me the perfect pitch in order to perform.’ I can’t say, ‘Let me wait for the pandemic to be done to show my leadership skills’ but you have to take an over-constrained problem in many cases and un-constrain yourself, and un-constrain more particularly the team that you are leading, so that they can go on to achieve things.”