The Best Leaders Are Great Followers

An underappreciated hallmark of the best leaders today is they have mastered the underrated skills of great followers. Satya Nadella rebuilt Microsoft not through top-down decrees but by listening deeply to engineers, customers, and critics. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors for more than a decade, is famous for her habit of deferring to the deep technical judgment of manufacturing teams and safety engineers. And Tim Cook spent years as the quietly empathetic operational lieutenant who followed data, processes, and expert input with near-religious discipline, qualities that later enabled him to create one of the most valuable companies in history.