Frances Frei, Harvard Business School Professor

In this episode of Talks at GS, Frances Frei discusses her work advising companies on how to spearhead cultural change and insights on leadership from her book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You.

On her advice to CEOs on building successful cultures: “The truth is all of us make it about ourselves some of the time, but what I try to inject in their mind in a way that’s pretty sticky is when it’s about you, you’re not leading. So, you are free to make whatever you want about you, but just don’t put that in the leadership column, right? The leadership column is when you are serving other people. And then that gets people to want to dwindle how much it’s all about them.”

On the importance of building an inclusive workplace culture: “It’s hard to be different, but when you can make it safe and welcome, you then get to that competitive advantage of: if I can bring out the best in a diverse workforce and you have a homogenous workforce, it doesn’t matter who I am or who you are, my team’s going to win. And so, inclusion I find is great business sense. And there is also today and I’m very glad for the moral imperative, right? It stinks to say to someone, please let me bring a small part of yourself to work. If we could set the conditions for our difference to flourish, that’s when we get just unprecedented pace, quality, scale and all of it.”