Our Time for Timeless Leadership

Gary Burnison is CEO of Korn Ferry and the author of Love, Hope & Leadership: A Special Edition.

When I was a kid growing up in the Midwest, cooler temperatures and falling leaves signaled a whole set of routines. On the first weekend of October, just like clockwork, we checked the furnace, switched the car tires and raked the yard into endless mountains of yellow, gold, and red.

The calendar told the time, and we knew exactly what to do.

Today, as autumn settles into the Northern Hemisphere and the year winds down to its final quarter, change seems to be a constant.

As our firm’s research has found, the ability to respond effectively to change is one of the biggest organizational differentiators, separating the best from the rest.

As leaders, we have to act—knowing what to do, even when we don’t know what to do.

We cannot afford to wait for the circumstances to change or the circumstances will change us. This is the time for timeless leadership.

Anticipate—what lies ahead. We don’t need to be visionaries, trying to predict tomorrow. Rather, we need to accurately perceive the reality of today. This moment is the starting point for creating a vision of the future that others cannot yet see.

Navigate—course-correcting in real time. Navigation is the companion to anticipation. Together, they can keep us on an even keel. Navigation happens in the present moment, with real-time agility and adjustments. It’s proactive and purposeful.

Communicate—continually. This is where leadership lives and breathes. As leaders, we’re both the message and the messenger. And when there is trust in what we say, there will be belief in what we do.

Listen—to what we don’t want to hear. We’ve been given two ears and only one mouth for a reason—a reminder to listen twice as much as we speak.

Learn—always. There’s nothing like change to accelerate learning. That’s when we apply past experiences to new and first-time challenges. It’s called learning agility.

Lead—inspiring others to believe and then enabling that belief to become reality.

None of us can choose the times in which we lead. As the CEO of a major healthcare system shared with me recently, “Decades ago I came to the realization that it is in ambiguity—uncertainty, crisis, risk—that opportunity exists. And control is an illusion.”

But leadership is not. And that’s what all of us need right now. 

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