An Interview with Maura O’Neill on Inspiring Leadership

Maura O'Neill, faculty director for the Berkeley Executive Leadership program and Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Haas School of Business shares lessons based on her personal experience leading innovative companies as well as working for inspirational leaders.

What traits are needed to be an inspirational leader?

I'd start with the following:

Set the bar exceptionally high for yourself and your team. 

Not impossibly high or else you will just demoralize them. But quite a bit higher than most of them think is possible. And be really clear on the end goal with lots of degrees of freedom for them to innovate along the way.

Believe that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things. 

Because they are. And collectively, if you motivate and lead a team to punch consistently above their weight the results will astound them, you and everyone else. They will be motivated to take on even bigger challenges. It becomes like an adrenal rush of pure satisfaction and excitement.

Cull the team. 

Here is the lesson I learned the hard way. Not everyone is the best match and can thrive in the position they are in—no matter how good a leader you are and how hard you try. They deserve to be in a company and in a position where they can thrive or at least their attitude and talents match up better. 

The biggest surprise of all for me was that some people just aren’t willing to use their highest and best skills and efforts. There is sometimes nothing I can do to change that. Never make the culling a surprise to the person—give them a reasonable chance—and keep it confidential between that person and his or her leader.

Listen, Learn, and Stay Humble Always. 

Successful leaders know their team, the marketplace, their customers, their family, and even a good novel has something to teach them everyday. If you don’t stay humble, listen intently, consider seriously the input that is all around you and stay open to it, life will smack you. Great leaders also don’t suspend their judgment. As a leader you must be clear and decisive.

Is there such a thing as a natural born leader? 

People that we think of as ‘natural born leaders’ stubbed their toes, learned a ton along the way, and got better and better. Sure, many of these had great gifts from the beginning. Engineering, oratory, sales, design but they learned to be great leaders.

Becoming a great leader takes the right attitudes, caring, and most of all a voracious and relentless approach to learning. One thing I do personally is devour biographies and autobiographies of leaders, past and present in a wide range of fields to uncover new insight and inspiration.

Could you share with us some of your insights on narrow-mindedness?

 I will let you in on the big secret: We are all narrow-minded even though we always think it is someone else. That is because from birth we are hard-wired to be narrow-minded. It allows fast and frugal decision making which we need to survive. But it can result in spectacular errors in business, medical and science discovery, politics and our everyday lives. 

A shortcut to avoiding it is to surround yourself with diverse points of view, read and watch materials from a wide range of fields, and embrace dissent in all aspects of your life.

How does questioning the status quo relate to leadership, innovation, and business success?

Question the status quo is at the center of an innovation culture. Wang Labs, Border Group, Digital Equipment, Kodak, Woolworth’s—all incredible American companies that bit the dust because they failed to ‘question the status quo.’ 

As Andy Grove, the great former CEO and leader of Intel said, ‘only the paranoid survive’ and 'embrace your Cassandras. The latter relates to those people in your organization that are telling you that you are about to miss a big turn in the road. 

What organizational cultures foster high performance, loyalty, and employee retention?

Trust, empathy, transparency, clarity of goals, relentless focus on performance, acceptance of failure and expectation of iteration and belief in nothing less than excellence.

What excites you most about the Berkeley Executive Leadership Program?

I am excited about teaching the Berkeley Executive Leadership Program because I know we can help executives take their careers and their organizations to new heights. 

All of us have a bunch of hopes and dreams. We wonder whether they are possible. We often don’t take the time to be deliberate about reflecting on what additionally we could learn to facilitate the next steps and come up with a specific plan to make it happen. Our aim with this program is five days to change someone’s life- pure and simple. I am about curating leaders who want to tackle the enormous challenges facing start-ups, major companies, social agencies and governments, here and abroad. Together we can.