Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Adam Grant on Finding Leaders Outside Their Comfort Zone

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

Does having deep expertise automatically ensure a leader will be great? Adam Grant, author of The New York Times bestseller Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, explains how the ability to get outside of one’s comfort zone contributes to leadership success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Hill. With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. When looking for great leadership at an organization, is it possible to have too much experience? Someone with a lot of experience can lean on the intuition that comes from having all that experience. On the other hand, someone with less experience is probably more likely to depend on the data that comes from testing a lot of ideas. Adam Grant is a professor at the Wharton School of Business and author of the bestselling book Originals, How Nonconformists Move the World. According to Grant, deep expertise does not always translate into being a great leader. The core job of a leader is to come up with original ideas and make them happen. That's the only way that you can succeed in a competitive

world is by thinking differently from everyone else. One of the traps of having a lot of deep deep expertise in one area, is that you get entrenched. You get stuck in familiar assumptions. You take for granted things that need to be questioned. And it's often people with the broadest knowledge outside their domains that are the most original. So look at fashion houses. If you look at the most innovative fashion collections

that come out over a couple decades, what you see is they come from directors who have the most experience not just traveling abroad, but working abroad in countries different from their own. So if you're a leader, it's not that helpful if you're American to go take a trip to Canada, although it may help the Canadian economy. But what you want to do is you want

to go and take a job assignment that rotates you to Eastern Europe or Latin America and exposes you to new cultures and norms. And that just doesn't happen cross-culturally, right? It's about rotating functions and disciplines and really getting experience outside your comfort zone. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time.