Matthew Kohut

And I think you can look at great leaders and say the balance of strength and warmth that worked in one place absolutely wouldn't work in another.

Well, the first question I already mentioned, which is which of these comes more naturally to you?

Which one is there a little bit of a deficit in?

And a couple of different ways to try and size this up.

One is if you have friends or colleagues, people you trust, and you can have this conversation with them about, say, you know, I think I'm pretty good at this thing, but I might be lacking in that.

Obviously, it's great to get some feedback on that.

Another thing, and this is going to sound a little crazy, but it's one of the best ways to see how you're doing is if you have a chance to record yourself.

If you catch yourself in the wild on video and you see yourself as others see you, suddenly you realize, wait, I'm coming across like a Mack truck at people or I'm coming across as a little uncertain and tentative or whatever it is that your specific challenges are.

And that's a great way to try and get a read on how you're either combining that skill plus will on the strength axis or how you're demonstrating to other people you understand what matters to them rather than just your own concerns.

Well, you know, I've been watching and studying how leaders in all sectors speak for 15 years or so.

And at one point I noticed that corporate leaders specifically were addressing political and social issues in a way that they never had when I was growing up.

And I thought, this is a really interesting phenomenon.

I had started a little bit of a folder for myself where I was just kind of keeping stuff in Evernote thinking, huh, that's interesting.

I've never seen a CEO say that.

And this continued to grow or crest in some way over the 2010s.

And finally, at some point, I saw people were writing about it here and there in an article in this thing or that thing.

But I'd never seen anybody really try and unpack what was going on here about why

corporate leaders were being asked to weigh in on these issues, why it might matter.

You know, there's a compelling argument to say that they shouldn't.

And I wanted to try and understand, is there a place for corporate leaders to talk about political and social issues?