What 700 CEOs Do Before Their To-Do List
Most leaders I know start the morning with a to-do list.
Very few start with a to-be list.
That distinction, small as it sounds, may be the clearest line I have seen between leaders who inspire and leaders who merely instruct and it comes from an unusual dataset: the 700 CEOs who have gone through McKinsey’s Bower Forum.
My friend Ramesh Srinivasan is the dean of that program. He is a senior partner at McKinsey, a co-author of The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, and someone I had the privilege of working alongside for 17 years at the firm. When I left consulting to build Happiness Squad, one of my core convictions was that outer impact starts with inner work. Ramesh’s research with 700 of the world’s top CEOs lands in exactly the same place.
We sat down on the Flourishing Edge podcast to talk about what those CEOs actually do differently. Here are some key moments from our conversation.
Great Leaders Have Stopped Giving Orders
The central finding of Ramesh’s work is not what you would expect from McKinsey:
Successful leaders spend less time telling people what to do.”
Why? Because the math of complexity no longer works. As Ramesh put it, “Almost by definition, me as a leader cannot have answers to all the problems that the institution I’m leading is facing.”
In a world of AI disruption and geopolitical whiplash, the leader-as-answer-machine is obsolete. What replaces it is a deep awareness of your own why, your institution’s purpose, and its values and the ability to use those to inspire the change you want to see rather than dictate it.
This is precisely what I mean when I say flourishing is a competitive edge. Purpose is not a poster in the lobby. It is the operating logic of leadership under uncertainty.
You Don’t Need a Silent Retreat to Find Your Why
Inner work does not require disappearing into the mountains.
“Leaders don’t need to go to 10 days of a silence retreat,” Ramesh told me and this is a man who has sat multiple Vipassana courses himself.
Instead, he recommends reflecting on your crucible moments. The events that shaped you. For Ramesh, that means losing his father at 12 and being raised by a mother who “brought a smile to everybody around her.” From her came his service orientation. From his early loneliness came a hunger to be liked and, eventually, the hard-won lesson that leadership is not a popularity contest.
Then draw the thread from those moments to how you show up today. Francisco D’Souza did this at scale while leading Cognizant, regularly bringing his leadership team together to share their life journeys, each person choosing their own level of openness. That practice connected hundreds of thousands of employees to purpose in a way no mission statement ever could.
Purpose and Profit Are Not Rivals
Whenever I talk about purpose-driven leadership, someone raises a hand: “My job is shareholder value. Why should it be any other way?”
Ramesh’s answer is refreshingly unsentimental. Yes, a CEO has a fiduciary duty and: “The odds of creating long-term shareholder value go up dramatically when you can think holistically about all stakeholders.”
McKinsey’s research identifies five sources of meaning people draw from work: the institution, their own growth, the team, the customer, and society. Shareholder value speaks to one of them. Leaders who tap all five mobilize the entire workforce.
This converges exactly with what Alex Edmans, Professor, London Business School, found in what he calls “Grow the Pie”: purpose-driven, people-centric organizations outperform, to the tune of ~2 to 3.5% alpha. As Alex says, if you want to reach the land of profit, follow the road of purpose. It is not either-or. One road leads to the other.
The To-Be List
Of the 150 micro practices in Ramesh’s book, one has already made it into my client work.
Each morning, the best leaders look at their day and ask not just “what will I do?” but “who will I be?” Before the board meeting, the tough conversation, the town hall: How do I want to show up? Calm? Curious? Courageous?
“We add value based on all three dimensions,” Ramesh explained. “Not just what we do, but also what we know and who we are.”
The corporate athletes have known this for years. Novak Djokovic, who has said it takes him about 15 seconds after a maddening point to reframe and play the next one as if it is the only point that matters. We business leaders do not need 15-second agility. But most of us never reframe at all. We carry the last meeting’s frustration into the next one like luggage.
A reflective pause between meetings. A to-be list next to the to-do list. A personal advisory board. These are small hinges that swing heavy doors.
Vulnerability Has Rules
If humility is chapter one of Ramesh’s book, “You’re not the smartest person in the room”, then vulnerability is its most misunderstood cousin.
Ramesh is blunt about what vulnerability is not: “If a leader goes in and says, we’re in a crisis, I have no clue what we should be doing, you should probably fire that leader.”
Real vulnerability is a judgment call, not a personality trait. The questions are when, how, where, and with whom.
Michael Fisher led Cincinnati Children’s Hospital through COVID, when the science kept shifting and every decision carried weight. On purpose, values, and quality standards, he never wavered. On the open questions, he was just as direct: we do not know the answer to this one. He would put it to his team, ask for the best approach available today, and say plainly that they would pivot as new data arrived.
Notice the order. The admission only lands because the clarity came first. A leader who says “I don’t know” without having established what the organization stands for is not being vulnerable. They are being absent.
This is where I watch leaders get stuck. They read vulnerability as exposure, something that costs them authority. In my experience it runs the other way.
My first training at the firm introduced me to the “Johari window”. The space of what is genuinely known between you and the people around you starts small. It grows in two directions: when you let yourself be seen, and when you invite others to tell you what they notice about you that you cannot see yourself. Neither happens in one swoop, you grow into it.
The leader who moves first gives everyone else permission to move. Do that for long enough and “I don’t know” stops being a confession and becomes an invitation. The thing people fear most turns out to be the organization’s superpower.
Reeta Roy did the same leading the Mastercard Foundation’s work creating digital jobs for women in Kenya: clear on mission and values, open about the fact that some experiments would fail, deliberate about speaking last so her team’s ideas could breathe.
Ramesh’s advice for starting: do not make the biggest vulnerable move you can imagine. Pick something slightly uncomfortable. If it works, double down. If it does not, get feedback and pivot. Vulnerability, it turns out, is also learned through experiments.
Feedback Asked For Is Feedback That Lands
Importantly, feedback you ask for is roughly 10 times more effective than feedback that arrives unrequested.
When the leader asks first, the behavior cascades. Ramesh models this relentlessly.
This is how fearless learning cultures get built, in what leaders do rather than what they announce.
Admiral Eric Olson spent forty years in the Navy, much of it with the SEALs. His teams ran a retro after every operation, including the ones that went well. The questions were never only tactical. What did we learn, and how does the institution come out stronger than it went in?
The second story carries more pressure. A leading Asian bank hit a serious failure in a major technology rollout. Nearly everyone around the CEO told him to fire the chief digital officer. He refused. He had examined how the decision was made rather than only how it turned out, concluded the process had been sound, and called it a genuine mistake with real learning in it. Firing the man would have been the easy move, and it would have taught the entire organization a lesson the CEO had no interest in teaching: that being right matters more than thinking well.
In my experience, I don’t think I’ve ever learned unless I felt fearless. Most organizations say they want to be learning organizations while quietly punishing every failure. The highest-performing NICU in Amy Edmondson’s famous research reported the most failures not because it failed most, but because it was the only place safe enough to tell the truth.
Put Fear in the Backseat
The last thing we talked about was strain, and how leaders carry it without being driven by it.
“I like to have that inner fear be in the backseat of the car that I’m driving,” Ramesh said, “versus be the driver of the car.”
Notice what this is not. It is not suppressing fear. It is not pretending the anxiety is absent. Fear stays in the car, it has a voice, it carries information, it is, in Ramesh’s words, a valuable asset. But purpose drives.
Every spike of stress, he treats as an entry point: a test of his operating system, a prompt to ask what recovery, what reframe, what new micro practice the moment is asking for. Manage energy before time, through sleep, movement, diet, and honest attention to which people and topics fill your tank.
The Invitation
I asked Ramesh what gives him hope. His answer: the leaders themselves. Again and again, he watches human beings meet brutal circumstances “with grace, with humility, with strength, with a strong sense of purpose.”
Open any newspaper and it is filled with things that activate us, and the activation is not wrong. What I try to remember is that in every one of those places, wherever humans are suffering, there is another human doing their best to help them. Despite everything in front of them, they have not put their hands up and given up. They are fighting through it. Those stories almost never get told. If we look closely enough, “we find that right where darkness sits, light is there as well.”
If this resonated, listen to the full conversation to learn:
- How to write a daily to-be list that decides who you are in the room, not just what you get done
- Why the best CEOs spend less time telling people what to do, and what they do instead
- How to practice vulnerability with judgment: when “we don’t know yet” builds trust and when it should get a leader fired
- The five sources of meaning that mobilize a workforce far beyond shareholder value
- How to make feedback 10x more effective by asking for it first
- How to put fear in the backseat so purpose drives and fear keeps only a voice
Learn more about Ramesh Srinivasan on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Ramesh Srinivasan. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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