What Makes a Great Leader?

Tomorrow’s leaders master three key roles — architect, bridger, and catalyst, or ABCs — to access the talent and tools they need to drive innovation and impact. As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems. These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation.

When Ajay Banga took over as CEO of Mastercard, in 2010, he knew that disruption of the payments industry was imminent. But rather than compete for market share within the 15% of global payments that were already electronic, he decided to focus the company’s growth on the 85% that were still made by cash and check transactions. For him, the financial inclusion of individuals and small businesses that lacked access to the formal financial system became both a business imperative and a societal responsibility. It called for new mindsets and behaviors around talent, clients, the market, technology, and government.

In our age of discontinuity, you need the ability to continually shift.

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiativeat Harvard Business School, the author of Becoming a Manager, and a coauthor of Being the Boss and Collective Genius.

Emily Tedards is a doctoral student in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy’s Reimagining the Economy initiative.

Jason Wild advises executives of the C-suite globally after leading strategic partnerships and global innovation at Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.

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