255. How Leaders Sound Smart Without Saying Too Much

At one level, effective communication boils down simply to making things accessible, simplifying so people can understand, providing the context to help them learn, and allowing yourself to build curiosity to motivate people to pay attention. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I am really excited to be speaking with Adam Bryant. Adam is a senior managing director and a partner at the XCO Group, and he is a former New York Times journalist and best selling author known for his corner office column, where he interviewed over 500 CEOs and executives. His work focuses on demystifying leadership, identifying the key qualities of successful leaders, and translating those insights into actionable advice for managers. He's the author of several books, including Quick and Nimble and The CEO Test. Welcome, Adam. I am really excited for our conversation. Great to be here, Matt. Thank you for the invite. Alright. Shall we get started? Let's do it. You've documented the career journeys of countless leaders. What are some of the specific patterns or trends you've identified that have helped these leaders to be successful in their careers? It's something I think a lot about, and I've come up with my top three, if you'll indulge me. So the first one is the ability to simplify complexity, which I know is a topic that's near and dear to your heart, but I don't think you can be an effective leader if you can't do that. So much of leadership is like there's a lot going on in the world, in your particular industry, inside your company. And I think it's a key leadership moment to be able to stand on a stage and say, this is where we're going. This is how we're gonna get there, and this is when we're gonna get there. But the timeline is that's a high art of leadership being able to simplify but not oversimplify complexity. So that's number one. I do think a lot about this word authenticity, which I think has become much more important just in the last several years. People want that and expect that from their leaders. Authenticity is one of those words that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The way I think about it is that you need to know what your values are and to be able to communicate them, and not just in terms of fridge magnet poetry that, you know, integrity is in part. But to be able to say, like, I wanna share with you the three values that are important to me. I wanna tell you the stories about how these became important to me, and I wanna tell you how these values show up at my leadership style day to day so you know what to expect and you know where they come from. And to me, like, that's …