CNBC's "Power Lunch" team discusses what makes a good CEO, leadership skills and more with Vik Malhotra, co-author of “A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership.”

New York

Vic Malhotra, senior partner at McKinsey and co-author of 'A CEO for All Seasons,' shared insights on what makes a great CEO based on an analysis of 200 top leaders over the past 25 years. He emphasized that exceptional CEOs are characterized by bold thinking, the ability to build high-performing teams, and a focus on shaping a performance-driven culture.

Malhotra also detailed the 'four seasons' of leadership, highlighting the importance of successful transitions throughout a CEO's tenure and the risks of stagnation if strategies are not adapted. He cited Larry Culp's turnaround at GE as an example of effective leadership, noting Culp's continuous learning, servant leadership, and skill in balancing confidence with humility.

What makes a great CEO? 'A CEO for All Seasons' co-author explains

Vic Malhotra is here on set with us today. He is a senior partner at McKinsey and one of the co-authors of A CEO for All Seasons, Mastering the Cycles of Leadership. Vic, it's great to have you on. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Brian. All right, I know you've got some names, you're going to name names, but before that, is there one quality that either makes somebody great or maybe a non-negative quality that makes them great? In other words, maybe they don't have a blind spot to certain things. Yeah, the great CEOs, and we've taken a very hard and analytical look at the 200 best CEOs of the last 25 years, they stand out for their mindset around being bold. They're never incremental. They're very bold in terms of their thinking. They stand out for the way that they shape a performance-based culture and they build extraordinary teams around them. They really build what I call a star team rather than a team of stars. So reading the book and you talk about the four seasons, what are some themes that are relevant across these four seasons? And maybe just talk a little bit about the seasons that you start with and how you end. Yeah, so just very quickly, the four seasons start with stepping up, getting ready to be a CEO or a leader. By the way, this is at the end of the day, a leadership book. It's about starting strong in those first few years. It's about staying ahead, the middle innings. And then finally, as you move to the last chapter, sending it forward. So those are the four seasons that we talk about. And there are some common threads that run across these. So firstly, just to be very clear, transitions just aren't at the start and the end. You also have transitions at the two or three-year mark. As you move to the middle innings, you have transition into your last chapter. And one of the things we learned was transitions create enormous value when done well, and they destroy billions and billions of dollars when done poorly. Right. So that was one big lesson. The second big lesson is great CEOs avoid the sophomore slump, which comes at the end of the year one. But really what they really avoid is stagnation in years three and four. As Arvind Krishna, who's in our book, said to us when we interviewed him, he said, Vic, the problem is we fall in love with our strategies. Things have worked well. Most CEOs, three-quarters of the CEOs, start out really strong. But they get stuck on their existing strategies, and they don't evolve them, and they don't really anchor in on some of the trends that go forward. So that's a second big piece that we picked up. Yeah. When I look at some of the names, and we covered this. I mean, on CNBC, we get a new CEO, and like, oh, the new CEO's here. And maybe the stock gets a pop, Vic, because it's a new person. You've drafted a new quarterback, so to speak. Talk to us about how much one person can matter to a huge organization. I'm always shocked by how much it can. But also, you look at somebody like a Larry Culp, who's in your book, right? The head of GE and the turnaround that they've done. Is there a secret sauce here? Very much so. Larry is an extraordinary story in our books, not just for what he did at Danaha, but now what he's done at GE. And when you look at the story, again, really in kind of the early years in the GE world, playing big ball, right? There was nothing shy about what he did in those early years. Quickly reanalyzed the portfolio, understood that the company needed to break up into three, did that, created extraordinary value across healthcare, power, and aircraft engines. Also, epitomizes a really great piece of continuous learning. He's always curious about what's going on in the external world. And the final piece I'll just say is, Larry really brings out to me what I'll call is a great servant leader. All CEOs deal with paradoxes, balancing near-term earnings versus investments, balancing, respecting the legacy versus disrupting for the future. Larry threads the needle on one other paradox, which is leading with confidence while leading with humility. And he does that extraordinarily well. He has perspective, vision, foresight, but he is also a great listener and works extraordinarily well through others.

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