Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. When he was just three years old, Chad Foster (PLDA 21, 2016) was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that would ultimately leave him blind. After an active childhood, playing all manner of sports, Foster says the fog began to roll in when he started college. He went through cycles of denial, struggling to make peace with his situation. Eventually though, he began to ask the question of "why me" very differently: instead of using it to prompt self-pity or framing himself as the victim of a tragedy, he used it to focus his life.

"Why have I been put in this situation? What am I meant to do?" By 2014, Foster was in the midst of a flourishing tech and finance career, and he came to HBS to start the Program for Leadership Development. It was there, in the Authentic Leadership course, that Foster met Bill George, who's taught leadership at the School since 2004 and is now an executive fellow. Foster describes the experience of meeting George and reading his professor's bestselling book, True North, as transformational.

Earlier this year, George released a new Emerging Leaders edition of True North, which includes Foster's story as an example of the importance of crucible experiences in defining leaders. And in this episode of Skydeck Foster and George share the lessons of their own crucibles, discuss the value of empathy for modern leaders, and offer some advice on how to start a leadership journey.

Chad Foster and Bill George

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Dan Morrell: Bill, after you had Chad in class, he reached out to you, and you began a conversation that eventually saw you feature him in your new book. What struck you about Chad's story as it relates to your thinking about authentic leadership?

Bill George: How deeply honest he was. And I think authenticity starts with being honest. We all have difficulties. Some of them are obvious. But a lot of them are inside us. They're hidden differences—and we don't want to acknowledge those. And I think we have to get to the point where we're really honest ourselves.

Took me a while to get there—when I can admit my mistakes and be honest. Because then once you do that, then you can be anything you want to be.

DM: Chad, what are your thoughts on the impact of crucibles on defining leadership?

Chad Foster: Well, I think, our life's greatest obstacles present us the most opportunity. What fun would life be if we never faced any adversity? What sense of fulfillment would we have if we never had an obstacle to overcome? What sort of growth would we experience as human beings if we never faced any adversity or any crucible? So I think there's an opportunity there, not only for a person to grow and demonstrate growth through overcoming significant challenges, but also to connect with other people in pursuit of something that's bigger than themselves.

BG: When I first came here in 2004, I had written about this in my first book, Authentic Leadership. And a lot of my faculty colleagues were very uncomfortable talking about it. Some even said, let's just talk about the positive side. And I said we really don't grow from that, from our great successes, because we start to think we're better than we are. And I think crucibles are the place we grow.

DM: Chad, you also talk in the book about how your experience has gifted you with empathy and specifically that you lived two lives, meaning that you lived as a young man, able-bodied. And then you second, latter half of your life as a man with a disability. How did that experience give you empathy and how do you practice that in your professional life?

CF: I think a lot of times after I went blind, and I was first walking around with my guide dog, people would come up to me and ask me some pretty bizarre questions, right? Some uninformed questions. I got that a lot.

I think now, being someone who relies on a guide dog, and having lived that first 21 years of my life as someone who didn't need a guide dog who could see, I can kind of understand why they have some of the questions that they have. It helps me understand that we are all simply a collection of the wisdom that our life experiences have taught us.

I know what I know because of what I've experienced. You know what you know because of what you've experienced. So if you subscribe to the school of thought that says we are a byproduct of our life experiences, it stands to reason that we're all limited by what our experiences have taught us. So when I try to talk to someone who's different than me, regardless of what that difference is, I always start with curiosity.

What is it that this person knows or has experienced that I have not experienced that brings them to this conclusion that's different than mine? They have some level of experience, some level of wisdom that I haven't learned yet, and there's something that I can take from this person. So how do I bring that out of this person so that I can learn from them and we can move forward together?

DM: Bill, I'm interested in your thoughts on empathy because empathy feels like something that we hear a lot more about today as a necessary trait for leaders.

BG: Absolutely. I studied as an industrial engineer and that was all about how you use your hands, how do people working on assembly lines and working machines became more efficient.

Then we moved, starting around 1970 to the area of the head—the IQ. And we used to think, incorrectly, that the smartest person made the best leader, which we know now is not correct. Today, you have to lead with your heart as well as your head. And I've studied here at Harvard, over a hundred leaders who have failed. Not one has failed because they weren't smart enough. They failed because they lacked emotional intelligence. They weren't aware of who they were at a deep level. They lacked passion for their work. Or they lacked compassion for their customers, or empathy, particularly for their employees.

And I would say the toughest one to have is courage. Now Chad has to have courage, but I've seen a lot of CEOs that have no courage and their companies don't fare well over time. Now, the interesting thing is that you're not going to improve your IQ between the ages of 10 and 60. You can get a lot of knowledge, but not your IQ. Your emotional intelligence is a learned skill. You learn those through life experience. You learn it through bumping up against the world and seeing what works and what doesn't work and having real life experiences often in environments that make you uncomfortable. Like being in a foreign country where you don't speak the language and you have to learn how to cope. Being in a new company, being in a new situation, that's where you learn, that's where you grow.

DM: Bill, you write in the book about one of your early painful crucibles when you lost your fiancé shortly before your wedding, and then your mother as well. Can you talk about how that experience shaped you?

BG: Well, I was in my mid-twenties and I'm an only child and I was very close to my mother. My father traveled all the time, not as close to my father. And my father called one day, I'd just gone to work, I left HBS and went to work in the Office of Secretary of Defense. And I was in the secretary of the Air Force's office, and I got a call telling me my mother had died that morning. And I was really devastated because I was very close to my mother, didn't have a chance to say goodbye. She'd had a heart attack and died. But when I recovered from her death I fell in love with a woman from Georgia and I got engaged to be married, and she started having some headaches in the summer, but there wasn't any diagnosis.

So she went back home to Georgia, prepare for the wedding. We were both living in Washington, in separate houses. And I got a call from parents the next morning saying that she had died of a malignant brain tumor. And it really forced me to think about "what's life all about?" And I think I'm a person of faith, but my faith had no answers. But fortunately my friends came around me and supported me during this difficult period; my boss did as well. And I came through that. But what I learned from that is I was always planning for the future. You got to realize life is about today and how you relate to people right now. [In] both cases I never had a chance to say goodbye. And I think it really is how you touch people every day. None of us knows how long we have to live. And so we've got to make every day be really meaningful and show up and care about people every day.

DM: It had an immediate impact on you as well as a long-term impact, then.

BG: Sure did. Yeah. And it made me rethink, why am I always planning for the future. Let's talk about today and how can I help everyone today? I've thought a lot about my purpose and my purpose, Dan, has become, "how do I enable people to reach their full potential?" And you might say that's what you're doing at Harvard. But I've been doing it since I was a freshman in college, trying to help people and encouraging them to go into leadership roles and build organizations—like I did at Medtronic—of leaders.

And that's what I've been doing the last 20 years. So my whole goal is to work with leaders to help them reach their full potential—so they, in turn can help other people.

DM: Now do you think, Bill, that it's necessary to have that kind of real deep crucible experience in order to become a transformational leader.

BG: Well, depends on what you call real deep. See I think Chad had a real deep experience. I would say a lot of people, [it] may be as simple as being rejected or your parents got divorced or you lost a job, or you had a health problem when you were younger. That's not simple, but it's really seeing what does that lead to your calling in life? How does it shape the person you want to become and really cause you to go deeper into life rather than at the superficial level and trying to, again, to be the smartest person in the room, but really dig into, "What's life all about?" And it forces that. So I do think to become a great leader, to have empathy, to have courage, you have to experience some of those challenging times.

DM: Chad, you said that you've been doing some coaching. Have you found that sort of thread about facing challenges and overcoming challenges in some of the executives that you have coached?

CF: Absolutely. In addition to that, you know, the fear, right? The fear that a lot of people have, the willingness to act courageously to take bold actions while being consistent with their values, their authentic self. That's a lot of what we explore is what's really important to you and what wisdom lies within you, and how do you bring your whole self to work—not the facade of your whole self, but your whole authentic self. And that's really why I think the particular coaching framework that I practice is so powerful. A lot of my story personally revolves around my self-identity and the stories that I choose to tell myself about my circumstances. The coaching methodology that I use also looks very closely at the narratives that we have that can either hold us back or they can help us bounce back.

And so it's very transformational, very deep work. But in order to do that deep work, you have to look at all dimensions of yourself. You can't just look at, "how am I thinking about a situation?" It really does involve all the wisdom in the body—the heart, the mind, the spirit, everything. Because we ultimately, we have to bring our whole selves to work.

BG: Let me just pick up on that, Dan, if I could, because in my new book, I talk about the leader as coach. And many people are hiring coaches like Chad to help them through it. But I think as leaders, we need to be coaches. We're no longer command and control, directing people what to do. And we're not just managing them and judging them. We need to become coaches. And so we created this acronym that the first "C" in "COACH" is to care about people. Because people are not going to listen to you until they know you care about them.

And then I think our job is to get them in their sweet spot. So, organize them. That's the "O". And into the place where they use their greatest strengths and they learn to play together as a team because they're "Aligned" around common purpose and a set of values. But this is not soft. All great coaches are very challenging.

And so the second "C" is "challenge". And if you look at great sports coaches, you look at great executive coaches like Chad, they challenge you to step up your game. You can do better. You need to develop yourself. And the final letter is "H" for "Help", because we need to get down and help people do it.

Not just stand back and judge them, but help. Maybe you show them how to do it, maybe you bring in other resources that can help them. But at the end of the day, I think we need to be coaches rather than directors and managers.

DM: Chad, I want to follow up on something that you said when you were talking about your experiences coaching executives. You said often we have to get past these stories that we tell ourselves that hold us back. What are some of those stories that, that we tell ourselves that hold us back?

CF: Look in my particular situation, I'll use my story as an obvious example, right? The fact of the matter is that I went blind in my early twenties. Now, fundamentally, there were a couple of stories that I could have told myself.

Story number one is that I went blind because I've got incredibly bad luck, right? Or story number two is that I went blind because I'm one of the very few people on the planet who has the strength and the toughness to overcome that and to use it to help other people. Now, technically, both of those stories could be true.

So which one should I live by? One story paints me as a victim, right? The "poor me" story. But the second story, the better story, is a Jedi mind trick that transforms my disability into my strength. "I went blind because I'm mentally strong enough to deal with it"—which, by the way, means I'm mentally strong enough to deal with all of the other curve balls that life throws at me.

Fundamentally, if we can revisit the narratives that we all have inside our heads, inside our hearts, and our spirit, and make sure that they're still meaningful, still relevant, and step into a new narrative, a more growth-oriented narrative, one that's more reflective of our current reality, that's where deeper, vertical transformation can take place.

DM: We've talked a little bit about this back and forth, but what have you learned from each other?

CF: Honestly, if it weren't for Bill's class, I would still be shying away from my crucible and not using it to help other people. It was there, honestly, where I was inspired to reconsider what I was doing with blindness. And from time to time people would tell me that I'd inspired them.

And that usually happened when I was just trying to get to my next goal in life. But I never really took any of that seriously until taking authentic leadership with Bill. And that really ignited something deep inside me. And it wasn't long after that my classmates elected me to give our graduation talk. And that short little 12-minute talk really changed my trajectory as well, because I saw how much it could help people. One of the people in my class was really affected by it. One of them decided to commission an opera based on what I said. Another guy, he comes up to me afterwards and come to find out this particular gentleman had lost a child the year before.

And something I said helped. Now, look, Dan, I'm not naturally like a real soft and fuzzy person, but when you can impact a person on that level, it changes you. And, so that showed me the real power. I realized, I was inspired to move beyond myself, and I realized that I had an opportunity: I lost my vision, but I could help other people find theirs. And I learned from Bill that I've been given this beautiful gift of blindness disguised in some really ugly wrapping paper. So all of us have these crucibles in our lives. So what gifts are right in front of all of us if we can only open our hearts and our minds to receive them?

And that to me really is the power in what Bill is teaching. It's not just being a great leader. Being a great leader, of course, is a byproduct of it. But it really is connecting with the things deep down inside of us at a visceral level that allows us to combine our passion with our profession, our humanity, and our talents, and bringing that to life in a way that has the greatest impact on people. And so that's one of the things that I've personally learned from Bill, and I wouldn't be on the path that I'm on right now without his leadership.

BG: It gives me a chill to hear you say, I've been given this beautiful gift of blindness. Who would say that? Yeah. Amazing.

CF: It's true. It's true.

BG: And how he's using that. I would think that people like me and all, so many other people that have had minor things go on. Can use that as a gift too. And so I hope that people can use this to inspire other people the way Chad is. That's why I wrote about him in my book, to see the beauty of someone who can own the difficult times they've had and really go out and use that to help other people.

DM: What would your advice be to someone who wants to make a change? Who wants to look inward, deeply, figure out how to be a better leader, but doesn't know how to start or where to start.

BG: Go back to your life story, because that's where you discover who you are, where you come from, and who you really are at your core. And write a lifeline and chart your whole life to this point—the ups and downs—and be honest about it. And put those high points and the low points, and see what you learn from each of those experiences. And share that with a loved one, a spouse, a mentor, a guide, a coach. But then go back and take the lowest point and really explore your crucible. And what comes out of that is a deeper learning from you about what you want to do with your life. Because when you learn that I had that terrible illness—like Dan Vasella did at Novartis as a boy, being in an iron lung for a year. He learned he wanted to be a great doctor and then he wanted to use those doctors' gifts to help other people with pharmaceuticals that could save lives.

And he did just that. But he had to go back and process that. And so I think that's what you have to do until you're willing to face that one, you're not going to be that person you want to become. And it may—and often has as it did for Chad—point you in a new direction and that may be very important for your life. Okay? That's what's I think the great gift here is that you can find yourself and find, "How can I make a difference in the lives of people?"

CF: I think for me, when thinking about what allowed me to navigate my situation and the learnings from that is really understanding each individual, looking at their own personal circumstances and figuring out what are the things that I can control and what are the things that I cannot control. And so for me, the thing that I could not control was the fact that I went blind. That was outside my sphere of influence. I couldn't do anything about it. No matter what I did, I was going to be blind. But what I could control is the way that I chose to narrate that situation to me. So what are the things that are facts?

And what are the things that are stories. And being able to really get clear-eyed about what are the stories I'm telling myself about my unchangeable facts, and then figuring out for the things that I can't control in my life, the things outside my sphere of influence, what can I do to make them work for me instead of against me? For me, it was figuring out how can I make blind look good? And if I could never sit back and reimagine my vision of greatness for myself, how I can make blind look good, what are the odds of me moving towards acceptance in my new circumstances? The odds were next to zero. But if you can sit back and visualize how you can make circumstances work for you instead of against you, that can move you towards acceptance and eventually towards thriving.

But it really starts with understanding what can I control in my environment? What can I not control? And then developing that new vision of greatness for yourself. What does that look like? And then the things that I can control, for me, it was having a successful business career and then learning how to write a book and give a keynote presentation.

Those are skills that I could work on. But none of them would've really helped me at all unless I had that new vision of greatness. That included unpalatable circumstances, the fact that I went blind.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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