The Qualities You Share with Effective Global Leaders, According to This Former Prime Minister

You’re more like a global leader than you think. After all, you face very similar challenges.

National financial crisis? You’ve faced budget woes in your business or NPO, too. Job creation and unemployment? Talk to your own HR department about how hard recruiting has become. The list goes on.

The scale is different, but the leadership qualities are the same. Here’s how our podcast guest, former Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, breaks it down.

You may roll your eyes seeing this for the thousandth time, but empathy remains vital in any leader. It’s foundational, Papandreou insists. It enables you to connect with your teams, customers, and partners in meaningful ways. On the business side, that keeps your team motivated and engaged, your customers loyal, and your partners close. For government leaders, it means you’re actually serving your constituents (a quality may seem rare these days). The action takeaway: regularly engage with all your stakeholders. You’ll be ahead of the curve when crises strike.

In fact, build on that engagement; you’ll soon recognize interconnectedness and networks that may have seemed invisible before. Human societies have been globally interconnected for thousands of years; international trade has been around as long as civilization. Just as societies don’t work in a vacuum, neither do our businesses. The undeniable proof stared at us during the supply chain crisis a few years ago. When you embrace the fact that you and your organization do not work in isolation, you can build relationships and networks, making them stronger and more resilient, ready for the next disruption.

Collaboration and cooperation logically follow from that. Competition still has its place, but our economies are evolving so there’s more benefit from friendly competition than cut-throat. Indeed, as global issues multiply, it’s easier to solve them when companies in entire industries work together. On a smaller scale, if your team is missing expertise, collaboration with another team will bring a solution faster than waiting four years for your assistant to get a degree in that missing field.

One of the most powerful lessons learned from Papandreou’s experiences is the value of dialogue. More than once, he’s seen how open communication transforms adversarial relationships into productive partnerships – even between nations at odds for decades. It helps both parties discover shared interests, paving the way for collaboration on resolving those old sticking points. For your own leadership, dialogue also helps you see differing perspectives – which sparks new insights and fosters innovation.

You may never be asked to save the world, but when you exercise the same skills that international leaders use, you’ll be better equipped to save your little piece of it.

Which global leaders, current or past, have inspired your leadership journey? What tools have you learned by observing them? Share in the comments so we can have the value of dialogue here, too!

This article was adapted from our remastered podcast episode Cooperation, Leadership, & Empathy: George Papandreou’s Path for Meeting Challenges.

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