Executive leadership is a fascinating concept. The ability to implement strategy within a company of any size that drives human progress is a subject that I have been studying for years.
Looking up, I find the most important lesson that I learned from Dell's leaders this summer to be the value of simplicity.
In week 1 of my internship, I set out to meet with and gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to be an executive leader.
In week 3, I reached out to our Chief Customer Officer Howard Elias and set up a time to learn from his experiences.
Collaboration equals innovation. -Michael Dell
My agenda? Social selling. I wanted to understand how Howard has grown to become an industry thought leader on the subject of customer oriented outcomes.
From our conversation, I quickly learned that executive leadership is founded in simplicity. The more you can bring people in to understand the greater mission and vision of the the broader Dell culture, the greater we can scale our ideas to be replicated.
This goes back to a philosophy that I learned from Walt Muntzenberger, a Principal Solution Advisor for SAP (Systems Applications Products) when I was doing business for our university in Chicago: individuals such as Howard understand and work to learn the vast complexities of all aspects in their business and markets.
What each executive leader does is take this complexity and break it down to be understandable for the people under them.
This is the beauty of change management.
Where I learned Howard's specialty (among many other skills) lies, is within building relationships from our internal development (I.e., individuals such as myself who are on an exploration journey of Dell to be brought into on the company) to external channel relationships that we have built over the years.
Simple is better.