Are You an Inspirational Leader?

Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard. people who most inspire you. Maybe it's a friend or family member who you've always looked up to. A coach or teacher who puts you to be your best. A boss who knew exactly how to motivate the team, or a successful CEO or politician who just always seems to do the right thing.

What do they all have in common? Today's guest has done some deep research into the specific attributes that make people inspirational leaders or not. In a variety of contexts and all around the world. He says that the keys are vision, setting an example, and mentoring, and explains that any of us can improve in these areas to become more inspiring ourselves. Adam Galinsky is a professor at Columbia Business School, and he wrote the book Inspire, The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others, as well as the HPR article, What Sets Inspirational Leaders Apart.

Adam, welcome, thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Allison. I'm really excited to talk to you. What people find inspiring seems like a really tricky thing to measure because it's so subjective, especially across different personalities and cultures. So how did you start to think about the best way to study it? It actually s happened spontaneously in a classroom one day. I was teaching the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about sixty agents, and one of them started talking about a leader that had inspired him to make better decisions. And I noticed something immediate about this person. They somehow

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