Having served as the president of both the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the provost of Yale University, Dr. Rodin has spent her career helping people and institutions transform themselves, and the world around them.
She broke through glass ceilings in academia, philanthropy, and business, and forged pathways for future generations of women leaders and changemakers. As a director of nine public companies, Dr. Rodin has focused on all aspects of corporate governance, from board diversity to social impact.
Throughout her career, Dr. Rodin has cultivated eight core principles of leadership:
- Learning: What you know is less important than how you learn. Set up metrics, monitoring, and feedback mechanisms to learn from the work, while you work.
- Listening: Identify diverse experts, embrace constructive criticism, and listen hard to what they have to say. Seeing yourself as others do builds trust and buy-in.
- Leverage: Relentlessly pursue multiplicative outcomes, and always strive to deliver outputs that more than double your inputs.
- Differentiation: Figure out what you and your organization bring to an environment, then make yourself unmistakable from the rest.
- Innovation: Advance new products, practices, and processes by networking unlikely partners and zeroing in on nonlinear ways to integrate assets. Combine old assets in new ways.
- Communication: Talk with and listen to as many different stakeholders as possible. Encourage open communication across and within teams.
- Resilience: Build the five characteristics of resilience into your organization, so it can weather the shocks and stressors of unexpected crises. Also build your organization’s capacity to grow from a crisis, using the opportunity as a chance to transform, to seize prospects that were either unanticipated or previously out of reach.
- Patience: There are moments in any venture that look like a catastrophe. That doesn’t mean the venture is a catastrophe. It means the venture isn’t finished.
