Jamie Dimon on the ‘one of the biggest threats’ to CEOs career, company’s success
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has spent more than 20 years at the top of the banking world, and he has a clear view of what separates great leaders from the ones who fail. According to him, it has very little to do with how much an executive actually knows about business. Dimon has identified insecurity as one of the biggest threats to both a CEO’s career and their company’s success.
The problem often starts with a promotion – as executives climb the corporate ladder, they shift from being experts in one specific area to generalists overseeing parts of the business they barely know.“The bigger job you get, the less you know—literally—about the job,” Dimon said on the Master Investor Podcast earlier this year. Strong CEOs handle this shift by hiring people who know more than they do, without feeling embarrassed about their own blind spots.
Insecure leaders, on the other hand, try to hide what they don’t know. “It becomes PowerPoints, you know, make them look good, don’t tell them the bad news. And that is what causes the problem,” Dimon said (Fortune reported).Jamie Dimon on why criticism matters more than egoDimon argued that this kind of insecurity is actually a deeper leadership flaw than arrogance, and it creates a ripple effect of other problems.
In his view, a CEO has to be able to take criticism – especially when it comes from unhappy customers – and use it to fix what is broken.“You’re not going to hurt my feelings by telling me we have a crappy product. If you’re right, I’m gonna thank you for letting me know,” he said.Jamie Dimon's ‘Ted Lasso’ approach to leadershipIn an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dimon pointed to an unlikely role model for upper management: Ted Lasso, the relentlessly positive fictional soccer coach from the Apple TV series.
Dimon said Lasso nails the balance between two essential leadership traits: a fierce drive to win, paired with genuine empathy and humility.“I love Ted Lasso. He comes in and he doesn’t know anything about football, and he’s just gracious. He’s working with people – their insecurities, their bad behavior, their work ethic – and he’s getting them to function as a team,” Dimon said.Dimon’s views on leadership carry weight because of his results.
Over the past two decades, he has built JPMorgan Chase into an $894 billion banking giant – the largest US bank by market cap.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
