If you want to know the leadership secrets behind iconic brands like Microsoft, Netflix, Bridgewater, Fanatics, Skims, Robinhood, or Rare Beauty, you could ask the companies co-founders—or you could ask Jay Shetty.
The best-selling author and life coach has sat across the table from Bill Gates, Marc Randolph, Ray Dalio, Michael Rubin, Emma Grede, Vlad Tenev, and Selena Gomez, interviewing them for his hit podcast, “On Purpose,” which averages around 500 million views a month and has surpassed 20 billion views in total since launching nearly a decade ago. After spending hundreds of hours peppering some of America’s most high-profile business leaders with questions, Shetty has learned something about leadership styles.
“There’s three types of leaders. There’s purpose-driven leaders, who focus on impact. There’s performance-driven leaders, who focus on goals, and then there’s power-driven leaders who focus on themselves. And I think we’re living at a time now where we can clearly see all three of them,” said Shetty, during a conversation with Julia Hartz, the co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Phoenix on Thursday.
Purpose-driven leaders are the most effective, according to Jay Shetty. “Purpose-driven leaders are building from a place of what they didn’t have,” said Shetty, who specifically mentioned Rare Beauty founder Selena Gomez and Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton as some of the people he has interviewed who fall into that category. “They’re trying to create for other people what they wish they had for themselves.” He added, “When they failed, the purpose driven leader never changed their purpose. They just found a new way.”
Shetty leveled with the audience of founders and CEOs, who run some of the fastest-growing private companies in the country, and said building a purpose-driven corporate culture is incredibly difficult. To do so effectively, the culture cannot depend just on the leaders, he added. Instead, it comes down to the C-suite creating an entire organization of leaders, down to the entry-level employee.
“Culture is dependent on how many other leaders you create that can also feel a part of that mission, and the leader in that mission doesn’t need to be a leader in your organization,” said Shetty, who knows this himself as the co-founder of Juni, an adaptogenic sparkling tea brand with 10 full-time employees. “It’s giving everyone—someone who’s just walked through the door all the way to someone who’s been there since the beginning—the permission to demonstrate leadership in different ways.”
That strategy starts—and ends with—hiring. As Shetty told the audience, “You can’t recruit badly and create good culture. I don’t think it’s actually possible.”
Ali Donaldson
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