Ep 195: Colleen DeCourcy - In 15

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Who takes care of you?

Colleen DeCourcy has been named Creative Leader of the Decade. She led Wieden and Kennedy to three consecutive Agency of the Year wins and her contribution to creativity has just been recognized by Cannes Lions with the Lion of St Mark Lifetime Achievement Award.

I met Colleen in April of 2015. And as I got to know her, I learned that she was humble, that she was generous, that she was vulnerable. That she was going to make it happen, even though, as you’ll hear, she was filled with self-doubt.

Today, three months into her version of retirement, her impact is everywhere.

And her sense of self has found a permanent home.

At its heart, leadership is an act of generosity.

It asks so much of us that to do it well, to have lasting impact, requires that we give much more of ourselves than we get back. At least in the short term.

It’s one of the reasons why leadership is so lonely.

But the longer that I do this, the more that I talk to leaders and try to understand them, the more I realize that there is a truth that shows up over and over again.

That the generosity that the best leaders bring, generosity that exists even in the face of their own fears and doubts, generosity that exists even in the furnace of modern business, lifts the people around them to heights they never thought possible.

And in the process of doing that for others, what these leaders end up creating, is themselves.