Lead with clarity and candor: CEOs emphasize transparency, trust, and honest feedback as foundations for high-performing teams.
Delegate and focus on unique value: Effective leaders build and empower teams – starting with their top team – to let go of operational detail and concentrate on areas where they add unique value.
Stay centered and keep learning: In volatile markets, resilience and perspective matter more than ever. Top CEOs prioritize what they can control, remain curious, and commit to continuous personal growth.
There is little doubt that the role of a CEO has never been more demanding. Leaders of global companies must navigate rising geopolitical uncertainty, fragile supply chains, and the relentless pace of technological change – not forgetting the occasional Black Swan event. Setting strategic direction and motivating a workforce amid such volatility is no small task.
In 2025, I had the privilege of discussing with six CEOs of global enterprises to understand the leadership traits and capabilities that are helping them drive transformation in these unpredictable times. Although they operate in different industries and geographies, a few clear themes emerged about how they build and galvanize leadership teams while managing intense pressure and public scrutiny.
A consistent insight was the importance for leaders to develop the courage and the skill to foster a culture of openness and transparency. Leaders who are straightforward and candid – while still holding their teams accountable – create stronger, higher-performing organizations, noted Morten Wierod, CEO of engineering giant ABB.
Another recurring theme was the discipline of effective delegation and learning to lead through others. Mars CEO Poul Weihrauch emphasized the need for CEOs to let go of operational detail, while Keppel CEO Loh Chin Hua underscored the importance of focusing only on areas where a leader adds unique value. For Esther Baiget, CEO of Danish bioscience powerhouse Novonesis, this includes acting as the company’s external ambassador: listening, sensing, connecting the dots, and bringing outside signals back into the organization. In periods of market turbulence, the ability to stay centered also surfaced repeatedly. Several CEOs spoke about concentrating on what can be controlled and maintaining perspective. This is particularly relevant for Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, whose company sits at the intersection of technical ambition and geopolitical complexity.
Just as important as zooming out is the capacity to look inward. Rohit Jawa, who stepped down as CEO of Hindustan Unilever in July, described the deliberate learning journey that has accompanied his career – one driven by curiosity, reflection, and a commitment to lifelong development as a leader.
In the lessons that follow, you’ll find insights and practical wisdom from leaders running global enterprises headquartered in Singapore, India, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
A lifelong “ABB-er,” Morten Wierod joined the company straight from university and rose through the ranks to lead its two largest business areas before becoming CEO in August 2024. As he steers the $100 billion engineering icon into its next chapter, his leadership approach is clear: “I give openness and trust, and I expect transparency and ownership in return.”
Wierod is also a leader who values speed and considers impatience a virtue. “Most leaders say impatience is their weakness. I think impatience drives performance – impatience for results now and improvement now. It’s the hunger to do more that drives innovation.” At the same time, he is “impatient with actions, more patient with results,” recognizing that some initiatives take time to bear fruit.
Candor is equally important. “Be polite, but not too polite. Feedback must be honest and direct, but always with good intentions.”
He also encourages what he calls level-up thinking. “I want people to put themselves one level above and ask themselves how they would analyze the situation from that point of view. ‘If you were me, would you go for this proposal? If not, why are you proposing it?’ That mindset creates better decisions and makes it easier to get a ‘yes’ when you ask for resources.”
Reflecting on his first year at the helm of ABB, Wierod explains that he made a conscious effort to invest time and energy in creating a strong executive committee. “We are a team of individuals,” he says, “but we have to work closely together and feel that we have each other’s backs. For me, that has really helped. They always say that it’s lonely at the top, but I haven’t really felt that during this first year. It’s really been a team effort.”
Paul Weihrauch joined Mars in 2000 and led various business units over two decades before becoming “group” CEO in 2022.
One of the biggest adjustments in his transition to the top role was moving from being a business unit leader to leading other business unit leaders. Thinking back to his first executive team meeting as CEO, Weihrauch remembers with a smile how his team seemed to make a conscious effort to signal to him that his new role would require some operational letting go.
Today, he measures success less by personal contribution and more by how effectively he enables teams, fosters alignment, and facilitates high-quality dialogue.
To maintain performance and trust, the leadership team regularly conducts “difficult decision drills,” where they practice open feedback and pause meetings to address behaviors and interpersonal dynamics.
Creating space for vulnerability has strengthened relationships, but Weihrauch emphasizes the need to keep balancing personal connections with performance expectations. As CEO, he says, you must put the company first, even if it means asking well-liked team members to move on when necessary.
“If you don’t live up to this responsibility about having the best leaders at all levels, who eventually is paying the price? The people below – the Associates that work for a leader who is not performing – will eventually pay the price.”
Over the past decade, Keppel CEO Loh Chin Hua has transformed the company from an industrial conglomerate into a global asset manager. The journey included a turbulent stretch in 2020, when the COVID-19 crisis sent Keppel’s stock to record lows, oil prices collapsed, and a major shareholder withdrew a takeover bid. So how did Loh remain composed through such upheaval?
“You have to learn to be kind to yourself,” he said. “There’s no point beating yourself up. When I look at a situation, I sometimes try to extricate myself and look at it from outside.”
This shift in perspective helps Loh stay focused and trust the process. “You just have to believe that if you keep doing the right things and you keep moving the chains, as they say in American football, then eventually you will get there and the market will change,” he said. “Of course, it’s easy to get frustrated if you allow yourself to think things like: ‘I’m doing all these things, but the market doesn’t value them – how unfair!’ But better to stay focused on our own actions and trust the process.”
Staying focused is also how he prioritizes his day-to-day responsibilities, stepping in only where he knows he can add value, and trusting his team to execute.
“Once you have good people, most of the time you can leave them to execute the business,” he said. “I look at where I can add value – the areas where I can influence the battle. When I’m not adding value, I lose interest.”
Now in his 12th year as CEO, Loh credits his sustained curiosity, drive, and engagement to his desire to keep learning. “I believe I’m a good student in life. And I don’t mean a student in the traditional sense in the classroom. I continue to observe and learn quite a bit when I visit people and places.”
A chemical engineer by training, Ester Baiget spent 25 years at Dow Chemical before becoming Novozymes CEO in 2020 amid the COVID-19 crisis. Since then, she has steered the company through a 2024 merger with fellow bioscience company Chr. Hansen to form Danish biosolutions powerhouse Novonesis.
Baiget sees her role as asking the right questions rather than having all the answers. She devotes significant time to engaging with global stakeholders. In addition to serving on the board of Dutch paint company AkzoNobel, she co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, serves as Vice Chair of The B Team and is a member of the board of the Science-Based Targets Initiative. These roles inform her leadership philosophy – tuning into global signals and translating them into strategic action.
“It’s how you define your job,” she says. “If your job as a CEO is to help your company be better, then much of what you do is connect. And for that, you need to get out, sniff, and bring those dots home.”
Watch the full CEO Dialogue here
ASML sits as the crossroads of global power, with export controls, subsidies, and strategic alliances influencing its path as much as engineering breakthroughs. In this environment, humility – and disciplined focus – become essential, notes Christophe Fouquet.
“Even as a CEO, there are things you cannot control,” noted Fouquet, who joined ASML in 2008 and held several management positions in marketing and product management before becoming CEO in 2024. “For example, we cannot control the macroeconomy or geopolitics. What we can control is having the right product, the right relationship with our customers, and entering markets that will be critical moving forward. If we do that well, there may be a few storms, but the sun will always come back.”
He describes his leadership style as rooted in humility and authenticity. “I want people to feel that they can come to me, and that I will listen,” he said. “At the same time, I expect transparency and accountability.”
For Fouquet, the most meaningful leadership begins once personal validation – trying to “prove yourself to others” – is no longer the goal. “This change of perspective is really liberating,” he said. “Because now you don’t come to work to prove something. You come with just the question: ‘Okay, what can we do differently? What can we do next?’ So you have a lot more space to create.”
Rohit Jawa joined HUL as a management trainee in 1988 and returned to become its CEO in June 2023, after spending almost 20 years in various international roles within the broader Unilever. He credits his trajectory in large part to approaching his own development with a dual focus: performing at his best today while consciously building the skills needed for tomorrow.
“I’ve always asked myself: What’s my potential? How much can I grow?” he said, admitting that it’s been an episodic journey where, every five to 10 years, he asked himself whether and how he could stretch to the next level, and then endeavored to develop the required competencies.
Over nearly four decades, his core values of integrity, hard work, and decency have remained constant. What has evolved, he says, is his agility and adaptability, which have been shaped in part by working across many countries. He’s also become more mindful of his health, committing to daily exercise and good nutrition as well as being more intentional about his emotional well-being. “I’ve learned to be calmer, to reframe things and see them more philosophically,” he reflects. “I’ve learned to take more perspective.”
This maturity comes from a habit of deliberate reflection. “I read a lot, and I also read some things over again to see if I’m missing a perspective. I try to keep distilling things down to what I need at every stage of my career growth,” he says. This involves reflecting that what has worked for him so far may not get him further. “It’s a very deliberate, conscious effort to improve.”
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