Joe Davis on what a generous leader actually does

What this conversation is about

Joe Davis spent his career at Boston Consulting Group, where he is a managing director and senior partner, and wrote The Generous Leader: 7 Ways to Give of Yourself for Everyone’s Gain. His definition of the generous leader is someone who gives freely of themselves, without expecting direct personal benefit, so others can develop, grow and thrive at their full potential.

Glenn Llopis opened where most executives are most comfortable, with the numbers. Davis did not argue. Outcomes matter, he said, quoting a chief executive who told him that stepping past yourself and connecting with your teams is what finally releases the human traits that produce those outcomes. What has changed, in his view, is the blur between work and life. Once the phone, the laptop and video calls made work constant, people stopped accepting being treated as a cog and started expecting to be seen as humans.

Glenn named the habit that gets in the way:

"we have been trained to perhaps judge people or perceive people the wrong way based upon how the organizations define them, not how the individual has defined itself" — Glenn Llopis · 00:06:15

The power of “I don’t know”

Davis told the story of a partner who could not bring himself to say three words. When a team got stuck and he sensed the question coming, he would leave the room rather than admit he had no answer. One day he stayed and said he didn’t know either. The energy in the room went up, the brainstorming started, and the work moved. That is the line at the top of this page.

Why is it so hard? Partly stereotype and expectation, which land differently depending on who you are. Partly training:

"You're trained to think, I got to prove I can do it by myself." — Joe Davis · 00:12:47

His advice is to step over your own line slightly, rather than all at once. One leader he interviewed watched how honesty landed in other people’s rooms before trying it in her own. Another suggested remembering a time you were vulnerable and noticing that it worked out.

Environment, leader, individual

Glenn asked the question at the center of his own method: does change start with the environment or the individual? Davis said both, and then split the answer into three:

"it's the environment. So what to reward, what do you not reward? What metrics do you use? What's the context that all sends a signal to people about how to behave?" — Joe Davis · 00:16:37

Then the leader, through what they role-model, and then the people themselves, who set the example for each other as they grow. That is the two-sided argument the method makes, arrived at independently by a senior partner at one of the world’s largest consultancies.

Listening, he says, has a double benefit: it builds the relationship, and it gets you information you did not have. He tells consultants to engage the skeptics and uncover the nos, because the person who thinks your plan will not work usually knows something specific about why.

Glenn added why listening has become harder:

"When we were listening to sameness, everybody said the same things, the same words, the same buzzwords. Now we're listening to difference." — Glenn Llopis · 00:25:14

Inclusion is about questions

Davis’s third generous act is inclusion, and he means something more practical than a diversity number: bring people into the room who did the work, and ask them something. They will be nervous, and they will also be connected to the bigger picture for the first time. His tip for a leader who finds this uncomfortable is to invite one person who feels safe, ask them one question, and have the grace to help them through the answer.

That is where Glenn laid out the five indicators he uses to read an environment: who do you let in, how do you see them, who do you let them be, what do you let them do, and how do you let them do it.

"I've learned that inclusion is about questions." — Glenn Llopis · 00:28:04

On allyship, Davis is equally direct. A button or a hiring quota is not it. A real ally opens a door to an opportunity, then lets the person walk through it and deliver, coaching without carrying them, and does not disappear when things get hard.

Giving up the mask

The seventh act is the one that holds the others together. Glenn told him where his own movement began:

"that was reminding people to take off the masks that they had been living with their entire lives." — Glenn Llopis · 00:41:57

Davis agreed, with a caution: you cannot simply ask people to do it. You have to role-model it first. He described a colleague who code-switched for years until the exhaustion became unbearable:

"Now she figured it out on her own. I can't take the exhaustion, so I'm just going to let myself be me." — Joe Davis · 00:43:35

Her teams preferred her that way. His regret is how long she carried it alone, and how much sooner she might have stopped if a leader had gone first.