Leadership today is often judged by visibility—who speaks most boldly, acts most decisively, and exudes the most confidence.
But Sébastien Page believes true leadership starts not with image, but with self-understanding.
“The real leadership skill as you climb up the ladder is listening rather than talking,” Page says. “If you’re a strong listener as a leader, you become a better decision maker.”
Page is the Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price—a global investment management firm. He oversees a team of professionals who manage more than $500 billion of investments.
But Page is much more than a “numbers guy.” He’s an award-winning research author who’s known among business leaders and ambitious professionals for making complex ideas practical.
His latest book—The Psychology of Leadership: Timeless Principles to Improve Your Management of Individuals, Teams, and Yourself—comes from years of collaborating with a sports psychologist and field-testing insights in the Fortune 500 world.
“There are so many misconceptions about leadership that persist,” Page says. “First of all, people think of leaders as communicators first and foremost. We want a figure who is inspiring. That’s how people picture a leader in their mind. She also will never give up. She won’t show any stress and she’ll be decisive. Well, most of the time it’s the exact opposite for high-level leaders.”
He elaborates: “The most difficult skill in business for high-level leadership is not to stick to your goals. It’s to know when to quit. ‘Strategic quitting’ is a prized skill in leadership because we invest in projects and initiatives that sometimes don’t work and it’s very difficult to make the decision to quit something and to reinvest in an initiative that has a better chance of working.”
Another counterintuitive view he holds is that stress can be useful. “The best leaders I know actually embrace stress, reframe it into activation and fuel for performance,” he says. Also, he says, good leaders “often possess the prized skill of strategic patience. Knowing when a decision is urgent is one thing, but it’s also important to understand the strategic advantage of waiting it out.”
The Danger of Goal-Induced Blindness
Page warns that even well-intended leadership practices can have unintended consequences. “We love measurable goals, don’t we? They’re motivating, they help align the organization. We want this country to go to the moon. These measurable goals are incredibly powerful,” he says. “So, my principle is ‘beware of the side effects’ because goal-induced blindness is well documented in psychology research and occurs when we get obsessed with our goals and we lose sight of everything that’s non-goal related that still matters in our lives or in our business.”
He points to real examples: “Wells Fargo, for example, had a measurable goal of opening as many new accounts as possible. So, they started opening famously fake accounts. Volkswagen was trying to reduce their emissions, and they started tweaking the tests. These are blue-chip, world-class companies that should have the best corporate cultures. These are successful companies over decades, and they suffered from goal-induced blindness. It’s real. It matters.”
Then Page adds a deeply personal note: “I almost died early in my career. I was completely overworked. I got a mysterious infection, spent a week in the hospital, almost died. I wasn’t taking care of myself. Pure goal-induced blindness. It’s important to avoid it.”
Reversing the Success Equation
Page flips a familiar assumption on its head. “If I reach my goals, I’m going to be happy. And what I’m saying is, if you’re generally happy, you will reach your goals,” he says. “Let’s give credit to Sean Aker from Harvard for this concept. He’s done lots of research on positive psychology. He’s published a book titled The Happiness Advantage, and he talks about reversing that equation.”
If you study positive psychology, Page says, you’ll likely run into the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. “There’s one acronym from positive psychology I absolutely loved when I was doing my research—it’s PERMA, P-E-R-M-A. It speaks to what makes people thrive in the long run. P stands for positive emotions; E, engagement; R, positive relationships; M, meaning; and A, long-term accomplishment.”
If you maintain positive relationships, if you find meaning in what you do and you focus on longer term goals, you will over time perform better as a leader as an individual, Page says. “We’re way too short-term in business. We need to think ten years ahead. We need to think longer-term.”
Meaning, Relationships, and the Human Side of Work
“You’d be amazed how rarely in the corporate world we talk about the meaning of what we do,” Page says. “We just don’t talk about it enough. It comes down to tying what you’re doing to the greater mission.”
He shares a familiar analogy: “There’s an architect who walks to three bricklayers, and he asks the first one, what are you doing? The first one says, I’m tired. I’m laying bricks. It’s hard. The architect walks to the second bricklayer. The second bricklayer seems a bit more energized. He says, I’m building this wall. Then he walked to the third bricklayer, and the third bricklayer says, I’m so excited. I’m going to work all day, all night. I’m building this amazing cathedral.”
Page connects it directly to his field: “If I do this in my world in money management, I might walk up to an analyst working on a spreadsheet. He might say, ‘I’m debugging the spreadsheet.’ I might walk up to a second analyst who says, ‘I’m finding ways to outperform the markets.’ I might walk up to a third analyst who might say, ‘I’m building better retirements for people.’”
He also emphasizes that human connection matters even in small ways. “Yes, small talk is not just small talk, it’s a human connection and it really matters,” he says. “In relationships, there’s research that shows that it is the number one factor of long-term well-being.”
Feedback, Trust, and the Courage to Ask
Page says self-awareness is the cornerstone of leadership and he talks about how leaders can deliberately cultivate self-awareness. “Feedback is super important in the workplace,” he says. “And there’s a little tweak that changes everything: you have to ask for it! That makes a world of difference and leaders should model that practice. They should go around and ask their team members, their peers, ‘how did I do there?’ There’s nothing more important than sincerely asking for feedback and then making it safe for people to offer it.”
Trust, he says, is what makes teams thrive. “It often comes down often to two key factors. Trust—do we trust each other? And second, mutual respect. Mutual respect does not necessarily mean being nice all the time and overly agreeable. It means ‘I’m going to take time to listen to your point of view because I respect you.’”
The Hardest, Most Human Skill
Page’s view of leadership is both challenging and deeply human. “People want independence,” he says. “If you micromanage, you’re taking that away. We need to retire the myth that the leader has all the answers. ‘I don’t know’ is something that leaders need to say more often and more confidently because we in fact don’t know everything.”
And in the end? “Leadership isn’t just what you do,” Page says. “It’s about how you think, how you feel, and how you show up in the lives of others.”
True leadership, he suggests, doesn’t begin in the boardroom. It begins in the mind.