Frank D’Souza is well-versed in how to navigate complexity. The longtime CEO of Cognizant moved around the globe a lot as a child and credits this peripatetic upbringing with giving him the skill of versatility—as well as insights into what motivates other people. It made him realize that “if you try to understand people, you can both hold them accountable and help them be more effective.”
Based on those insights, he and his Cognizant cofounders built a business environment that allows employees to do their best work by providing a clear set of values and metrics, rather than directives from on high. D’Souza believes in surrounding himself with the smartest people he can find and getting their input: “We all win together—or sometimes we lose together. And that’s OK too,” he says.
D’Souza discusses why CEOs must be in a perpetual state of learning, why the attributes of vulnerability and strength are not at odds, and what he wishes he had done differently as a young CEO, among other topics, in this interview with McKinsey’s Hans-Werner Kaas, a coauthor of The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out (Portfolio, September 2024). What follows is an edited version of their conversation.
Hans-Werner Kaas: Tell us a little about your background.
Frank D’Souza: I had an incredibly lucky upbringing. My father was a diplomat, so we moved around the world; I lived in 11 countries and went to local schools in eight of them. That upbringing informed my leadership style in so many ways. Because I got to meet people from all over the world, I hold the core belief that human beings are more similar than we are different.
Eventually, I found my way to the US. After receiving a master’s in business from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, I founded Cognizant with a couple of other people. During the 26 years I was there, we expanded it from a start-up to one of the largest systems integrators in the world, with almost 300,000 employees, a $40 billion market cap, and $16 billion in revenue at the time.
Hans-Werner Kaas: In The Journey of Leadership, we talk about human-centric leadership—or the idea that attributes like self-reflection, empathy, compassion, vulnerability, versatility, and decisiveness are the foundational qualities of a great leader. How have you operationalized this form of leadership in your own career?
Frank D’Souza: It’s such an important topic in today’s world. At Cognizant, I led a professional services business that was all about people. Everything we did depended on thinking, “How can we get almost 300,000 people to wake up every morning and do the best that they possibly can on behalf of the customer, on behalf of their colleagues?”
But at the end of the day, as a CEO, you have to drive performance. That’s what you’re there for. So the question is, what’s the best way to do that? What we found was that you couldn’t just be directive. We couldn’t possibly say to them, “Every day, and every minute, this is what you need to do.”
Instead, we wanted to create an environment where they could do their best work and we would get the hell out of the way. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to empower people. We built a system around empowering and delegating to the front lines, where people closest to the client made decisions on the client’s behalf. We made sure they were operating within guardrails that made sense, and then we made sure that the rest of the organization got out of their way so that they could do what they needed to do.
Hans-Werner Kaas: Can you elaborate on the guardrails? Were they performance metrics or principles of behavior or a code of conduct?
Frank D’Souza: I would say there were two sets. There was a set of values, or a code that we operated by and that everyone understood. These were the things we stood for as an organization that we documented as our “cultural value drivers”—transparency, passion, empowerment, collaboration, integrity, and customer focus.
We expected each of our associates to live by these cultural values. On top of that, we had specific metrics. Everyone had four core metrics by which they operated: a customer satisfaction metric, an employee satisfaction metric, a revenue metric, and a profitability metric. The idea was to balance these four and optimize them in the context of our broader values.
Hans-Werner Kaas: The idea of balance plays a significant role in our book. As a leader, how do you balance showing vulnerability with exhibiting decisiveness and strength?
Frank D’Souza: This may be somewhat of a contrarian view, but I would say that the choice between vulnerability and strength is not actually a choice. Vulnerability can be a loaded word. If you think about it in the context of cybersecurity, for example, to say “we’ve got a vulnerability” implies weakness or a soft spot in your defenses. There are a lot of negative connotations around the idea of vulnerability.
But in the context of leadership, vulnerability means allowing yourself to be open-minded about different ideas and accepting different perspectives. You have to believe you’re not the smartest person in the room. If you exhibit these behaviors, and you do so genuinely, they are a great source of strength. I never thought of strength and vulnerability as a trade-off. I wanted the smartest people around me when making a decision.
Leaders have to operate in such a complex environment. Technology is changing rapidly, geopolitics are shifting, megatrends are moving at unprecedented rates. In today’s context, I’m not sure you can even be the smartest person in the room. The only choice you have is to say, “How do I surround myself with incredibly smart people and be open-minded to their thoughts and ideas?” Making the right decision together is a source of strength. That’s the essence of leadership today.
Hans-Werner Kaas: Surrounding yourself with the smartest people not only gets you great perspectives and input, but it also creates buy-in and excitement, right?
Frank D’Souza: Absolutely. As you’re rising, you want to bring everybody along with you. There’s no better way to do that than to consider everyone’s views and options, and then we all win together—or sometimes we lose together. And that’s OK too. The idea of failure is also important in today’s world. In many organizations, there can be an aversion to failure. In my view, if you’re not failing, it might be the case that you’re not moving fast enough or not taking enough risks. There’s a changing dynamic around failure that needs to be part of leadership.
Thinking about failure means going back to root causes. Most often, my failures stem from one of two places: a blind spot that I had or a comfort zone that I was in. I either didn’t see something, or I assumed something that wasn’t the right assumption. And those eventually lead to some form of failure.
It’s good to be constantly aware of your blind spots and your comfort zones. The faster the world moves, the more blind spots you tend to have and the more likely you are to fall back to comfort zones. Finding mechanisms to push you out of your comfort zone, and to hold up a mirror to your blind spots, I think those are the ways that you learn from failure and try to mitigate going forward.
I used several techniques to do this, the most important of which was to cultivate a network of disinterested third parties that I could call upon for advice. As a leader, it’s often hard to find people who have the time and experience to offer good counsel. But at those moments of truth, having someone you can call on to give an independent view is invaluable.
Hans-Werner Kaas: What was your experience in defining and shaping a culture at Cognizant? How did it evolve?
Frank D’Souza: The raw material, if you will, was very similar to our competitors—we hired from similar schools, we trained in similar ways, and so forth. What was different was our focus on customers—and they told us that their experiences dealing with us were different.
We built a client-centric culture that put customers ahead of our own needs in fundamental ways. For example, we were much more interested in the lifetime value of a customer than in each individual project value or profitability. We gave our client teams the ability to make those trade-offs: If a team wanted to invest in the short term with the belief that it would pay dividends in the future, it was empowered to do so.
We also figured out how to grow and maintain that culture, which was something that always worried me. At our peak, the company was growing at a remarkable rate. In the last full year I was at Cognizant, we hired 75,000 people in a single year. We came up with a model that would promulgate the culture by identifying “the heroes, the rituals, and the legends in the firm.”
We took the time to identify heroes and hold them up for the rest of the firm to see, to build culture into every one of our rituals around the organization, and then to create legends by taking time to document and retell the stories of the big and little things that moved the company forward over the years. These specific examples were a powerful way for us to make the culture come to life and spread it throughout the organization.
Hans-Werner Kaas: How did you instill these things in the senior management team, which acts as a multiplier across most organizations?
Frank D’Souza: First, there’s no substitute for spending a lot of time working together, physically in many cases, to instill the culture. Jack Welch famously noted the “two-by-two matrix” of performance and culture—people who delivered performance, yes or no, and people who lived the culture, yes or no. He said that the hardest decisions leaders make are about people who deliver results but don’t live the culture. Actively identifying those people, and then making the hard decision to say they may not be part of the journey going forward, is one of the most important things you can do in the top team.
Hans-Werner Kaas: Our book discusses how CEOs learn to lead from the “inside out.” In other words, change starts with oneself. If you have been on a reinvention journey, are there any ideas or practices that you can recommend for the broader leadership community?
Frank D’Souza: I was definitely thrown into the deep end. I became a public company CEO at the relatively young age of 38, with very little experience outside the enterprise I had helped to found. I felt a fair amount of uncertainty and fear in being the steward of a big company. I took the responsibility that the board had entrusted to me very seriously, and I thought a lot about what I needed to do to be successful.
I thought about the fundamental things I needed to do well, but more important, the areas where I needed help. I strongly believe that the hard work of “inner leadership” starts with really knowing yourself, particularly as you change as an individual. I was in that job for 12 and a half years. The person who took the CEO job on day one was a very different person from the one who left more than 12 years later.
The inner work continues every day and it involves understanding yourself, being true to yourself, and removing yourself in a way so you can figure out what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. For me, that translated into surrounding myself with people smarter than I was. Thinking about my team, I systematically went out and said, my CFO should be a better CFO than I could ever be. My head of marketing and strategy should be better than I could ever be, and so forth.
The second was a broader community of people—advisers, mentors, and coaches—who I could turn to for advice, in good times and bad, who could be dispassionate and didn’t have any vested interest in my success or failure. Sometimes they were a sounding board, other times a shoulder to cry on when things weren’t going well. Those two groups of people were integral to my success at Cognizant.
The fact is, none of us has all the answers. My father used to tell me, “There are no experts anymore; there are just people with varying degrees of ignorance.” That’s an interesting way to think about things. If you adopt that mindset, then you start by saying that not having the answers is not a weakness; it’s just dealing with the environment.
Hans-Werner Kaas: Another theme in our book is empathy. Should a leader show empathy and, if so, how? What role has it played in your career?
Frank D’Souza: Just as with vulnerability, the idea that showing empathy and focusing on performance are at odds is a false comparison.
There is more than one way to achieve any objective. I would tie performance and empathy together by saying, “There are five different ways to achieve an objective; how do we arrive at the best solution?” Empathy is trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes to figure out how they can achieve the objective they have. Then you can hold that person accountable.
Standing in others’ shoes is something I learned as part of my upbringing. Whenever we moved to a different country, my parents wanted to put me in a local school. In many cases, we didn’t speak the language, so we had to learn it. It wasn’t that I was thinking about “building empathy.” It was probably just a survival skill to be able to make friends and have a social life.
But it taught me that if you try to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, you get a much better understanding of how they think. In the business context, if you try to understand people, you can both hold them accountable and help them be more effective. That’s how I think about the relationship between empathy and performance.
Hans-Werner Kaas: We talk in the book about leaders having a “to do” list, but also a “to be” list—that is, the skills and attributes you need to embrace and constantly hone. How would you describe the role of the modern leader?
Frank D’Souza: I would underscore the point that the world is more complicated than it has ever been. The demand on leaders to consider not just business performance but also the impact of that performance on broader society is an imperative now. That should be part of every leader’s set of considerations.
The second point I would emphasize is that employees today want authentic leadership. In my view, there’s a dearth of authentic leadership in the world. It’s refreshing for all of us when a leader has the courage to stand up and say, “Look, I don’t have all the answers, but we’re going to figure it out. We’re going to make mistakes along the way, but we’re going to do the best we can.”
I think that level of authentic leadership is a requirement today. However, while considering multiple stakeholders and being authentic, you can’t forget the core job of a leader, which is ultimately to drive performance.
Hans-Werner Kaas: When you reflect on your own career, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Frank D’Souza: I think perhaps I would take more risks. I would lean forward even harder than I did. What I find interesting in this kind of introspection is asking, “Well, why didn’t I? What was the set of things that held me back from taking those risks?” Those opportunities that I now look back on and say “I could have done that, and we could have been bigger,” or “We could have been more successful,” were always there. They were in front of me at every step along the way.
I only wish I had engaged in more introspection to figure out what inhibited me from doing those things. But this is why a change mindset and a continual focus on the inner work of leadership is so important.
Hans-Werner Kaas: You have embraced human-centric leadership and have been a role model of inside out reinvention. Thank you for your insights and for being such a great contributor to our book.
