Luncheon Speakers Say Leadership is a Team Effort

Leadership is about more than always being right, or being too tough to show vulnerability, or charging ahead alone.

That was the message of the speakers, including keynote presenter Rudy Giuliani, at the fourth Rockhurst University Leadership Series luncheon Thursday.

Giuliani, the 107th mayor of New York City, said in both his candid question and answer session with a group of Rockhurst University students and his speech at the luncheon that his leadership has been shaped and guided by a number of core values and principles.

Giuliani said sticking to his core principles served him well in his career as a federal prosecutor fighting the mafia and drug crime and during his two terms as New York City’s mayor, during which time he worked to reduce the city’s violent crime rate and became a national leader following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. That doesn’t mean he was always successful in everything he tried, but he told the audience of more than 1,000 business and community leaders at the luncheon that even when they fail, good leaders take lessons from their experience.

“I learned more from the election that I lost than from the election that I won by a landslide,” he said.

Effective leaders also have to have hope, a vision, and a pathway to making that vision a reality, he said. And Giuliani added that good leaders have the ability to recognize their own weaknesses, gather a team that can balance those weaknesses, and take to heart their suggestions.

In accepting the Rashford-Lyon Award for Leadership and Ethics, current National Endowment for the Arts Chair Jane Chu, ’05 EMBA, echoed the cumulative aspects of leadership. She said she recognized now that the examples of leadership she saw throughout her education and her career, including her position as CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, gave her “tools” with which she compiled her own set of skills.

“You also helped me understand that how you do something is just as important as what you do, and these are qualities I can take with me wherever I go,” she said.