‘Will you be my best friend?’ How Lumen’s Kate Johnson turned a breakfast into a CEO partnership
Fortune · C · trust 56/100
Good morning. Kate Johnson’s friendship with EY global chair and CEO Janet Truncale began when the Lumen Technologies CEO spotted Truncale eating breakfast alone at a Business Roundtable event a few years ago. “I sat down next to her and I said, ‘Will you be my best friend?’” Johnson told me yesterday on stage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. “I was looking for connection so I could have a better day.”
Truncale, then new to the top job at EY, immediately agreed and recalled Johnson showing her where to grab her name tag to mark her spot on the table as “everybody rushes in to put their name tag somewhere early.” The camaraderie morphed into friendship, and changed how Truncale approaches such gatherings. “In the last two years, I’ve frankly tried to pay that forward, so when there are new CEOs, I try to reach out and say, ‘hey, I’ve just been through this.’”
What I love about that story is what it says about personal connection in leadership, especially for women, whose share of C-suite and board roles has stalled .
Both Truncale and Johnson describe themselves as introverts—in my experience, most CEOs are—and they kept their friendship largely to themselves to the point where colleagues initially thought they didn’t know each other when EY won a deal to help transform Lumen’s network inventory.
“Liking each other isn’t nearly as important as respecting and trusting each other’s capabilities,” Johnson said. “I’m a capital allocator. I allocate human and financial resources, and there’s no way on earth I’m ever going to have enough of either, so I partner for expertise.”
About 25% of EY’s $57 billion in global revenues last year came from work generated through alliance and ecosystem partners, Truncale said. “As a leader, you have to be really comfortable with what you are good at and partner to gain expertise. That is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Those who figure out how to combine those capabilities with confidence are the ones that are going to reach their ambition sooner and further and grow faster.”
What personal connections enable is a deeper trust and more innovative ways to get results. Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber talked on one of my panels about the importance of bringing not just your skills but your network to a corporate board. Sam’s Club CEO Latriece Watkins told my colleague Emma Hinchliffe that “when I feel most powerful is when I see the people I’ve invested in make moves.” And Olivia Walton is investing $100 million in partnerships to halve America’s maternal mortality rate, telling our audience that “everybody wants healthy families.”
Check out Kate Johnson’s “Daring Diaries” blog to get her perspective on the human side of leadership. I’ll be doing three fireside chats this morning with ADP CEO Maria Black, Revathi Advaithi of Flex, and Silicon Valley veteran Marissa Mayer. You can join us via livestream here . Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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Today's edition of CEO Daily was curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Nicholas Gordon, and Lee Clifford.
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