What Romeo and Juliet Can Teach Us about Leadership

There are two ways to look at Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare.

Either a tragic-beautiful-poetic eternal love story about two star-crossed lovers or a 5-day ill-advised relationship that resulted in 6 deaths.

Former is an opinion, the latter is a fact.

The facts come from the mind. They are indisputable and absolute.

But we follow our hearts which is why the love story interpretation of this play has been more appealing. If something or someone speaks to our heart, the mind becomes irrelevant.

The leaders we admire speak to our heart (the corporate term is “people skills”), make us feel inspired, suspend judgement and march forward.

I was part of a greenfield project in China started by a handful of leaders with supposedly little experience in biologics (proficient in small molecules) and we built a majestic biologics plant from a strawberry field to GMP manufacturing in 30 months which went to win global industrial accolades. Without an exception, those leaders had outstanding people skills and we followed.

They hired, trained and mentored the subsequent teams, managed the success and setbacks, worked and made us work long hours, bootstrapped in crunch times, and much more.

They spoke to our hearts, and the minds (the technical deliverables) followed.