Lumen CEO Kate Johnson: ‘Be A Learn-It-All, Not a Know-It-All’

Kate Johnson, the president and CEO of Lumen Technologies, thinks we need fewer know-it-alls and more learn-it-alls leading businesses. As she explains it, leaders owe it to their teams to get past thinking of themselves as the smartest people in the room.

Johnson developed her particular leadership theory on, of all places, the tennis court. “Just as you acquire new shots and approaches to tennis, you have to be constantly looking for new ideas and wanting to learn everything you can in business,” she says in a far-ranging interview. “You have to be nimble and agile enough to respond to any new situation or challenge.”

The key to corporate agility, Johnson says, involves being curious and thinking through problems collaboratively. “That is the difference between a know-it-all and a learn-it-all,” she said.

It may seem like a stretch to try to apply the same mindset on the tennis court to the corner office of one of the largest providers of digital connectivity to businesses and the government. But Johnson insists the “thinking game” is the same.

“We have to be agile, we have to be curious, we have to be flexible, we have to have hypotheses, and we have to have mastery of the available data,” Johnson says. “But we have to leave space to process and to change course quickly and effectively.”

It’s not going to be one person who has all the answers, she adds. “It’s going to be the company that figures out how to tap into the value of these assets the fastest. That’s the company that’s going to win.” Listeners will learn the principles Johnson champions in the workplace including:

• Using curiosity and collaboration to promote continuous learning.
• Ensuring feedback takes you to the next level instead of taking you aback.
• Making sure you build a culture around getting successful results.

Johnson also notes how much people, in businesses and in our daily lives, have changed their mindsets in recent years. “The old Corporate America structure expected leaders to be the smartest ones in the room, mastering their business and answering every question as if they had always known the answer,” she shares.

She says that the old model doesn’t work anymore. “Anybody who thinks they have all the answers is going to be in a bit of trouble. The mindset and the systems that we build have to account for the world around us, which changes every second in very unpredictable ways.”