Gary Hamel: So as an employee, how would I know whether my leader was truly an open leader or not? Maybe the fact that I follow them is evidence enough. But how do I really know whether somebody is practicing the art of open leadership or not?

Charlene Li: I think about it as a spectrum. There are some people who are early in that journey of being open, versus not. And I go back to, you can feel it in your gut. You really like working for this person. You believe in them, you trust them, and that's the hallmark of what is a good leader, not just an open leader.

I don't think I'm necessarily reinventing leadership here. But it's sort of modernizing it, using some of the tools that are available, being very pragmatic about how you express leadership today. How do you build trust? Because the way that we communicate, the way we share, the way we build relationships now is changing. And you have to be able to feel comfortable with them. Some leaders say, "I manage and I build trust because I show up at that cubicle. Or I write the personal note." I say, "But you have 200,000 employees. How do you do that personal level of leadership at scale?" And you couldn't in the past, but now you can. So how do you practice and exhibit leadership in that way, develop that inspirational relationship, that personal relationship with people?

And the amazing thing is you can do that now. I mean, these tools are amazing that enable that sharing to take place where people really feel like I'm sitting there with my leader at whatever level of the organization and I really know what that person's thinking, feeling, and I trust that person.

Gary Hamel:I guess it requires a willingness to make yourself vulnerable in some sense.

Charlene Li: Absolutely.

Gary Hamel: I was talking to Vaneet Nayar who runs HCL Technologies. Like many leaders today, he writes a blog. But I think maybe what's different -- and you can tell me how common this is -- he really explicitly says to the organization, "I want you to ask me your toughest questions." In fact, he said, almost everything he gets is a dirty question. Like, you're stupid, why do we have that policy? Why did you do this? And that's kind of a hard thing to hear when you're the leader and you have all this imputed authority, and people four levels down are … I mean, how do you get people to have the courage to even tackle you in that way? And as a leader, how do you develop the humility and the willingness to have people come at you?

Charlene Li: I think it's about saying, the benefits of having that open dialogue will make me a better leader and make the organization better. So you're putting your ego aside. You're saying, come on, let me have it, because no one else will be truth tellers out there. Who's going to be the truth teller?

And I think some of the problems that some executives are having now, they have these internal blogs, they're really liking it, but they've allowed anonymous comments to come in. And so the employees are saying these really rough things. That's good to open up the dialogue, but they're also not taking ownership of it. And so what I suggested to one executive who was having this problem was ask people to sign their names. And if they sign their names, we're going to have lunch together to discuss the solution to this problem. Now, that's an incentive: If you have the courage to put your name against a problem, you're going to be a part of that solution, and you're gonna have a personal lunch with me.

Gary Hamel: As you've seen this play out in organizations, how do you overcome the fear that employees have? Because they've been pretty socialized to keep the head down, to not attack leaders in a public forum, not ask tough questions. Before we had blogs, you'd go to a meeting where a CEO is having a town hall. Most of the questions are softball questions. So how does a leader communicate the fact that I really want you to be honest, I want you to be tough, because that's how I'm going to know where the real problems are.

Charlene Li: You kind of have to engineer it, frankly. Especially if you're talking about culture changes and change management, you have to engineer it. It's classic change management. So you're in that town hall, you've got to have your plants. You've got to get the people who you already know have these questions, approach you. Say, can you please ask that question on the blog so I can respond to it, so people can see that it's okay? And you demonstrate this over and over and over again. It's going to take six months before you get your first real comment from somebody. It's going to take months.

Gary Hamel: So you have to have some folks that you've said, I want you to ask a tough question. It's okay. And people see that, and that individual courage starts to be contagious, and people say, "Okay, we've got a new kind of environment here."

Charlene Li: Or the CEO -- and again, it could be any manager, I want to make sure it's not just CEOs. You go out and you talk to all these people and you share all the comments that came back. I heard from this employee, they asked me this tough question, great question, I wish more of you would do that here. I want more of this.

And you just keep saying it over and over and over again. And you show people that when you ask these questions, you don't get your head chopped off, but more importantly, you get rewarded. You are held up onto a pedestal.

I love the fact that at Ford Motor Company, Alan Mulally, when he first came in, he asked people to come into the meeting and give me a green light, yellow light, red light on your business at the next meeting. I want to know if it's a red light so we can deal with it. Everyone comes in, green light, all the way around. And he goes, "That can't be true because we're losing billions of dollars every quarter. So where's the red light. Go away, we're ending this meeting, come back."

First person that comes back, red light. And he said, before we start, let's give this person a round of applause. And so it really is this conditioning. It is this knowledge to say it's okay to say that things are going wrong and I take ownership. Or, tell me what's going wrong so then we can fix it.

Gary Hamel: What are a couple of the questions I need to be asking myself that would help me understand where I am in this journey to become more open?

Charlene Li: I would say the most important thing to think about is how do you use sharing as the first stepping stone for developing these relationships? Where are the opportunities to share? And notice, I haven't said a thing about technologies. Where are the opportunities for you to share, developing that relationship, sharing information, sharing how you make decisions, even sharing the decision-making power. Make a difference in your organization. Identify who that audience would be, what the nature of that is, and start. Again, create that habit of sharing.

The most effective leaders that I see started getting comfortable with this. Barry Judge, [chief marketing officer at Best Buy,] when he first blogged, very uncomfortable, very command-and-control kind of guy. And his first blog was ten words. Basically saying, "Here it is, the first post, phew, glad it's over." And that was it. Do you remember the first time he had to blog? It's nerve-wracking. If he went from there to develop this really heartfelt, very open, very transparent conversation and he could only do that when he felt comfortable. He had developed that trust. Other people had developed that trust with him.