Q.01How do you recognise genuine leadership talent?
For me the essence is the ability to take responsibility for outcomes you don't fully control. Anyone can own a result when they hold all the levers. Strong leadership begins where you have to deliver through other people, with incomplete information, and you carry the consequences either way.
I recognise it almost immediately in how someone behaves when something goes wrong. Talented leaders instinctively move toward the problem and ask what do we do now, while others move toward an explanation of why it isn't theirs. The second signal is curiosity about people. Real interest in what makes someone tick, not as a management technique but as genuine attention. When I see those two things together, I stop worrying about the rest of the CV.
Q.02What leadership challenge keeps you up at night?
Leading through a change in the nature of work itself, not just a change in strategy. We are moving into a period where the tools, and increasingly AI, can do a large part of what used to define someone's job and their sense of worth. Leaders will have to help capable, loyal people redefine what they are valuable for, sometimes faster than those people are ready for.
That is not a technology challenge, it is an identity and trust challenge. The leaders who prepare only by buying the tools will be surprised by how much resistance they meet. The ones who prepare by building enough psychological safety that people can reinvent themselves will pull ahead.
Q.03What should leaders simply stop doing?
Stop trading on positional authority, the idea that the title alone earns you the right to be followed. Respect has to be re-earned in how you show up and in the work, not assumed from the org chart.
I would also retire the habit of performing certainty you don't have. For a long time leaders were rewarded for sounding sure. But in a fast-moving environment that just teaches your team to stop telling you the truth. Saying I don't know yet, here is how we will find out, is no longer a weakness. It is a competitive advantage, because it keeps the real information flowing toward you.
Q.04Which decisions made Profound genuinely stronger?
The ones where I chose to rebuild rather than patch, where I was willing to have the confrontations we would normally avoid. I come from a culture where we tend to step around certain conversations to protect the relationship. That instinct quietly lets problems grow.
The moment I named things directly and gave talented people bigger, clearer mandates instead of vague shared ones, the energy changed and they rose to it almost immediately.
Q.05When did you realise the company asked for a different kind of leader?
The moment was uncomfortably concrete. Profound had grown on founder-led heroics: when something wobbled, I stepped in and made it work through sheer effort and relationships. Then the work outgrew what any one person could hold in their head, and the numbers stopped forgiving us.
I realised the company no longer needed me as a firefighter in the building; it needed me to build a house that didn't catch fire so often. So we chose to rebuild: a smaller, sharper core, clearer mandates, a new operating model. The hardest shift was deciding to make myself dispensable on purpose. It is still work in progress.
Q.06What gives you energy, and what costs you energy?
I get energy from leaders who are demanding and warm at the same time. High standards, no lowering of the bar, but obviously on your side while they hold it. That combination is rare and it is magnetic, because you always know where you stand and you never doubt their intent.
What costs energy is leadership built on control. It makes the whole system slow and fragile, tells capable people they are not trusted, and caps the organisation at the size of one person's attention. Both control and chronic negativity consume the oxygen teams need to do brave things.
Q.07Which quality is most underestimated in leaders?
Self-regulation. The unglamorous discipline of managing your own state before you walk into the room. A leader's mood is contagious far beyond what they realise; your steadiness becomes the team's steadiness. We celebrate vision and charisma, but the leader who holds the room steady in a crisis is the real champion.
Q.08Which insight about people do you wish you had had earlier?
As leaders we deceive ourselves more often than we admit. What we labelled an agreement was often just a wish, and then we are surprised when it is not picked up, even though the fault lies with how unclearly we set it.
The other thing I wish I had known: people remember how you made them feel on a bad day far longer than they remember what you decided.
For Gino Jacobs, most leadership failures are clarity failures. Name things directly, give people real mandates, and make yourself dispensable on purpose, so the company can thrive without you at the centre of every decision.