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40 POPULATION HEALTH 40 CEO/STRATEGY 4 things only the best leaders do, based on interviews with 2,500+ executives By Molly Gamble X -factor leaders — as they are called — bust complexity, halt "us-them" thinking, pull their weight with teams in two distinct ways and possess a track record of grooming multiple effective leaders. is is the conclusion drawn by three leader- ship experts: David Reimer, CEO and managing partner of leadership consultancy Merryck & Co. Americas; Adam Bryant, managing director of Merryck & Co. and a former New York Times journalist who created the "Corner Office" inter- view series; and Harry Feuerstein, president of Merryck & Co. Americas and the firm's head of global services. In an article in strategy+business, Mr. Re- imer, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Feuerstein say their findings about exceptional leaders are based on data collected from 2008 to 2018 as they followed the careers of many C-suite leaders. ey conducted in-depth interviews with more than 2,500 executives, participated in hundreds of C-suite successions and worked alongside more than 1,000 individual senior executives. Seventy percent of the organizations in the analysis had annual revenues of $5 billion or more, and the vast majority were publicly traded. e remaining 30 percent ranged in size from $100 million to $5 billion in annual revenues and were evenly split between pri- vate and public. Here are four things the best leaders do: 1. Exceptional leaders simplify com- plexity and build operational nar- ratives around it, which their teams easily understand and embrace. Most executives are accustomed to processing vast amounts of information on the fly, but stand- out leaders go one step further. ey own complexity by creating operational narratives that illustrate two things: (1) how the com- pany will carry out a strategy and (2) how the company will track progress at a glance. e best leaders give the entire organization a common reference point to track progress toward a long-term goal. 2. They drive ambition for the whole enterprise. Any company with more than one team, department or function is at risk of "us-them" thinking, but the best executives remember the only "us" that matters is the company. ese leaders maintain an enter- prisewide mentality by overcoming two fun- damental human tendencies: tribalism and the sense of safety that comes from navigat- ing areas of expertise. Enterprise-level think- ing occurs only when executives have enough self-awareness to understand these impulses and self-discipline to overcome them. As one former CEO told the authors: "I tell people that once you get a job you should act like you run the place. Not in terms of ego, but in