Jim Yong Kim
Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, is the 12th president of the World Bank Group. Soon after he assumed his position in July 2012, the organization established two goals to guide its work: to end extreme poverty by 2030; and to boost shared prosperity, focusing on the bottom 40% of the population in developing countries. In September 2016, the World Bank Group Board unanimously reappointed Kim to a second five-year term as president.
Kim’s career has revolved around health, education, and improving the lives of the poor. Before joining the World Bank Group, Kim, a physician and anthropologist, served as the president of Dartmouth College and held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. From 2003 to 2005, as director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, he led the “3 by 5” initiative, the first-ever global goal for AIDS treatment, which helped to greatly expand access to antiretroviral medication in developing countries. In 1987, Kim cofounded Partners in Health, a nonprofit medical organization that now works in poor communities on four continents.
Kim has received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, was recognized as one of America’s “25 Best Leaders” by U.S. News & World Report, and was named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Kim was named the world’s 50th most powerful person by Forbes magazine’s List of The World’s Most Powerful People in 2013.
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At the time of this writing,1 Jim Yong Kim is serving as the 12th president of the World Bank Group. Trained as a physician and anthropologist, he was born in 1959, in The Republic of Korea at a time when it was one of the poorest countries in the world. To Kim, the great irony of this is that when he was born, the World Bank refused to give loans to Korea because it thought Korea would never be able to pay back even the lowest interest loans. It wasn’t until Kim was about four years old that Korea got its first loan from the World Bank Group.
Most of Kim’s life was spent in some of the poorest countries and communities in the world: Haiti, Peru, Mexico, and many countries in Africa. As cofounder of Partners in Health, a nonprofit medical organization that now works in poor communities on four continents, and as director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, Kim’s focus was on providing health and education for the poorest countries – and doing so in a way that made a point. The point being that it was the responsibility of physicians, anthropologists, and academics, and in a broader sense, all human beings, to think about the lives of the poorest people and ask, “What should we do? What has to be done next to make a real difference?” One day Kim answered his own question – what has to be done next? – and decided that he needed to try to lead organizations and others to have greater impact. This is when Kim began to focus on to serve is to lead, a slight twist on Frances Hesselbein’s famous servant leadership quote.
Kim’s leadership path accelerated at Dartmouth College, where he was president for three years. It was at Dartmouth that Kim began working with executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, who he says, completely changed his life, not only in the way he thought about leadership, but also in how he could apply the lessons he learned in coaching to large organizations.
For instance, at the World Bank, Kim was confronted with a suspicion of leadership training, especially among the PhD economists. “Academics tend to have a deep suspicion about leadership,” says Kim. He had come across this attitude already at Dartmouth. “When I was at Dartmouth, talking about the importance of leadership for our students, one of the professors told me, ‘You know we hate leadership.’ ‘What do you mean you hate leadership?’ I asked. ‘Leadership suggests followership,’ she said.”
They had a point in that scholars are supposed to teach young people not to blindly follow others but to think for themselves, which can be good and bad. Good in the sense that students learn to question authority and the status quo, which supports societal growth and positive change. But in the realm of leadership, it can be bad in that people assume that they shouldn’t ask for help, that they need to figure it out for themselves, even when they are stagnating in their own careers and damaging their people, teams, and organizations with poor leadership.
Kim believes that because of his example of working with Marshall and of bringing coaches into the Bank to work with people, the tide has turned. People who were having difficulty as leaders now ask for and get a coach and many of them have gotten better. Kim has witnessed remarkable changes and in one case, a person went from having the worst feedback ratings from their people to having the best. It takes time to change cultures and the World Bank culture is changing, thanks to leadership coaching.
One of the greatest benefits of coaching, Kim says, is being brought back to a place of humility, learning, and understanding that no matter how good he thinks he is, no matter how much he thinks he’s improved, there’s always room to get better. In fact, he reminds himself and others quite often, “No matter how holy you think your mission might be, it does not make you immune from bad leadership.”
It’s because of this awareness – that no matter how sanctified the mission and no matter how well-trained a leader is, few can sustain their best performance on their own – that Kim continues to work on his leadership skills with an executive coach and he supports and encourages others to do the same.
There is always room to improve, says Kim, whose role model for great leadership is Alan Mulally, former president and CEO of The Ford Motor Company. Alan, who transformed Ford during his tenure, did so, explains Kim, with commitment, a compelling vision and comprehensive strategy, and excellence in terms of leading an organization, not anger or toughness or ruthlessness. Alan led Ford through caring about everyone in the organization, by walking the halls, smiling and engaging everyone who worked there from executives to janitors. It was a revolution at Ford, says Kim. He’s not the only one who lists Alan Mulally as one of the greatest leaders he’s ever witnessed in action. Among the many accolades to Alan’s leadership include Fortune, which in 2013 recognized Alan as #3 on its World’s Greatest Leaders list, and Time, which recognized him as one of the World’s Most Influential People.
What Kim recognized and is most in awe of was the revolution that happened at Ford, the change for the better, that was instigated and guided by Alan with “a mixture of warmth and compassion linked to an absolute set of moral and ethical standards that everyone knew they could not violate.” When Kim was ready to take the World Bank Group through a huge change exercise, he asked Alan to join them for a few days. The result of the exercise, coupled with Alan’s visit, was transformational and continues to spread in a positive way. And, as Marshall has done, so Alan did, charging Kim and the Bank no fee other than to “get better, have fun, and do good.”
As Alan Mulally and Marshall Goldsmith volunteer and serve to support The World Bank’s powerful mission, “to eradicate extreme poverty on earth by 2030,” as Dr. Jim Kim devotes his life to what needs to be done next to make a difference, so you, too, can give of your time and talents if you aren’t already.
“Any kind of volunteer work is good,” says Marshall Goldsmith, who goes on to say, “Anybody who does any volunteer work should be praised. It’s great to help in a way that you’re leveraging your unique skills. Put your talents to good use. It feels good! Whatever I have done to help others has come back tenfold. And not just once, but a hundred times.” Especially in nonprofit organizations, the challenge for people, according to Kim, is that “sometimes we partake in toxic behaviors excusing them because we are on a ‘holy mission’ that is more important than how we behave towards each other.” And, because most nonprofits can’t afford leadership coaching, pro bono coaching relationships such as that which Marshall and Jim have forged are the only way leaders of these important organizations are going to get the coaching necessary to transform their leadership, make massive contributions, and create positive global change.
This is why Kim encourages all of us to go out and help. He wants us to hone our skills and offer our unique talents to nonprofit organizations whose missions we can get behind. For-profits can afford to pay for the services you can provide, but nonprofits often cannot. Specifically, as it relates to coaches, the missions of these nonprofits, the Girl Scouts, the Nature Conservancy, Bookshare, the animal shelter, are just as important as those of for-profits, and the conditions the leaders of these organizations face are often far more difficult and they need help.
So, let this be your call to action – develop yourself, practice your skills, and get out there and help. Do what you do best as a volunteer in an organization whose mission resonates with you. If we all work together and help each other, we will make the world a better place!