Andy Jassy has seen tremendous growth and change during his 28 years at Amazon—from his first days before Amazon’s IPO in 1997, through his roles as former CEO Jeff Bezos’s shadow and launching and running Amazon Web Services, and his tenure as CEO beginning in 2021.
At every stage, he’s learned how to navigate the challenges of stepping into new and expanded leadership roles. In a recent conversation with David Novak on the "How Leaders Lead" podcast, Jassy shared three pieces of advice for any executive going through a leadership transition—lessons he learned as he took over as Amazon’s CEO.
1. Be prepared to massively delegate
“You have to massively delegate to be successful. When you have 25 businesses across the company, you can't be in the weekly rhythms of each business. It doesn't scale for the businesses—or for you, or the company. So you have to build completely different mechanisms—what you're going to spend your time on and how you're going to audit, inspect, and add value.”
2. Expect that relationships will reset
“I knew all the people who were going to report to me because I was on the senior leadership team with them for many years. I had good relationships with virtually all of them. I didn't think it was going to be that big a deal moving into the new job. But what happened was every single relationship reset. Some reset really quickly. Some took a little longer to reset and some never reset. And the ones that didn't reset, both sides have to move on from that.”
3. Have humility and respect for what you don’t know, but trust your gut
“At almost every leadership level, when you step up, you want to have some humility and respect for what you don't know and what you have to learn. You can also sometimes have maybe too much respect for it.”
“If you're encountering areas that you haven't been in before with really great leaders who are really deep in those areas, you can delegate too much or not trust yourself enough to really speak up and call out things you want to change. There were some things that seemed a little bit off to me. It was a good reminder that you just have to trust your own instincts and your gut sometimes. And even if you're wrong, people will show you why you're wrong and it's OK.”
“If you're encountering areas that you haven't been in before with really great leaders who are really deep in those areas, you can delegate too much or not trust yourself enough to really speak up and call out things you want to change. There were some things that seemed a little bit off to me. It was a good reminder that you just have to trust your own instincts and your gut sometimes. And even if you're wrong, people will show you why you're wrong and it's OK.”
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