Former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: Run towards conflict to be a resilient leader

That’s the advice of Ginni Rometty, the former IBM CEO who spoke at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen conference in San Diego on Wednesday. When it comes to an uncomfortable or challenging situation, “most people don’t run towards it,” she said.

But as she looked back on her career—and her early life, which was riddled with setbacks and deep inequality—she saw that doing the opposite was an invaluable asset. She recalled one coworker who, whenever she encountered an issue, was always the first to volunteer to dive in.

“I thought, why does she volunteer for these problems?” Rometty told Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram. “Well, it’s because she always came out with a stronger relationship on the other side. It started making me say, you know what? I think this is a good thing.”

Failing to address a problem in business head-on, she said, zaps one’s positive energy—a vanishing resource vital to retain. “As a leader, you really need to conserve your energy so you have a lot of positives,” she said. “So I started looking for conflicts. I found running toward conflict to be a really important way to build resilience.”

Growth and comfort don’t coexist, she added, preaching what has been her calling card for over a decade. Appearing at a Fortune conference in 2014, also opposite Lev-Ram, she said the sentiment is “true for people, for companies, for nations.”

At the time, Rometty, then Fortune’s cover star as the new face of IBM, was walking through her strategy for why she divested $6 billion of IBM’s assets in pursuit of a “higher-value” strategy aimed at mobile devices, data analytics, and cloud computing.

“Something I ask myself every day is, ‘Did I make decisions or do things that only I can do?’” Rometty said in 2014. “If I’m doing things that someone else can do, then I’m wasting my time.”

Now, over three years removed from her CEO seat at IBM, she reflects fondly on her choices. “I placed big bets,” she said Wednesday. “Certainly with A.I., we were making hardware that didn’t exist at the time. I see so many of the issues now. We were exactly right, one decade early, and there hadn’t yet been trust built in that technology.”

This is where she finally delved into the comfort side of the equation: In order to grow, get comfortable with the thought that you won’t see the benefit of some of your boldest decisions for many years to come.

“The things that we did right, like [acquiring Red Hat for $39 billion in 2019], that was the foundation for IBM’s return to growth,” she said. “They just may take time, but probably the biggest lesson…is this idea of when you’re under so much pressure to become something, know what to change but what should not change. What part of you has to endure even if it’s modernized?”

Rometty said she would get in trouble when she got away from that, “because the pressure is so intense on you to succeed or become something else.” One of her big learnings, then, was to deeply know what she and IBM were in service of, and to have it really firm in her head. “You want to change everything else, but not what you know what has to endure.”