(featuring insights from 2025 Authentic Leader Award recipient, Jim Keyes)
Leadership isn’t something we master once and rely on forever. It grows, evolves, and matures as we do. And just as importantly, it expands as our understanding deepens.
Jim Keyes often reminds us that education is not an event — it’s a lifelong process. Over decades of leading companies, advising boards, and mentoring the next generation, he developed a simple but powerful framework he calls The C-Suite of Learning — not a corporate leadership team, but a roadmap for becoming wiser human beings.
Jim’s insight is straightforward: What we learn, how we learn, and why we learn determines who we become.
1. What to Learn: Change, Confidence, Clarity
Before learning can even begin, we must embrace the fundamentals that open the mind:
- Change — seeing reality honestly
- Confidence — trusting that growth is possible
- Clarity — stripping away confusion and complexity
These three qualities shape the posture of a learner — someone willing to grow rather than retreat.
2. How to Learn: Critical Thinking, Curiosity, Creativity
These are the engines of discovery:
- Critical thinking teaches us discernment.
- Curiosity teaches us humility.
- Creativity teaches us possibility.
Jim puts it beautifully when he says children are born asking “why,” and adults too often tell them to stop. Authentic leadership requires recovering that childlike fire (a point that Jesus also made!).
3. Why We Learn: Collaboration, Cultural Literacy, Character
This is where education becomes more than achievement — it becomes responsibility. Learning is not for personal advancement alone; it prepares us to live well with others. Further, it teaches us to collaborate more effectively, to better understand cultures different from our own, and ultimately, to lead with integrity.
And it is in this final tier of integrity, where wisdom is born! In fact, Jim summarizes this quite simply:
- IQ = Intelligence
- IQ + EQ = Knowledge
- IQ + EQ + CQ = Wisdom
And wisdom, he reminds us, is what ultimately sustains freedom — both personally and in a democratic society.
So, the ultimate the truth that this leads to is this: The “C-Suite of Learning” isn’t about the title on your business card — it’s about the person you’re becoming.
And it offers every leader, at every stage of life, a way to grow not just in skill, but in character.
Editor’s Note
At the Authentic Leadership Foundation, we develop leaders who think critically, act with character, and serve with purpose. Jim Keyes’ C-Suite of Learning reflects the same foundations woven through Principled Decision-Making, integrated leadership, and the work we do with students and adults alike. Knowledge may open doors — but wisdom keeps them open.
