Most leaders can build a strategic plan. They know how to define objectives, sequence priorities, allocate resources, and measure success because we do it every day for our organizations. But Musa Tariq, Cofounder of Science x Story and former C-suite executive at Ford Motor Company and GoFundMe, believes the most important strategy many leaders never create is the one for themselves.
Speaking to a recent LEAP Essentials class, Musa challenged participants to approach leadership with the same intentionality they bring to the brands they represent. Reinforcing Your Foundation, the first of Virtuosi League's 6 Pillars of Leadership, begins with an uncomfortable realization and, often, even more uncomfortable work: before leading others well, we have to understand ourselves.
"Everyone put together a project plan and a strategy," Musa said. "You've all done that for businesses, for someone else because they've asked you to. How many of you have done that for yourself?"
Leadership development often begins by looking outward: new capabilities, stronger influence, broader responsibilities. Musa argues that lasting leadership begins by looking inward instead of looking ahead to what role comes next.
He illustrated the idea through the way that great companies rediscover themselves. When iconic brands lose their way, new leaders rarely begin by inventing something entirely new. They go back to the company's founding story and uncover the beliefs that shaped its success in the first place. The same exercise, he says, applies to individuals.
"Sometimes when a brand is lost, going back and understanding what its DNA is is a really important thing…we as individuals all have our own starting stories, but it's something that we tend not to think about."
Those early experiences often explain far more about our leadership approach than our résumé ever will, revealing our underlying value systems, instincts, and motivations that continue to shape our decisions under the surface.
That perspective also changes how we think about careers. Instead of defining ourselves by our latest promotion or employer, Musa encourages leaders to build an identity that extends well beyond work. This advice echoes of LEAP Flagship professor Antonio Lucio, who once reflected that "there is no such thing as work-life balance, there is only life." Leadership cannot be compartmentalized because values do not switch on at the office and off at home.
Perhaps the most practical challenge Musa offered was around prioritization. Many leaders convince themselves they can excel equally in every dimension of life at the same time. Career, family, friendships, health, or personal growth are all dimensions of life, but we don’t allocate the same effort or resources to all of them equally. In practice, trying to maximize everything often produces mediocrity everywhere.
His alternative is both liberating and uncomfortable: choose.
Priorities will shift across seasons of life, and acknowledging those shifts doesn’t mean you’ve failed, it means you’ve achieved clarity for this season. The difficult work is accepting that saying yes to one priority inevitably means saying no, or at least "not now," to something else. That clarity becomes a filter for career decisions as well.
"When anyone's at this stage where they're thinking about what's next, the best advice I give them is thinking about the life you want to live. And then what work fits into that life?"
Reinforcing your foundation is about becoming more intentional about leading in alignment with your values, goals, and priorities, a task that is not limited to the workplace. That means identifying those values, goals, and priorities to lead ourselves so we can more effectively lead others. The stronger that foundation becomes, the steadier every leadership decision built upon it will be across all of the components of our lives.
Musa Tariq is a globally recognized brand and marketing leader who has shaped some of the world's most iconic companies, including Ford, Airbnb, and GoFundMe. He co-founded his own agency, Science x Story, a brand-driven growth consultancy that creates value at the intersection of business, marketing and organizational strategy.