‘Will you be my best friend?’ How Lumen’s Kate Johnson turned a breakfast into a CEO partnership

In today’s CEO Daily: EY CEO Janet Truncale and Lumen CEO Kate Johnson on the importance of friendship

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Good morning. Kate Johnson’s friendship with EY global chair and CEO Janet Truncale began when the Lumen Technologies CEO spotted Truncale eating breakfast alone at a Business Roundtable event a few years ago. “I sat down next to her and I said, ‘Will you be my best friend?’” Johnson told me yesterday on stage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. “I was looking for connection so I could have a better day.”

Truncale, then new to the top job at EY, immediately agreed and recalled Johnson showing her where to grab her name tag to mark her spot on the table as “everybody rushes in to put their name tag somewhere early.” The camaraderie morphed into friendship, and changed how Truncale approaches such gatherings. “In the last two years, I’ve frankly tried to pay that forward, so when there are new CEOs, I try to reach out and say, ‘hey, I’ve just been through this.’”

What I love about that story is what it says about personal connection in leadership, especially for women, whose share of C-suite and board roles has stalled.

Both Truncale and Johnson describe themselves as introverts—in my experience, most CEOs are—and they kept their friendship largely to themselves to the point where colleagues initially thought they........

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