Barcelona just finished the tallest tower of the Sagrada Familia and marked a hundred years since Gaudí died. His basilica still has something to say about how to lead.
Barcelona has just lived through something rare. The central tower of the Sagrada Familia, the tallest of them all, was finally blessed and inaugurated, a hundred years to the day after Antoni Gaudí died. The skyline of the city changed in a way that will not happen again in our lifetime. Walking through the streets these days, it is hard not to be stopped in your tracks by the basilica, Gaudí's great unfinished masterpiece, now a little less unfinished than it was. The building is a testament to his genius, but looking closer, it is also a reflection of how he led. The more I read about his approach, the more it seems just as relevant today as it was in his own time.
Gaudí put his philosophy simply: "It is necessary to alternate between reflection and action, which complete and moderate each other." That balance, between thinking and doing, is at the heart of leading well. So what can we take from him?
Show passion. Gaudí's work is what happens when someone is driven by love for what they do. As he put it, "to do things well, first you need love, then technique." When a project genuinely matters to you, you carry the motivation and the commitment that exceptional results need. There is a lesson there in not being afraid to pursue your own work with that same enthusiasm.
Delegate. Gaudí surrounded himself with skilled people and trusted them with real autonomy. He understood that getting the best from a project means developing the people around you and aligning them with your vision, then stepping back and letting them work. That trust is part of how something as ambitious as the Sagrada Familia got built at all.
Be humble. Despite his fame, Gaudí never lost his footing. Coming from a working-class family of coppersmiths, he knew a craftsman's worth lies in the work, not the background it came from. There is something worth holding onto there, staying grounded and open to others even as the scale of what you are building grows.
Stay disciplined. Gaudí was known for an intensity of focus that bordered on the extreme. He lived in his workshop for long stretches, cutting away anything that pulled attention from the work. Few of us need to go that far, but the principle holds: cut the distractions, and give the work your full attention.
Accept failure. Gaudí experimented constantly, and not everything held up. He treated failure as part of the process, a chance to learn and refine rather than a reason to stop. That same willingness to take a calculated risk and adjust afterward is worth carrying into any ambitious work.
Looking back at all of this, what stays with me is that leading well is not only about reaching the result. It is about the way you walk the path to get there. Gaudí never saw his church finished, not even close, and he seemed to know he never would. A hundred years on, the tallest tower now stands, the one he placed deliberately just below the height of the hill behind it, so that nothing he built would rise above what nature had already made. There is something in that worth sitting with: building something larger than the time you have to finish it, and trusting it to the people who come after.