Former PayPal CEO and President Dan Schulman has an impressive track record of employing innovative techniques to lead companies through difficult transitions to new heights of success and profitability. With Priceline, Virgin Mobile, and PayPal (PYPL), Schulman deftly navigated these iconic businesses through turbulent mergers, acquisitions and splits to emerge as sector powerhouses and highly profitable enterprises.

Schulman reveals to Yahoo Finance the key things a leader needs to do in order to achieve their goals. He believes that having a moral compass that drives values helps to create the consistency effective leadership requires. Schulman states that some of the core objectives of a leader are: to be able to clearly define reality, inspire hope, and have a game plan to get from reality to that inspired vision.

According to Schulman, by following these principles, he has taken PayPal to almost $30 billion in annual revenue, over 430 million active accounts and $1.5 trillion exchanged through the platform.

Providing a foundation to his leadership principles, Schulman says that as a leader “you need to feel comfortable with yourself, whether times are going great or not great, because you need to be a very consistent leader.”

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Video Transcript

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DAN SCHULMAN: I think in this world, you know, you need to have a moral compass that drives your values. You need to feel comfortable with yourself, whether times are going great or not great, because you need to be a very consistent leader.

And as a leader, you always need to be able to clearly define reality, which sometimes is difficult for people to hear. But at the same time, you need to inspire hope. You need to have a vision, like, OK, here's where we are. Here's where we wanna get to. And here's our game plan to try and get there.

And I think great leaders do those three things. They define reality well so people don't think you're delusional. They inspire hope that, OK, this is the direction we want to go to. And they create a game plan from reality to that inspirational vision.