The speech that made Obama president

I have started a new course on Leadership and Communication, with the purpose of shape my public speaking skills. But the uniqueness of this course is its focus on the Authenticity of the message, and the Language (verbal and non-verbal). This takes Honesty, Trust, Concentration, Respect, Empathy and Open Mind. And, at least for me, this is a new an interesting approach of communication, that goes further and deeper than improving your grades while presenting at class, or earning a rise at work.

The first part of the course, encourages us to understand and critically evaluate speeches made by well-known leaders. Then, after analysing the styles, we students should apply those theories to ourselves. Finally there is a group reflection on each one performance. The idea is to find the style that fits most with your individual personality, by performing the different styles at least once.

Here I leave with this purpose the speech made by Obama, which is believed to be the one that made the difference for him becoming president.

HR in the future organizations

I have just been listening to this podcast from Jacob Morgan interviewing Pat Wadors, Senior Vice President of Global Talent Organization at LinkedIn.

While I totally recommend this one (tho it is a little bit long, is tremendously interesting), I want to highlight a couple of thoughts and ideas.

1. HR is changing from hiring/firing people + negotiating benefits to a wider and more flexible concept. HR now is about treating employees BEAUTIFULLY. Not just «good» or «fair»: beautifully. This is  influencing leaders and help people to achieve their aspiration. It is also about guaranteeing the alignment of the company’s values and making things happen in the daily culture.
2. The vision of HR is to inspire people to change the world: your team, the employees working for the company (and candidates too), the customers, etc.
3. The mission of HR is to enable high performance healthy company scale. The health status is reached by creating a fun atmosphere of inclusion, where the employee feels recognized and wants to be engaged.
4. We are in a talented world. Every company wants the top people working for them, so they have to first attract them and then retain them. The only way to do it is to come honest to the candidates/employees: to offer the right things for their career and to be able to keep those promises in the future. However HR can not always control every single detail, so the company needs to be prepared and have a plan for unexpected situations where the employee might eventually leave.
5. The key tools to retain people are empowerment and accountability.
6. Everyone deserves a great leader, and HR has the perspective and tools to get closer to that ideal situation.

The unsurprising truth about female leaders

By Caroline Fairchild, at LinkedIn.

On Monday, I moderated a panel of female business leaders at the 10th Annual Duke MBA Women’s Leadership Conference. I started the discussion by posing a question to the audience of roughly 100 female MBA students and professors.

“Fortune recently released its list of The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and less than a third were women. Does that surprise anyone?”

Not a single woman rose her hand.

While it may not be surprising that women represent the minority of great leaders in business or beyond, I was shocked that this future cohort of business execs appeared unfazed by the stat. A majority of the women in the audience would be rejoining the workforce in a matter of months. Yet the lack of female role models ahead of them appears to be nothing but old news.

Rather than dwell on the reality of the present, I turned to my panel — leaders at CitiGroup, Procter & Gamble, SAP and Aetna — to weigh in on the future. How can women make that very unsurprising stat, surprising in the future? Here is what they said.

Brag about yourself because no one else will.

Women are much less likely than men to share their accomplishments at work with their managers, said Marissa Moss, a director in CitiGroup’s High Yield Research Group. While men are willing to brag about their big wins, women think that if they just do a good job, their work will eventually be noticed. Moss said that’s not the case, particularly in male-dominated fields like finance, and encouraged the MBA students to speak up at work when they succeed.

Get used to taking risks because it never gets any easier.

While women may be more risk-averse than men, risk-taking doesn’t suddenly become easier as you go through your career, said Jill Higman, an executive director at Aetna. In fact, as women progress in their career, it’s more likely that risk-taking becomes more challenging as they get married and begin families. Yet the reality is taking risks is necessary to having a successful career. Higman, who admitted that she is not a natural risk-taker, shared that she taught herself to become more tolerant. The key is taking opportunities and pushing for the right job when it makes sense for you in your career, she said.

Marry a man who wants to stay home.

Sharon Ruddock, global vice president and chief learning officer at SAP, didn’t succeed in finding a partner who was willing to stay home, but she still encouraged the audience to seek out a stay-at-home dad. The support at home can make taking big opportunities in your career all that much easier, she said. Ruddock also encouraged the audience to be overconfident in their abilities as she views a lack of confidence as the main reason why we see fewer female leaders in business.

Pull out bias from the hiring process.

For Charlene Patten, the global brand franchise leader of Gillette Venus and female shave care at Procter & Gamble, the numbers won’t change until the unconscious bias of the hiring process does. We all have read the studies that say a guy named Howard is more likely to get the job than a woman named Heidi with the identical resume. At Procter & Gamble, the company takes a candidate’s name and gender off of his or her resume to ensure bias doesn’t creep in.

How the perception of ourselves limitates us

This summer, while I atended a Leadership course, we had a hot discussion on the course structure, and the willing of the professor to be us, the students, taking the lead and walk our own learning path. We the students were asking a more active role from his side, and he blamed us of not being concious of our potential and being coward to take a step forward. You don’t want to know how outstanding you are. You are extraordinary! he said. The following day he answered our demands with an overwhelming lecture on Based on experience learning… but I was not fully convinced of his theory. Some weeks after it all happened, reflection started to throw some light on the concept, but it has been six months from then when I think I am starting to fully understand what he meant.

You have to look at the innovation and management picture. Among the ingenieers, there are two posible paths to follow. The first one goes deep into one knowledge field: with the technical background you can become a high-value expert. That would be the conventional path to take. The other one is more abstact. It goes in the management and leadership direction, exploiting the inter-disciplinary aptitudes and the ability to critically analyse and take decisions that balance economy, technology and reality. This is the modern profile sometimes demanded in business: it uses technology as a tool that you already know thanks to your studies and bunch of practical experience, and highlights the intelectual and visionary approaches.

There is no good or bad path, but the professor assumed that if we were there because of the leadership topic, we somehow had interest on the second one. They are not absolute either, you can walk some steps into becoming expert on something, then abstract it gaining ‘big picture’ knowledge and strategy, and so on.

What I have experienced this last months is that the biggest obstacle in the leadership path is yourself. Finding a dead end and stop trying insted of going around. Thinking that you are not prepared for a bigger challenge. Not willing to abandon your comfort zone. Not realising that small failures are part of the deal, and what it is expected from you is a final success and not a perfect middle performance.

Therefore I have discovered that if I want to become leader at some point, I have to  be ambitious with my next career steps. I have to believe in my outstanding background and my capacity to evercome to unexpected events and win challenges. And I have to break that ceiling glass that keeps me well protected inside the comfort zone and give a chance to what makes me happy and keeps me motivated at work.

How leaders inspire action

Just on the same week I have run twice into different Simon Sinek TED talks. This second time the source is different: IEM Caring, a new organization just created with the goal of enhance the contribution of Industrial Engineering current and former students to the society.

I am specially excited about how Simon Sinek describes the ability to inspire others as a leadership skill, just as I always  say.

Leaders as heros

One more inspiring lesson on leadership.

Leadership

When you look at other sectors of society, you see leaders who are geniuses at this. You can spot the collaborative leader because he’s rejected the heroic, solitary model of leadership. He doesn’t try to dominate his organization as its all-seeing visionary, leading idea generator and controlling intelligence.

Instead, he sees himself as a stage setter, as a person who makes it possible for the creativity in his organization to play itself out. The collaborative leader lessens the power distance between himself and everybody else. He believes that problems are too complex for one brain, but if he can create the right context and nudge a group process along, the team will come up with solutions.

THIS is the leading style I like.

Boss versus leader

The boss drives his men; the leader coaches them.

The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will.

The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm.

The boss says ‘I’; the leader, ‘we.’

The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.

The boss says ‘Go’; the leader says ‘Let’s go!’

The customer is always right.

Harry Selfridge.

‘We’ superpower

Good leaders always talk with ‘we’. That way they keep the audience closer, they enhance the group feeling and they highlight their belonging to it as one more player. I was glad to say that I learnt ‘we’ superpower as something unique in Summer Academy, when I got back home and checked that in the first book I found about leadership ‘we’ was just on the second page.

 

However, it is not that easy to learn how to speak like that naturally. We tend to use too much ‘I’ there where we consider our impact and presence was essential, and ‘you’ when we are about to give orders or directions. I probably read that page before going to Lisboa, but I never learnt to do it until I spent two weeks of rehearsal.

Leadership in a nutsell

We follow by heart, we follow after a long process of criticism or just because we admire the leader. But in its essence we follow the lead in an exercise of our own freedom. 

 

Leadership means to me inspiration, vision, passion.