Trust your instinct

July 21, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

I used to think success was all about goal-setting and alignment. If I didn’t achieve my goals, I was off-path, I needed to be re-directed again.

But a conversation with leadership researcher Marcos Salazar changed this for me. Marcos described how alignment is not always what is needed. Sometimes it is the creative things we do where we wander that allow us to come back to something profound when we connect the dots later. Sometimes we have to follow our instinct, rather than just follow what we wrote in a goals statement. There is an important balance between these two.

When did you trust your instinct, fall ‘off-path’ and only later connect the dots?

Filed Under: development, leadership ·

How to start a movement

July 3, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Dance is a powerful metaphor to leadership. Check out this TEDtalk “How to start a movement”  on the potential we have to effect the change we want and start something that attracts attention and gets followed.

[ted id=”814″ lang=”eng”]

Filed Under: leadership · Tagged With:

Breathing

July 2, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Breathing is like leadership. We take in different air and then breathe out our own air. Leadership is about breathing out our own air while taking in other air first. It is also about never stopping but not rushing, staying synchronized with the body as it is to stay synchronized with a system.

Filed Under: leadership ·

Making Meetings Effective

June 21, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

How many hours a week do you spend in meetings? Some people spend 20-30 hours a week, some even up to 40 hours/wk. Meetings take time and time is money. There are meetings that waste time and meetings that inspire people.

So, how can we make meetings not only more efficient but more effective?

A meeting is a process of communication that leads to result that begins before group assembles and commends after group dispenses. I now facilitate leadership and organizational effectiveness sessions for groups. Here are 7 inside tips (contact me if you are interested in more):

1)      You have a responsibility and right to good meetings. If you a run meeting, you  have a responsibility to make the meeting successful.  Make sure you hear ideas that others would not have heard. Try to build off of others, use the “yes and” approach.

2)      Effective meetings: An efficient meeting starts and ends on time and follows an agenda, but we never even know if real “work” got done. An effective meeting does something for organizations and balances being creative and having structure.

3)      Roles: Understand the roles that you like to play and others like to play in a meeting. Roles in groups are really important:  there is often a joker, cynic, dreamer, provocateur, delegator, leader, evocateur. My personal favorite: the evocateur, that is the person who is listening to the group!

4)      Presencing: Be present. This is more than a physical location, a group must be mindful to what is being sensed in a meeting. Structure agendas where groups work 2 by 2’s, engage people, make them move around.

5)      Update meeting agendas: Realize what the key topics are during the meeting. Create a schedule and adjust the agenda by topic rather than just having a round robin of updates.

6)      Save the meeting: You can save a meeting even if you are not in charge. How? Acknowledge an issue, ask questions, summarize points, refocus an agenda, regulate to get dissention and agreement.

7)      Evaluate: Do an evaluation at the end, a check-out or pluses and deltas. What went well? What could have gone better? Add the date and look at this before the next meeting.

Filed Under: leadership · Tagged With:

Being Proud

June 13, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Throughout our childhood, we learned through imitation, we copied from our elders and turned this into our own voice. Most of these traits were borrowed from our culture and family fields of expertise. Now, it is easy to feel ashamed that we are copying someone else. People are made to feel like don’t have agency when the act of learning can be a form of agency.

Proud people are proud of what they’ve learned. In graduate school, I am surrounded by the frontier of knowledge and oftentimes feel incompetent and unknowing. School provides me a safe environment to feel this way and encourages living in uncertainty.

Yet while in school, I am not just paying attention to what I’m learning, but also to my histories back home. I may still feel ashamed of what I’m learning, especially if it is not legitimate within my culture.

If I go back to people I use to talk to before grad school, they may give me positive reinforcement and think it is wonderful I learned what a “cost/benefit” analysis is. If I took my job offer at Deloitte afterwards, this would mean I was a grad school success.

If I say I am uncertain about my future career, they’ll think I’m crazy or have become seduced by the bubble of my school. It is easy to feel ashamed of what I’m learning.

Our challenge in school is to learn new ways of thinking but to keep asking ourselves: how can I translate this into my own language and poetry, with my own ways of analyzing the world?

I can always go back to the same business suits that I’ve worn, I know it’s comfortable, I know how it fits, people expect me to look that way. I’ll be accepted. I risk this when I try and test new ways of thinking and operating, but that is the whole point of coming to school. I’m proud of what I’ve learned.

Filed Under: leadership · Tagged With: ,

What to Remember When Waking

June 7, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte ~

Filed Under: leadership · Tagged With:

My summer work at the Presencing Institute

June 6, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Through all my social impact work over the past 5 years, whether in the education, food, health, or sustainability sector, the common thread I have seen is a need for (1) a more systemic, cross-institutional way of thinking in order to address the fundamental root problems in these systems and (2) local and decentralized leadership capacity that allows leaders to identify potential for innovation, and to act on it. There is a lack of leadership capacity on the ground to work across sectors. I have learned that we cannot address the challenges just by focusing on one sector.  What is required is the capacity to collaborate across sectors, and to create projects and innovations that focus on multi-sector innovation capacity.

Through a course called “Leading in a Profound Sustainable World” at MIT in fall 2010, I was introduced to the Presencing Institute and became immediately inspired and interested in their work on ecosystem change to address the world’s largest social problems.

The Presencing Institute (PI) is a global network of change makers that seek to initiate profound societal innovation and change. PI focuses on advancing social technologies and leadership skills, and making them available to change makers, innovators, and communities around the world to address the root causes of the current economic, ecological, social, and spiritual crisis. Over the past 5 years, PI has created a global network of advanced practitioners, and built cross-sector innovation processes that address social and environmental challenges in, among others, major global companies (Nissan, BASF, BP,Shell) NGOs (WWF, Oxfam, Red Cross) and multi-lateral organizations (GIZ, UN).   PI also aims at creating local platforms that connect change makers and leverage their work.

This year, the Presencing Institute launched a new project to create a shared cross-institutional learning and leadership platform—and a network of places—that allows for learning and capacity-building across institutional boundaries. This innovation and leadership platform called g.school aims at creating a globally networked and regionally grounded innovation ecology that consistently generates the following five types of outcomes:

1. Vibrant Living Prototypes
2. Leadership Capacity Building for local change makers
3. Cross-Institutional Platforms for Innovation
4. Knowledge Tools for Change Makers
5. Core Group of Reflective Practitioners and Thought Leaders

My summer internship working on the g.school project with PI is a perfect synergy of my intellectual interests and my passion to help addressing the social and environmental challenges especially in non-industrialized countries. I am already intrigued by the emergence of a powerful network of such leaders and their institutions. My goal is that my work for PI will also leverage the earlier work I have done especially in India. Looking forward to more updates here in the coming weeks!

Filed Under: leadership · Tagged With: ,

Don’t leave until you leave

June 6, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Sheryl Sandberg’s words from her Barnard commencement speech have been echoed again and again across blogs and media over the past month. Her heartfelt message for young women is to lean in, not lean back, put your foot on the gas pedal, and own your career.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY&w=560&h=349]

Filed Under: leadership, Women · Tagged With: ,

Habits of Highly Effective CEOs

May 2, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Last week, I heard from Adam Bryant, writer of the Corner Office in the NYTimes, in a Harvard course. Adam Bryant has spent the last few years asking CEOs not what they do but how they do what they do and how they learned what they do. The Corner Office column took off quickly with a compilation of leadership and life lessons from these CEOs.

Adam wrote an interesting piece on the “5 Habits of Highly Effective CEOs” in mid April that summarizes his takeaways.

Here are some highlights on his CEO interviews from his visit to our course:

  • A CEO what must understand what they need on executive team: a visionary, an enforcer, classic manager, and a customer representative.
  • The importance of listening:  CEOs limit the distractions of technology by turning off the iPhone and blackberry when they know it is important for a manager to feel they are being listened to.
  • The importance of giving direct feedback: It’s not what you say it’s how you say it. Good CEOs are more of a coach to people who work for them, rather than the boss. One CEO offers ‘office hours’ to his entire staff to offer time for this coaching.
  • Effective CEOs study a system before they shift it. Young graduates often run into companies thinking they are going to instantly change a system but he reiterates patience and listening as crucial here.
  • Of the fortune 1000 companies there are 13 female CEOs. Women have been seen to understand team smarts and group dynamics more than men. The future  of companies will be working on ad-hoc teams, not an organizational chart model and women have a leg up.
Filed Under: development, leadership, Women ·

Cultivating Leadership

April 29, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

My passion for feminine leadership development stems from a desire to connect with others and help them connect with themselves. Last week, I met Jennifer Berger from Cultivating Leadership based in New Zealand. We discussed two key questions that I am thinking about:

  • How do I use my leadership work at Harvard and develop it into something into my career?
  • How do I create spaces for others to learn this that will conducive to their learning and stage in development?

Most of our development is not a beautiful path, it is a tangled web of vines as we try to figure out what belongs and what does not. Many people commonly take personality profile indicators such as the Myers Briggs test to better understand themselves. I had three major takeaways from our conversation:

1)     “In order to understand anything well you need at least three good theories” -Bill Perry

The more we can gain new theories of thinking, the less we hold to one but combine a set of theories to push our own thinking. More theories help us be psychologically spacious.

2)     “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers he poses the right questions” -Claude Levi Strauss

What helps me ask different or the “right” questions? Often having the space and time to reflect, whether a meditative process, asking people you know well or connect to, and finding community to be curious with. Again, this is about how to live with the questions and not just about solving problems.

3) “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust

What helps me get out of one perspective and take multiple perspectives?  This could be travel, getting into uncomfortable situations, creating dissent, stepping into shoes of other person, reading, writing, conflict, or failure. These interventions help us take notice of what is around us.

The big news of the 21st century is that the world as a whole has got to be managed, not just its parts. What has helped me look at systems? It is about constant learning and development.  We can all come up with new ways of working if we become the author of our own story, make time for reflection, and observe and experiment to  create new structures and practices.

Filed Under: development, leadership ·
« Previous Page