Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y.
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4).
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5).

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Dr. Éliane Ubalijoro is an adjunct professor of practice for public and private sector partnerships at McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development, where her research interests focus on innovation in global health and sustainable development.

She is the project manager and an investigator on a Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health phase 2 project led by Professor Timothy Geary, the director of McGill’s Institute of Parasitology. She is a member of FemStep, a research network highlighting rural girls’ and women’s perspectives for engendering poverty reduction strategies in Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, DR Congo, and Ethiopia using arts-based methodologies. In this context, she has been developing Ashes to Light, a multimedia project to document intergenerational dialogue on resilience as a platform for wisdom sharing and youth leadership training in peacebuilding. Dr. Ubalijoro is an expert consultant for the non-profit group The Innovation Partnership (TIP) as well as the founder and executive director of C.L.E.A.R. International Development Inc., a consulting group harnessing global networks for sustainable systems development. Previously, she was an assistant professor in McGill’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She is a member of the Presidential Advisory Council for Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Prior to going back to academia, she was a scientific research and development director in a Montreal-based biotechnology company for five years in charge of molecular diagnostic and bioinformatics discovery programs. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Ecosystems Restoration Associates, a Canadian-based pioneer in global forest restoration and conservation-based carbon offset programs. She is a contributor to the book The Transforming Leader: New Approaches to Leadership for the 21st Century by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Transcript
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Key Takeaways: 

– Leadership must evolve with technology  

– Compassion stabilizes organizations during disruption  

– Ethical responsibility builds trust  

– Adaptability outperforms rigid control  

– Emerging economies offer leadership lessons 

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Unknown Speaker 0:08
I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, Today, my guest is alien upalic JoRo. She’s an ILA board member, Executive Director of clear International Development, Incorporated Professor in Practice, Institute for the Study of International Development at Yale University, and a member of Rwanda’s National Science and Technology Council. Welcome Elian, thank you so much. Thank you, Maureen. It’s a pleasure being here with you. So where you want to start what is most interesting to you at this moment, at this moment, just here at the conference, the International Leadership Association’s global conference in Brazil, conference in Brussels today, I chaired a session on the future leadership and so where we are today is we are living in a context where gene editing exists. So we’re able to go into our DNA, our human DNA, and we’re able to make changes. We’re able, through artificial intelligence, to have a lot of the work that was normally done by workforces human workforces are going to become automated. So there’s going to be a lot of changes in the workforce of the world, and in the knowledge worker workforce, absolutely, or with just people who got automated, so less skilled? Yes, now it’s going to be in the more skilled and people with power. Yes, I think that’s important differentiation. As people get displaced and they’re powerful, their voices will be heard differently. So what’s very interesting about this space we’re in is there’s going to be more and more replacement of human work by algorithms. And so this is work that can be done by legal experts at lower levels. Some of the surgeries are going to be automated, antibiotics, diagnosis, surgery. In terms of banking, Blockchain revolutionize how we move money around the world, how we create transparent ledgers that allow us to have our transactions be transparent and simultaneously be held in different ledgers on the internet. So there’s a lot of things that are going to be happening that are going to change how we do business in the world, what type of work people do, and as these areas of technology, which is really the Fourth Industrial Revolution, take more and more space. It’s also how is that going to change the dynamics between emerging countries of the world, powerful countries, and so how do we prepare the workforce of the planet for these changes? So in 2050 between now and 2050, 50% of the births in the world are going to happen in Africa. Right now, Africa has about a billion people, and by 2050 that’s going to reach around 2.6 billion. So how do we prepare for that workforce? How do we ensure that people will have work or quality of life where they are, that we’re going to be limiting forced migrations related to poverty. And how do we root accessibility fruit additionality. Roots accessibility. How do we ensure that people have access to food, to water, to energy, to housing? And how do we do that in sustainable ways? How do we harness the renewable technologies that we have today, fuel cells, solar, all sorts of new technologies that will allow us to have life cycles of the chemicals that we use or how we use energy. How do we allow Cradle to Cradle manufacturing, so ensuring that instead of going to get more natural resources out of the earth, we use the ones we have more effectively and reuse them and exposes them. Yeah. And so this idea of the circular economy solely there is no waste. So what we do, we use, and then we repurpose, and we bring back into the economy. And how do we ensure that what we use from our biodiversity, from the natural world, that we really have cycles where there is a minimum of waste or no waste at all, and we go from food production to production of organic fertilizers, and we allow cycles that are producing more food for the planet, but also higher quality food less use of chemicals and pesticides. So how do we optimize the system? If we look at the second exporter of food in the world is Holland, and Holland is one of the smallest countries of the world. It has about 1.2 1000 people per square kilometer. So it’s a very densely populated country, and yet they’re still growing that much of food, yet 400 sport and.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
They’re doing sustainably. They’re using solar powered greenhouses, and they’re also looking at energy from all sorts of other renewable sources of energy. So waste, energy production, getting energy from heat sources below ground. So there’s a lot of

Unknown Speaker 5:19
geothermal energy, and so how do we in the 21st Century have economies that will have a neutral carbon footprint or a positive carbon footprint? So the way we innovate, the way we consciously build and grow businesses in the 21st Century is really critical to how humanity is going to survive in the century, and it’s going to be really important in terms of the power dynamics, access to water around the world, access to land around the world, and how we consciously lead for peace. I love that last component, because we talk about just basic survival. Yes, the Maslow, yet, stump and yet, here at the ILA conference, there’s a big focus on leading for peace, yes, and that’s a conversation that I don’t hear much in my business community environment. We all talk about politics, but there hasn’t yet in the circles I’ve traveled. And so I’m sure there are other people talking more about this, but not less about what practices do we take on each of us, yes, such that we’re creating a world in which our children aren’t shipped off to war, yes. And so it’s really about, how do we consciously work, live in families, in organizations, in communities where we are having a purpose driven mission, where we have respect for life, for the planet, for humanity, for others, And we are doing that with the most compassion possible. One of the issues in that we’ve seen around the world in the last 12 months, there’s been amazing, really powerful climate incidents. There’s been flooding all over the world. We’ve had hurricanes. It’s been a very traumatic year in terms of climate incidents, and what we’re realizing is there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves unless we’re protecting each other globally. So that gets to the conversation about interconnectedness. Yes, that it’s so easy for each of us to be so focused on our own personal lives. I go to work that’s stressful. I take care of my if I have children and a spouse, I’m doing all of the things associated with providing for their health and safety and education and entertainment that they’re going to play sports and just providing a healthy environment. And for most people, there’s not much left. So the conversations, again, are often not other than to point out that there was a earthquake in Mexico, and I hope they’re okay, and sometimes we send money. There isn’t a lot of sense of the interconnectedness that I am making decisions with the quote other in mind when other is on the other side of the plan. And what’s really interesting about that is, every day, we make economic choices. We choose what we’re going to buy, which companies we’re going to buy from and that has consequences locally and globally. And so if we all as consumers can use to be conscious buyers, conscious consumers, we can promote economies where we’re really helping companies that are having the greatest benefit locally and globally, be the leaders economically that are going to help us globally, advance the interconnectedness in the most positive way. And in some cases, that’s as simple as going to Fair Trade stores or buying a fair trade product in a big box store. So it can be simple as that some countries and now there are different apps that are available that actually allow you to look at the footprint of the companies you buy from, to look at how sustainable they are, to look at how much social good they’re involved in. So it’s interesting, the amount of information now available in terms of for consumers in terms of the decisions we make. And we may think this doesn’t matter, but it matters greatly when we think about a couple of years ago, when the Ebola crisis happened in and okay, and there was this idea, oh, this is in Africa. And then there were a couple of cases that were detected in Spain, and then the US. So.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
The reality is the quality of health in Liberia, in Sudan, anywhere in the world where an epidemic can start because of the level of migrations that are happening, anything can get anywhere else. And it does, yes, and so it should matter to each of us, what is the quality of health care that everybody else is receiving on the planet, because the level of migrations are creating these massive effects that can affect us everywhere. The economic consequences of the Ebola crisis were massive in terms of African continent as a whole, even though Ebola virus was actually really present and in Iberia and Sierra Leone, and it was able to be stopped in terms of spreading to other countries. But the fear of what it represented. A lot of people who were traveling to other areas in Africa were scared to go. I have a friend who went from Ohio over to work because his background was international health, and when he came back, there were families who would not let his children go to school, so there was a massive fear, and a refresher on him to say, don’t go and do good, because we’re afraid you’re going to infect us. Yes, yes, not just figuratively, literally. We could die, yes, because you want to go do that.

Unknown Speaker 11:25
And so the reality is, the fears people have, whether their real fears or their perceived fears, are things we need to deal with, and the reality dead people’s quality of lives, wherever they are in the world. If we’re able to ensure that every child on the planet has access to health care, if we can ensure that each country in the world has a health system that doesn’t allow epidemics to sprint and can be contained and dealt with as fast as possible, then those types of worries are things we won’t have to deal with, and it’s important that we don’t get into a situations where the people who want to be of service to the planet are ostracized because they’re going to help. And that was exactly the situation, yes, and it was a family decision, because it was a spouse with two children, and

Unknown Speaker 12:25
there were concerns about, how long would he gone? Be gone? Would he be infected? Yes. Would he die? Yes. And those are big decision they’re taking. They’re huge decisions, and I think it’s important that we don’t have a few people on the planet take on that suffering. If we all collectively are able to say, how do we each contribute in the best way we can? Then there are a lot of ways we can work together to ensure that fears related to the sprints of disease like that are minimized, then we can ensure that the people locally can organize so that they’re able to contain disease, that they have the proper equipment to prevent the spread. And so how do we organize ourselves so that communities can help themselves? The thing that strikes me

Unknown Speaker 13:23
is the polarity of we’ve got a global community, and now disease travels around the world. Yes, and soon is there a global decision making. And yet, what happens in a small community in Sudan or Columbus, Ohio or Addis Alba, they want to make decisions for themselves as well, and some organization on high shouldn’t dictate. And yet, it seems like we need orientation toward both that we as a global community have some sort of guidelines and that local areas implement them in a way that is

Unknown Speaker 14:04
practical.

Unknown Speaker 14:06
So one of the simple things is, how are we designing cities to maximize health? And so with the urbanization growing in emerging economies, if we have people organized in urban areas where they have access to clean water, where they have access to toilets that don’t allow contamination of sanitation systems with water drinking systems, then we are creating situations where health in the long term is possible, but when we have situations where people living in shanty towns where they don’t have access to clean water, we’re creating situations where the possibilities of epidemics grows. And so that decision of how we are organizing cities around the world is really critical that infrastructure cause.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Money. Infrastructure costs money, and at the same time, the opportunity cost is, if we don’t put those infrastructures in place, the costs related to epidemics can be beyond anything we can think of. So the opportunity cost isn’t, oh, let’s do nothing and hope there’s not going to be an epidemic. Is, let’s invest in what is needed. Let’s create jobs locally that are sustainable, that promote sustainable, healthy cities, that allow people to thrive in their communities, and that ensure that nobody has to be forced into migrating because they have no choice, especially as you talk about the dramatic increase in population on the African continent, in some areas, I presume that are not yet highly developed, and basic sewer structures and physical infrastructure is not yet present to support that population growth. Now maybe it shouldn’t be, because it hasn’t grown, but that investment and then again, we get into the question of global community, and where does the money come from? Do we as a global family, help one another? If you were my sister and your car broke down, of course, I might help you. And yet, if I don’t have enough food on the table, I’m going to struggle, struggle to help you. So I again, it’s a hilarious do we define other and how do we define who’s in our time? How do you expand the definition of my people? Yes, one of the exciting things about the 21st Century, and the interconnectedness we have is that there is a growth of impact investment of social, responsible investments of conscious capitalism. And so there are networks. There are financial instruments today that can help us rethink how we invest, why we invest, and the types of return we get on those investments so that we are helping a healthier world for our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren. And what is very exciting to me about this is if we look at Africa, 60% of the arable land on the planet that isn’t being used for agriculture is enough. So if we were able to have sustainable, ecological food production in Africa, looking with support with the types of technology being used in Holland, for example, right now, again, University, which is a very important agriculture University in Holland, is actually helping all sorts of research institutes around the world promote sustainable productive agriculture. So if we can increase partnerships for good around the world, we can have productive economies that are creating jobs for people, that are bringing dignity to communities, and at the same time, we can design the rural and urban areas of the future to be areas where people were going to live and thrive. But there is a level of consciousness to achieve this that we need to attain that isn’t there yet at scale. So let me play back what I’m hearing so we can point to some of the trends, yes, not with 100%

Unknown Speaker 18:24
accuracy, at least trend wise. So we know how jobs will flow. We know where people will be born, and we know the deficit between what’s what currently exists and what will be required, so number of houses, a volume of food. And so then it tells us that if we

Unknown Speaker 18:46
planned

Unknown Speaker 18:48
in this world, that there would be a way to to look forward, identify the gap, and potentially fill the gap, yes, as a global community, through things, in some cases, things that already exist. So conscious leadership, conscious investment, solvent leadership. But the definition of leadership has to change the mindset. Has to change the definition of in and out groups. And who do I care about? And is it me first or us first. And again, I keep seeing the polarities that if I’m on a plane, of course, I have to put my mask on first, because passing out isn’t going to help anybody. And yet, how long do I sit there and breathe before I reach out and help my companions? One of the things I think I’m hearing is that the awareness and concern for everyone has to expand dramatically because ignoring something that’s happening over and there and wherever, there is do whoever and then it was eventually.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Only come to my front and impact. Yes, if we look at the recent peace nobel prize that was given to a group that was informing and fighting nuclear warfare, one of the realities is, there is enough nuclear power in the world to blow our planet. And the reality is, how do we monitor the balance of power in the world, and how do we do that in a way that ensures that we will continue this? And so the importance of, how are we looking at technology and technology for good? We’re really at a place and time where we have access to phenomenal, sustainable technologies that can really help us do great and so what are the conscious choices we’re making to allow these technologies to help all of humanity thrive, rather than what am I doing to make my company more profitable? Yes, and I want to say, and we’ve created examples in the last few days, there are ways to make my company profitable and concurrently have a bigger purpose, and align those in a way that creates both global sustainability and profitability. It is not an either or hapsal just means a shift in mindset, absolutely, and it’s really we have to get beyond the zero sum game to really have growth mindsets be the foundation of how we educate children around the world. We have to have ethical leadership that ensures that we have enabling policies to support good at the health, at the food, at the education. How do we ensure the safety of all and with ethical leadership, with enabling policies, with caring financial systems, we can be able to create systems that really allow thriving and sustainability to be hand in hand as we move forward in the 21st Century. What are some of the characteristics and traits that you think are foundational? So one of the things that I find, especially when I talk to young people, is they tell me, there’s so much suffering in the world. What can I do? And one of the issues that I see today is that there’s a lot of empathy, but empathy with paralysis. And so what happens is I can feel for your suffering, for my suffering, for somebody else’s suffering, but I feel there’s nothing I can do about it. And so one of the things that is really essential in this 21st Century is to grow our level of compassion. So the idea that I can hold suffering, but I can hold that suffering in a space of compassion that is much larger than the suffering.

Unknown Speaker 22:52
So you’ve used the word empathy and compassion, and those are different yet. So can you explain to our listeners what’s the distinction and how do they play out? Okay, so Matthew Ricard, who’s the French Buddhist monk, who’s also a molecular geneticist, has a great book called on altruism, and one of the things he talks about is this idea that we get fatigue, empathy, fatigue, and we live in times where we see more and more burnout in work environments. And what happens around that is that people see a lot of things, feel a lot of the pain, but feel that there is they feel powerless to do anything about it in the systems they’re in. And that’s pervasive in our workplace, but also as well, watching politics amazing absolutely and so one of the things around that, and there’s more and more research in the neurobiology of compassion that is showing that what actually happens in our body when we are holding solely empathy is that our energy is drained. But when we’re able to hold suffering in a space of loving kindness, when we’re able to be in a space of non judgment and really bless what we’re thinking of, thinking of, send messages of love and hold a space of grace, we’re able to recharge our bodies, and boy, is that hard to do. But what’s interesting is now that there’s these amazing studies looking at monks that have been meditating over in decades, and there’s data showing that their chromosomes, so their DNA, they actually have longer telomeres. And telomeres are the ends of the chromosomes, so our DNA material, and so what happens is, the more stress we live, the shorter our chromosomes get over time, and our brain is also impacted, right? Absolutely. So one of the things that happens, for example, children who receive attention and who are read books will actually have more neural networks, so they will have greater power.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Capacity to learn compared to children’s, children who don’t get talked to, who don’t get read to. So there are so many ways we can promote health, we can promote learning. We can promote an openness to creativity, to adaptability, to agility, and those are all necessary skill sets in the 21st Century, okay, also as an adult, yes, if I meditate, so I may have missed the boat because my parents didn’t read to me, or before, actually, I was quite fortunate so he they didn’t read to me, and I have that, but I’m here, yes, and

Unknown Speaker 25:37
I had the opportunity to change my physiology absolutely meditating. So, so one of the things we’re seeing more and is realizing that we have plasticity, so our bodies, our minds, our neurons, that we have this capacity to rejuvenate our system. And I want to say not only rejuvenate, but strengthen ability. Frontal cortex, yes, where cognitions complex thinking Absolutely. And we do it, not necessarily by thinking more, but by meditating, by holding a space of compassion, by living in a space of non judgment. And it it affects our biology. It affects the biology of the people we work with. It affects the community we live in, its longevity. It affects the probability of getting diseased or not so. So there are amazing links we’re seeing. We’re seeing, for example, in terms of our gastrointestinal systems, we have more bacteria in our bodies, cell bacterial cells, than heated cells. There’s an area of research that looks at the microbiome. The microbiome looks at what is the flora, the microbial flora in our bodies. And if we’re stressed, we have different types of microbes in our body. If we have cancer, we have different types of microbes within our bodies. If we have diabetes, we have different types of microbes in our body. How we create a space of health in our body, how we promote well being in our body, will determine the quality of the microbiome we have, and the microbiome we have is connected to our neural system, okay? And so that will determine the quality of our thinking, of our capacity for compassion, of the our decision making process. And so what we know today that may have seen Pollyanna 50 years ago is that growing your level of compassion, of loving in this world actually improves your health. I think there are a lot of people who don’t yet know that message a traditional corporate culture where we still reward the superhero. I’m work harder. I work hard at work, then I go drink with my buds, and I may go home and take care of an ailing parent. There’s no time for me, and I am proud of the fact that I can drink more and work more and behave like a superhero, and yet at the same time, I am physiologically damaging myself. One of the realities is when we are physiologically damaging ourselves, we become more reactive. It can take more time for certain people, it can be internalized and turned into disease. It can be externalized and turned into violence, toxic leadership, abusive leadership, but the manifestations will come out, and they have effects on ourselves, on our families, on our communities, and so this is why it is so critical today to really have a mindset that promotes well being, that promotes interconnectedness, that is service to a greater good, because all of that is good for our own physiology, but is also really critical to navigating the level of change and turbulence we’re living in the 21st Century. So you just said something that really stands out. So I want to reiterate it and maybe put it in my own words, the idea of service to the greater good as a sense of purpose. So actually, having a sense of purpose that’s bigger than myself is also restorative. It’s not that I’m going out there and doing nice stuff for those people, it’s that helping others actually physiologically improves my well being, absolutely, absolutely. And this is why this is an important message for us to realize, because this level of generosity that we can hold for each other will increase the level of good in the world, the level of joy in the world, the level of prosperity, and our capacity for envisioning sustainable systems. So back to the beginning of that. So by my famous, by consciousness, by whatever words we use, I realize that different people will have different reactions to some like they.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
These words from consciousness to mindfulness to meditation, and they imagine residents walking around at the tambourine in an airport for the flower. It’s called to this. And we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about very deliberate practices, yes, that are practical within every spiritual path. So you don’t have to leave your church. No, no. Go to the airport. No. My former husband, I think, was terrified that someday he would come home and I would be wearing an orange robe with my tambourine and flowers headed out to the airport because I meditated. And it’s not the case. I never did. Quit my job and

Unknown Speaker 30:39
search following some something,

Unknown Speaker 30:43
what I did do is have a different sense of self and a greater capacity to do the work I did and do. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I can say I feel like a very different person, absolutely and so let’s tie that back, not make it about me, but that

Unknown Speaker 31:04
by having these practices and doing them as well as we can in busy lives,

Unknown Speaker 31:09
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Unknown Speaker 31:30
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Unknown Speaker 35:00
We need stakeholder involvement. We’re going to have to involve more people. We’re going to have to bring technology people and be able to look by moment. How do we address these issues together? And so again, you’re showing a few things here that I want to pull out, moment by moment. I made plan, and I still think it’s a good idea to plan Absolutely, even

Unknown Speaker 35:23
floundering about and yet, I have to be willing to adjust that plan and not have my ego attached to making changes. Yes, and in fact, the wicked problems require that I, as an individual, it’s not technical, really, just do a thing and change my mindset, yes, to sit back in and do a thing different than was even available to me in the past, absolutely. And so the reality is we have to deal with people. We have to deal with tasks. So we have to be good at working with people. We have to meet our deadlines, but we have to to have relationships where we’re able to inspire people to accomplish what they need to accomplish. So we can accomplish and focus on what we need to accomplish, and so we can

Unknown Speaker 36:14
effectively have our tasks met. And so that balance is needed. I cannot coerce you into doing something the best way is for how do we respectfully work together towards attaining the goals we want? And when we have systems where leaders inspire others to do great work and create systems where clarity of responsibilities of roles are there, or when systems are more emergent, people are able to listen, observe and pay attention, so that moment by moment, they can help each other figure out things, use their innovation and creativity to find new ways of doing things, and that balance is really important. So again, I’m going to restate not that you didn’t say it absolutely beautifully, and I couldn’t do it effectively, but I hear that I need to change my inner thought process, my mindset, my way of seeing the world, needs to continue to evolve, and I need a commitment to that or I won’t be able to do the things required. There are a few things in my world that are black and white, but that’s a black and white. If I’m not evolving my insides, my outsides won’t meet the tasks at hand. I will be obsolete and doing damage in the process, absolutely so any day we don’t have space for self reflection is a day lost in terms of crook. And so that space of self confidence, self reflection, self identity, the more that inner space is strong, the more we’re able to handle the turbulence on the outside. And this is why having a growth mindset is so critical today, because that growth mindset allows us to see any obstacle, any failures, as opportunities to grow our skills, and not as a failure of who we are. Yeah, I missed the mark I set on a task, and often I did as good as one could do given what we had. Or sometimes I’m tired and I just bollocks it up, and I get up and I keep going Yes, and I do better next time, absolutely. And that’s critical to ethical leadership, because when I think the only way I can get there is by cheating, by stealing, by doing something that is wrong or condemns others. That’s because I have a fixed mindset, and I believe that I have the capacity to do things in a creative way that includes the other that gets to a point that so resonates, and again, it’s something we don’t talk about. We talk about humility. But I work with leaders in do 360s and there are some people who underestimate their ability, and that underestimating and lack of self confidence, yes, means that there’s a gap between what they can do and what they choose to do, because they feel inadequate to meet the task, even though they have the skills absolutely, absolutely and that’s a huge problem, especially for women, because women may be absolutely competent, but their self confidence will limit the opportunities they’re willing to go after. There’s a certain percentage that says women will apply for jobs that they’re 100 or 110% qualified for, and men will apply for jobs where they’re 30% qualified for. So what happens is, over time, men will stretch themselves more and grow more and women become.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Because of that search for safety, won’t have that capacity to grow. So one of the things that is really critical for women and girls, and especially as mothers, as sisters, aunts, godmothers, is, how do we encourage girls to stretch? Because when we’re able to do that, we build our self confidence. Biologically, we are wired to keep our children safe. Yes, then with we will be less risky, absolutely than men who are the court and who are wired to go out and conquer when they have to take more risks. So we’re overcoming

Unknown Speaker 40:37
physiology again, definitely, but with plasticity, you can rewire, and this rewiring is really critical. It’s really critical, especially with this fourth industrial revolution, where there’s going to be needs for more and more technologically trained people. And we want women that these spaces, because we want women to bring their innovation and creativity to these spaces, because often when women go into technology, they will use technology to be of service to greater good. They just will use it just to produce more video games. So the importance of having half of the world contribute their intelligence, their emotional intelligence, their IQs, their capacity for compassion, to bringing new solutions to the wicked challenges we have in the 21st Century is imperative. We have to do it.

Unknown Speaker 41:28
I love that we have to do it. And yet we have to, again, in some ways, rewire our brain, yes, so that we are up to the task. Absolutely, if we think about it, whatever, all of the technological tools we have, there’s updates, there’s constant updates. Yes, refresh, refresh. So why is it that we think, if those tools that are more basic do it, why shouldn’t we need to do it in the other population we haven’t talked about? It’s those people who are aging. Yes. So back to the refresh idea, if you and I are gonna live to be a hot grid, yes, then we have more productive work years ahead of us than behind us, which is not what I was taught you work till you get to retire and enjoy. And I assume that was somewhere around 60. Now that may be somewhere around 80 or 90, and so how do we help folks to continue assuming people are remaining healthy, which we have already talked about, how do we take on that growth mindset and assume that has to be our mindset into our 80s and 90s? I worked with a client recently who said, I’m 55 you can’t teach an all about new tricks. And my response was, how many years do you want to work? Because with that attitude, you should be planning your retirement cardio.

Unknown Speaker 42:51
So one of the things that’s really clear in terms of the plasticity of our brain or ourselves, is the more we stretch ourselves, the more we rejuvenate. And so the quality of life we’re going to have, if we’re going to live longer, will be proportional to the level of effort we put in today. And so one of the things is we have to become lifelong learners. We talk about learning organizations, but really, as individuals, we have to be lifelong learners. Everyone had heavier that. I absolutely agree. Maybe I’m expanding the definition of learning. So we talked about meditation, yes, being one of the mechanisms reflection and looking at, where am I excelling and where am I not. There’s traditional learning, and then there are the disorienting dilemmas. How do I put myself in environments that are terribly uncomfortable for me? It was doing an outward bound trip where I had to go into caves with bats flying at my knee and things like that that only physically really be not within my lane. And I think the learning, it’s important that we use them. And I am not saying that you weren’t using that definition, but to be explicit, that learning needs to encompass all of those with some regular diet. Absolutely, the idea for me is, how do I create enough discomfort that I’m constantly growing Okay, enough discomfort. It’s not about paralyzing discomfort, which I occasionally do have. And so the idea is, really it’s this idea of, if we want to grow our emotional intelligence, we’re going to have to put ourselves in a space of discomfort cools. If we want to grow our circles of influence, we have to be on the edge of where our knowledge, our circles of influence, our networks, those just on the edge of those zones is where creativity, innovation, novel spaces emerge.

Unknown Speaker 45:00
And if we think about weightlifting as it just as an enemy, more, if I lift weights and truly build muscle, I’m tearing absolutely hurts. Yet when I write a textbook, my brain hurts. I can only write for so long. Then I move. For me, the process is right walk, right walk. I have to get out of the physical environment into a natural space, and I know I can go back when I start to have ideas again, when I don’t feel fuzzy, it hurts my brain. And this is where compassion comes in again, because

Unknown Speaker 45:34
we’re exercising that muscle of emotional intelligence, of compassion, of learning abilities. And so it’s we stretch ourselves, and then we rest. We have gratitude. We stretch ourselves, we rest, we have gratitude. And as we practice this cycle, we create a virtuous cycle that increases our level of influence, increases our opportunities, increases our capacity to do good with others, increases our networks, increases our capacity for leveraging and so then we really are slowly growing spaces. We’re feeling this comfort, but we’re also growing our capacity to love. And so we’re able to sustain more attention, we’re able to sustain more turbulence, and we’re able to navigate more and more difficult systems, and are able to have leadership that is inspired, that is transcendental, that really allows us to work at levels we couldn’t imagine. And it’s that idea is, how big a dream can I set for myself, and how can I slowly work towards it. We often we overestimate what we can do in six months or a year, but we underestimate what we can accomplish over five or 10. And love that then A and that’s how my books start. Is, what is your vision for your contribution to the world? What’s your legacy? And I know for many of us, that idea is a bit of a stretch for me. It was interesting. A friend of mine, a colleague, died of pancreatic cancer way too young, so I was sitting in his funeral and in the service, and we talked about putting yourself in that spot, but actually sitting there listening to people talk about someone I knew so well and had such great regard for and I wondered, would anyone show up for mine? What would things say, like one of those bad comedy shows they had to pay a homeless person to show up? What would the impact? What will it be? Hypothetical to me, that at some point this will happen. How do I imagine and then what do I do every day? That for me, this is personal. I do have a vision statement of helping leaders solve the world’s biggest Absolutely. And I think there’s a saying that people will forget a lot of things, but they will not forget how you made them feel. And we’ve talked about physiology, so we know that there’s an effect at the cellular level, in terms of our DNA. There’s a space called epigenetics, or DNA methylation, where we know that our environmental stress has an influence on our DNA. And so what we know is how we make ourselves feel and how we make others feel will be remembered, and it will be remembered on DNA level and will be remembered on emotional level. And so our leadership legacy is there at all of these levels, and it’s our choice to decide what is we want it to be. And as a closing comment, I want to say thank you, because

Unknown Speaker 48:43
I get crying for our listeners. What you don’t know is this is the second time we’ve recorded this interview because I had a technical issue that was completely my fault, at the level of grace that you demonstrated in being willing to give yet another hour

Unknown Speaker 49:01
at a conference that’s incredibly busy, where you’re a board member and trying to make things happen, is touching. Well, she said, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing for the world, for building greater leadership for good. Thank you, Marie. As we close, how would people reach you? They can reach me on LinkedIn, my profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter account. I have a number of videos on YouTube where I talk about leadership. I have a TEDx talk. I have a number of book chapters on leadership. So I’m out there. There’s a lot of information out there, and I’m continuing to do more work and to share what I learned along the way, so I plan to continue to contribute. Thank you. So basically, Google, you absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 49:59
You.

Unknown Speaker 50:01
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