S1 EP 003 | The Global Leadership Blueprint: Building Success On Four Pillars

Episode #3

[00:00:00] Taty Fittipaldi: In this episode, we will discuss the four pillars of leadership for international careers called the Global Leadership Pillars. We will talk about each pillar and the main skills nested in each that are important for success when leading multicultural teams internationally for impactful business decisions.

[00:00:24] Taty Fittipaldi: Hello, and welcome to the Leadership Nest podcast, the podcast that nests stories, knowledge, and. Science to soar the leadership in you. I’m your host, Taty Fittipaldi. As always, our podcast will be divided into three phases, a story, a lesson, and its application. This way you can have structure and information while also having some fun.

[00:00:52] Taty Fittipaldi: This program is brought to you by Coaching Expatriates.[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Taty Fittipaldi: Today’s story.

[00:01:05] Taty Fittipaldi: When Adora got her. first chief finance job, she inherited a team that she’d been told was weak and needed adjustments. When she asked the HR partner to define what they meant by weak, they just told her that the stakeholders thought that the finance team underperformed. That sounded vague, but she was up to the task of observing and evaluating for her own assessment.

[00:01:33] Taty Fittipaldi: After a few weeks with them, though, Adora noticed that it was not them who were underperforming, but the previous leaders who were poorly managing them. Indeed, there were skills in their jobs that they could improve, but when talking to the team, Adora realized her team did not receive any formal functional training for over five years.

[00:01:57] Taty Fittipaldi: Her team reported that all their processes [00:02:00] were manual, and the few systems they could rely on were bought in the 80s and were extremely outdated for the new millennium. They also reported a very upsetting behavior that they called Side A, Side B. Side A was the side of the building where all commercial departments were located.

[00:02:21] Taty Fittipaldi: A clear bias favoring side A happened while side B was discriminated against and poorly treated according to their perception. And finally, there was The workload management issue. Because they lacked automated and integrated processes, as well as resourceful systems, all the manual work took long hours in order to comply with the headquarters timing for reporting.

[00:02:49] Taty Fittipaldi: During Adora’s first three months, she would arrive at 9 a. m. and leave around 9 p. m. Her team would always stay past her [00:03:00] time to go home. Curious, one day she asked Rob, the night security guard, what time they would usually leave. During financial close, ma’am, they leave around 2 or 3 a. m., said Rob. Adora said, that late, huh?

[00:03:16] Taty Fittipaldi: Rob then shared that half of the month was like this for them. The other half was not much better. They would leave around 10 p.m Rob said. How long has it been like this? Adora finally asked. To that, Rob replied. Ma’am, I work here for 10 years, Miss Adora. It has always been like this. It’s awful how they’re treated like slaves when Side A gets all the company perks.

[00:03:42] Taty Fittipaldi: Hmm, the Side A reference again. Adora thought, from a third party, from the security guy who does not even work inside the building. Thanks, Rob, said Adora. Let’s see if I can change this, right? Rob nodded politely and replied with a vague, Yes, yes, of course, [00:04:00] ma’am. He didn’t seem convinced. After the first months of transition, Adora started to feel the pressure from the headquarter.

[00:04:08] Taty Fittipaldi: Long work hours, extensively manual processes, long nights, leading to some errors, and the side A, side B conflicts. One day, Adora asked her chief accountant, Anna, you guys work really long hours, and you don’t seem phased. What’s your secret? Anna smiled at the implied compliment and answered, You know, Adora, when we arrive, the team has breakfast together in the kitchen while we talk and get energized for the day.

[00:04:38] Taty Fittipaldi: No matter how busy our days are, We always stop for lunch and around 5 or 6 we take another long break to eat so we can continue working until late. Oh, Adora reacted. Sounds like you guys are super disciplined about your self care. Anna laughed and replied, well, you can say that. At least we [00:05:00] don’t miss food time.

[00:05:01] Taty Fittipaldi: The next few days, Adora noticed herself missing lunchtime and regular breaks, which was reflected in her stress levels. Noticing that, some members of Adora’s team would come to her office occasionally to remind her to stop for a break. Very quickly, Adora noticed that her team had something she didn’t.

[00:05:23] Taty Fittipaldi: which she labeled personal leadership. Her team learned to lead themselves and their performance throughout the years to keep up with that strenuous work style. She would have to also commit to becoming more proficient in personal leadership if she were to survive this job. After a few financial closings, Adora got the gist of the major problems her team was facing and decided to start something she called Closing Postmortem.

[00:05:53] Taty Fittipaldi: Nobody liked the name, the meeting, or the fact that all participants in the process, [00:06:00] regardless of if they worked in the finance department or not, were present in this meeting. These meetings always started with Adora asking each in a round table style what problems they faced during the close and what would be helpful to happen next time to avoid them.

[00:06:18] Taty Fittipaldi: The first few meetings were a bloodbath between people from PsyDay and side B, always itch, trying to blame the other side for their problems. However, Adora was quite proficient in people leadership, so she quickly shifted everyone’s minds and spirits from blame mode to solution mode. Also, the fact that everyone was present to listen to the problems made people who seemingly had nothing to do with the peace of the process intervene and say that they could help.

[00:06:50] Taty Fittipaldi: With something without costing them much or anything. In less than a year, with this strategy, Adora was able to cut this meeting time by [00:07:00] half and improve the entire closing process to make it almost perfect, although still manual. The conflicts were also surprisingly improved. In parallel, Adora had to work on convincing the main stakeholders in the organization to update all the financial systems, besides getting the training budget approved for her team.

[00:07:23] Taty Fittipaldi: These were quite big challenges, but Adora was well versed in organizational leadership, so analyzing data to create strong business cases to influence decision makers in their choices was something she did pretty well too. After one year, she got all the training budget approved, and new systems also approved, and the green light to purchase and implement.

[00:07:51] Taty Fittipaldi: How did you get this all approved? Anna asked one day. Well… It was not easy, you know, I had to talk to the right people and [00:08:00] pull all the data from the money we were saving with the process improvements and with how the sales team now is more profitable with our finance for non finance people training we gave them.

[00:08:10] Taty Fittipaldi: All I did was pull the right data, showing the new costs versus the cost savings, talk to the right people and give them a little nudge with some influencing skills. Quite impressive, Sedana! Which surprised Adora a bit. She was not expecting any acknowledgements from her team members. But what surprised Adora the most in this whole thing was when one of her peers at the headquarters said in one of her visits there, Adora, I think you are doing a great job about communicating what’s really happening in your region.

[00:08:46] Taty Fittipaldi: None of us had any idea or any data of how things were so bad for the team there. That really surprised Adora. Does that mean they actively were [00:09:00] not trying to learn about it? Hmm. However, she learned that as part of the company’s culture, poking into someone else’s region was not considered polite or professional, so everyone relied on the regional leaders to provide all data and communication about their regions.

[00:09:20] Taty Fittipaldi: On top of all these initiatives, Adora also worked on something that preoccupied her from the very beginning. The Side A, Side B culture. Leading behavior through cultural leadership was not something Adora did in her previous jobs, but she felt it was critical right now. She soon noticed that the Side A, Side B situation was a local culture.

[00:09:47] Taty Fittipaldi: The company’s culture relied on strong collaboration and communication amongst all departments and regions. Which meant she had to sanitize the local culture and [00:10:00] make it adopt the entire company’s culture. She articulated this initiative with HR, compliance, and the headquarters to slowly change the local culture.

[00:10:10] Taty Fittipaldi: It involved weeding some bad apples, changing to a new office with a different structure, lots of training and team building, plus coaching and mentoring many individuals. But in a few years, Adora was able to do what no other CFO before her did. She increased the company’s top line, profits, inter functional collaboration, communication, and culture.

[00:10:38] Taty Fittipaldi: And she was able to accomplish this by using all the four pillars of leadership in the Global Leadership Pillars methodology. Personal leadership, which leads self. people leadership, which leads people, organizational leadership, which leads ideas, and cultural leadership that leads behavior. All these four pillars [00:11:00] of leadership were critical for her success.

[00:11:03] Taty Fittipaldi: She had to articulate initiatives in all these pillars and weave them to see things later coming together and bringing about the results that she wanted. This episode is sponsored by Coaching Expatriates, a leading global executive development company that helps leaders around the world create happier and more profitable workplaces using the four success pillars in global leadership, an innovative leadership learning methodology.

[00:11:31] Taty Fittipaldi: Visit their website at www. coachingexpatriates. com.

[00:11:43] Taty Fittipaldi: Today’s lesson,

[00:11:48] Taty Fittipaldi: the global leadership. Pillars is a leadership methodology that relies on four pillars of leadership, personal leadership, people leadership, organizational leadership, and [00:12:00] cultural leadership. Personal leadership leads self, it’s the ability to take care of our well being, have an assertive and positive mental game, manage our willpower, control our stress, and lead a balanced and a full personal power.

[00:12:19] Taty Fittipaldi: Adora had to gain a lot of experience in this pillar because otherwise she would not be able to keep up with the consistent good work at that level of workload demands. People leadership leads people. It’s the ability to master work relationships in any environment and culture and create high performing and collaborative relations or teams that create a positive impact.

[00:12:45] Taty Fittipaldi: Without this pillar, Adora would not be able to start the whole process of improving things and reducing costs, which allowed her to move to the next pillar once she started to gain traction. The [00:13:00] third pillar is organizational leadership, which leads ideas. It’s the ability to leverage data and information to help organizations set strategic goals while motivating individuals to execute their assignments to achieve those goals successfully.

[00:13:17] Taty Fittipaldi: Thanks to Adora’s superb skills in collecting data and leading ideas, she was able to change processes, get approvals, and new systems to improve everyone’s quality of work and environment besides increasing profits. Imagine how much trust your team will have in you once they see you trying so hard to make their lives better.

[00:13:43] Taty Fittipaldi: Finally, the fourth pillar is cultural leadership, which leads behavior. This is the ability to drive culture and values to influence stakeholders and communities to create an inclusive and engaging work environment. Adora [00:14:00] noticed the company had a good overall culture, but had a local problem. This happens to many companies, and many leaders end up choosing to turn a blind eye to local cultural problems, given the stress and the pressure they are already impactful results.

[00:14:20] Taty Fittipaldi: What they misunderstanding, however, is that leading the right behavior with the right values can be transformational to a company, which often drives profits and creates a happier work environment.

[00:14:38] Taty Fittipaldi: Start with personal leadership and evaluate how aligned your work is

[00:14:48] Taty Fittipaldi: with your personal values, how much stressed you are. What kind of self talk you have about work and life, how you are dealing with your productivity and performance, [00:15:00] and finally, how well are you taking care of your well being? Next, move to people leadership and identify how well you communicate with others, manage people’s expectations, manage people’s impressions of you, and how well you can influence decision makers and build trust.

[00:15:20] Taty Fittipaldi: If you see any gaps, start there by getting some training and experience on those topics. Then, move to organizational leadership and be honest with yourself about how much business acumen you have and how your executive presence is perceived. How are you collecting data to lead ideas? We talked in a previous episode about the importance of data collection through notes and we even gave you a methodology for that.

[00:15:48] Taty Fittipaldi: Listen to that episode if you want a refresher. Finally, gain experience in cultural leadership by actively engaging in initiatives that touch [00:16:00] behavior like diversity and inclusion, company values communication, helping onboarding employees, or even coaching less senior employees or participating in a mentoring program as a mentor.

[00:16:18] Taty Fittipaldi: Key takeaways.

[00:16:23] Taty Fittipaldi: What’s your main takeaway from this episode? Here are mine. Number one, to be successful when leading internationally, we have to rely on the global leadership pillars, personal leadership, people leadership, organizational leadership, and cultural leadership. Number two, regardless of our job title or status in the company, we can all gain more experience in each of these pillars by engaging in initiatives and training.

[00:16:52] Taty Fittipaldi: that help us improve that pillar. Number three, whenever we start a new position, it’s key to start gathering data, [00:17:00] improving business acumen for that specific company and industry, and learning what are the main key stakeholders. Number four, always laying out a plan with the initiatives in each pillar can be critical for success.

[00:17:15] Taty Fittipaldi: Adora was able to implement so many initiatives in parallel because she had a solid plan once she collected the data that she needed. Good execution starts with good data collection and a good plan of action. 90 day plans are very common in global leadership exactly because they can be quite powerful for a strong and quick execution once you start in a new global leadership position.

[00:17:44] Taty Fittipaldi: This brings us to the end of the Leadership Nest episode. We hope you have enjoyed learning about the global leadership pillars and how they can be powerful in creating impactful business decisions. Tune into our episode next week, when we will be chatting [00:18:00] about documenting our activities and reflecting upon them for greater performance.

[00:18:11] Taty Fittipaldi: If you have any questions you’d like us to answer in the future episode of the show, just go to speakpipe. com slash Tatia Fittipaldi or click the link in the show notes below to leave us a brief audio message. Make sure to visit us on our website, www. leadershipnest. com, where you can subscribe to our show anywhere podcasts are streamed so you never miss a show.

[00:18:39] Taty Fittipaldi: While there. If you find value in our show, you can also subscribe to our Global Leadership Weekly Newsletter from Coaching Expatriates, where we deliver bite sized lessons on global leadership, decision making, and cultural competence to help you learn how to think, Relate and strategize in a whole [00:19:00] different way as a global leader.

[00:19:01] Taty Fittipaldi: If you liked the show, you might want to check our online global executive leadership program, a nine week leadership development and learning system that will help you lead internationally while making financially conscious and impactful decisions. Taty Fittipaldi is also available for private coaching.

[00:19:19] Taty Fittipaldi: See the website for more details at www. tatyfittipaldi. com. CoachingExpatriates. com slash executive dash coaching. Thanks for joining us this week on the Leadership Nest podcast. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode. Until the next time, keep nesting. Wherever you are in the globe, this is Taty Fittipaldi wishing you a beautiful day.