The Harvard Business Review argues that having a mentor helps you to succeed in life. Below Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Director of the WPSP, poses questions to Tabi Haller-Jorden, a WPSP mentor and President and CEO of The Paradigm Forum. The interview highlights the importance of mentorship and Tabi’s personal journey to leadership. You have broken the glass ceiling in many areas and pushed the frontiers in many male dominated areas of work. Tell us the most important talents, characteristics, personality traits, experiences, knowledge, relationships that bolstered your way forward? My parents’ careers had a significant impact on my definition of effective leadership. My mother was a Japanese linguist, and my father was a journalist and diplomat. Understanding cultural differences and how you communicate your preferences and approach a situation are paramount. I grew up in an environment where reading culture and context were considered critically important before making any presumptions about what is considered an appropriate assessment. Tell us your own story and what challenges that you have transcended? I started my career in a corporate setting, and it became clear that institutional norms and the conventional wisdom around how decisions are made prompted impatience. I was keen on the cachet of a global corporation, but I was raised to assert my own voice, and in a corporate setting I was not able to thrive. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful mentor and sponsor there who was always a real mirror in terms of my thought processes and assumptions and actually encouraged me to leave. When I left and started my first global consulting firm, I realized I was able to make so much more impact from the outside. What expertise/capacity did you develop along the way to achieve your goals and benchmarks? Listening and perceptual skills are vital when trying to diagnose a situation and read context. Not making any presumptions until you understand the dynamics of what is going on and engaging in the context as a learner rather than a judger are both paramount. We need to learn to ask more questions and to be humbled by the complexity of context. Living and working overseas quickly brought to my attention the fact that one toolbox does not always translate. You learn to be much more adept at consequential thinking and to be more flexible in your reasoning and decision-making. What are some key leadership attributes that you see are vital? A keen appetite for learning. My parents and family celebrated risk-taking, so I am always trying to throw myself into new situations and take risks. What are the gender stereotypes (hampering women’s leadership) that are most pervasive? I think that the remaining challenge is how we are going to address the division of labor at home. I continue to see a lot of presumptions tied to competency and leadership based on physically apparent differences. We have to start treating men and women as individuals as well as to challenge the tendency to dumb down complicated assessments of what people aspire to and their skills. We persist in applying a very narrowly defined normative standard to our definitions of talent and leadership. How do you translate that theory into action? To give an example of work/family reconciliation, a client recently asked about dates for a meeting. When she proposed a particular date, I immediately responded that I was unavailable on that day because it was my son’s birthday. I remember hearing a CEO explaining her perspective on this by answering the question: Who’s going to remember? She said, “At the end of the day, my daughter is going to remember if I miss her birthday or an important event. If I miss a meeting, that may affect me in the short-term but being there for my daughter is much more important and has a long-term impact.” How do you make the work/family reconciliation work when you are a single mom? You have to help your children understand and see where you do draw these lines. How can they be best combated? We have to look carefully at the insidious nature of gender-based stereotypes. I think we need a much more robust definition of leadership to include the capacity and bandwidth to accept responsibilities that stretch beyond the workplace. What have you done to open the door for other women and inspire others? How can we best do that? Part of what the Paradigm Forum does is look at social justice in the workplace. Because we advise corporations, governments and academic institutions on creating greater equity of access and opportunity, we redefine how work gets done and develop new models for workplace agility. We’re also looking at the policy response to workplace challenges. One of the consequences is opening the door to much more demographic and generational diversity, as well as to flexibility around working from different locations. We are expanding the notions of how work, productivity and leadership are defined. How can women leaders in business build bridges with women in public policy? That is a core element of our work. We work with national governments, the public and private sectors as well as academic institutions. I also teach at several business schools. How can mentees best reach out to role models and potential mentors? It’s important to clarify needs, expectations, boundaries, definitions of success and what are the appropriate topics and questions. It’s also valuable to learn why a mentor/mentee has committed to mentorship. How can mentors best help mentees achieve their full potential/their goals? I think we all suffer from a poverty of our own imagination and we need to think beyond some of the givens. Part of what I have been careful to do is to expand my understanding of context and challenges and provide some risk-taking options and approaches to think about something I might never have considered. I think it’s important to stretch one another’s thinking and do what we can to challenge any limitations – in effect, to act as a catalyst to ensure a broader spectrum of considerations and ask questions that will allow your mentee to think through her actions/decisions. We are all “hungry” for a challenge and that is one thing a mentor can do once the comfort level increases. What I like about how we communicate is that it is very opportunistic, creative, instrumental and pragmatic. My mentee poses particular question and we can communicate easily with modern technology. We’re able to consider a lot of different scenarios and use problem-solving techniques to approach a situation.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 07:38:29 +0000
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