Motherhood is a resource for companies, not an obstacle. Just a pipe dream? No, it’s a reality for Danone Company. All new mothers are now returning to work after maternity leave. What’s more, a high percentage are promoted after doing so. South East European HR Director at Danone Sonia Malaspina explains how companies can facilitate an increase in the country’s birth rate and value new parents’ skills. These skills are key to Danone employees’ careers. In fact, 40% of all promotions are given to new mothers that have previously taken parental leave.
It’s an important statistic, considering that 73% of Italian women that resign from their jobs are also mothers. The latest data provides a snapshot of the current birth rate in Italy. Danone decided to position themselves as an employer valued parenting experiences. The results are clear: the corporate birth rate increased by 7.5%, compared to the falling Italian birthrate – 4%.
“Becoming a mother shouldn’t slow your career down. Actually, it helps you to develop managerial skills”. Danone decided to analyse these skills, assessing people before and after they became parents, through the Life Based Learning method and the digital program for new parents.
Malaspina explains, “Motherhood is a training ground. It develops skills that are incredibly important when you come back to work. Companies spend enormous amounts of money to help people learn soft skills, improve emotional intelligence, become better at resolving problems, more agile and flexible, through courses and lessons. But parenthood is ten times more effective”.
“We’re most proud of the following statistic: all mothers return to work following maternity leave. It wouldn’t be right if they resigned, and the company would definitely lose out. 45% of our managers are female, many of them are mothers. Our group has understood that parents bring added value to the workplace”.
Companies spend enormous amounts of money to help people learn soft skills, improve emotional intelligence, become better at resolving problems, more agile and flexible, through courses and lessons. But parenthood is ten times more effective.
Sonia Malaspina
Thank you to Danone for partnering with us since 2017, including Life Based Value as a strategic element in their parental policy.
Riccarda Zezza, CEO of Life Based Value and Manuela Andaloro, management consultant, joined forces to create a series of interviews aimed at portraying impact makers and leaders who are driving change and innovation worldwide, and in doing so, are raising awareness on a new successful type of genuine leadership. After a very successful first interview with Chiara Condi (Women, Women should stop asking what they’re worth), and with Dr. Mariarosaria Taddeo (Impact: Shaping, and throwing your heart into it), we continue our series with Fleur Bothwick, OBE, EMEIA Director of Diversity and Inclusion at EY and co-author of Inclusive Leadership.
I’m the Director of Diversity and Inclusive Leadership (D&I) for the EMEIA Region at EY which is made up of Europe, Middle East, India and Africa with ninety-nine countries and 105,000 people. My role entails developing, driving and embedding an integrated diversity strategy across a large multi-disciplined matrix organization.
A key focus for this role is stakeholder engagement, specialist consultancy, change management and brand development in the market. I’m a regular conference speaker and contributor to articles and research in this field. I’ve published a series of thought leadership articles too, most recently on how to take the disability agenda global.
A couple of years ago, I co-authored a book on Inclusive Leadership to share what Charlotte and I had learnt over the years – www.diversityandinclusiveleadership.com. In 2013 I was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s New Year’s Honors List in recognition of my contribution to workplace Diversity and Inclusion.
My professional and my personal goals are similar. At the end of the day, I want people to feel inspired, to have a purpose and to feel that can fulfil their potential – both at school and in the workplace. That’s why I’ve been working with the National Autistic Society for last five years to open a specialist secondary school for students on the autism spectrum in my local borough. Our free school will open its doors in January 2020.
I think there are many reasons why companies get a reputation for bad management. Usually it boils down to the culture and company values. If companies don’t appreciate their talent and focus purely on results, it’s more likely to see lower engagement and a less happy workforce. Personally I wouldn’t struggle to thrive in such an environment – I would leave them to it and find somewhere else to contribute.
Most workplaces don’t need command and control. Real leaders can see this. People don’t join a company ‘for life’ any more. The gig economy is growing. The future of work is already here in so many ways, especially with the rise of AI and robotics. For any company to thrive, the leadership have to bring their people with them and embrace workplace diversity.
Inclusive leadership is all about first of all understanding your own motivation, your preferences and style and then being able to identify what works for other people. It’s moving away from ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’. Now it’s more about ‘treat others as they would like to be treated’. It’s a leadership that is present – not listening at the same time as doing your emails and it’s a leadership that makes sure that everyone in the room/on the phone has a voice.
Inclusive Leadership has been officially shortlisted in the ‘Management Futures’ category for the 2018 Management Book of the Year prize which has just been announced by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and the British Library. From the Back Cover: The most successful organisations are those with the most diverse and engaged workforces. Studies show an 80% improvement in business performance among those with high diversity levels. When people feel included and able to reach their full potential, they are more engaged, more productive and often more creative.[/caption]
There are two things for me. One is that we all do guilt very well, particularly working mothers. The eldest of my three boys is now 20 and I couldn’t be more proud of them. They don’t feel scarred by the fact that their mother juggled work and homelife when they were small. If anything they are more attuned to the challenges of the workplace and their role in achieving equality. The other thing we do too often (and I’m not saying men don’t do this) is that we strive to deliver 120% on everything when often 80% would be good enough.
I’m not sure that they will be ‘very’ different. Definitely we are seeing changes. There is more of an interest in building a better working world. Plus, more men want to play a more hands on role in the home. That said, we were told Gen X would enter the workforce and change the landscape. There has been some shift, but it’s slow.
This is a highly pragmatic tip that came out of an Ideas Jam. We asked people to think about how they could change what they currently do to be more effective, both individually and as a team. I realized that the default setting on outlook for meetings was always an hour. So I changed it to 45 minutes for phone calls (maybe 6 or 7 calls a day). I started to get back on average 1.5 hours a day and the calls remained focused and productive.
I think much of the ‘future of work’ is here already, with of course more to come. We come across AI all the time (not always positively) and we have robots already doing some audit work. The gig economy is thriving. I am thrilled to be able to shop and bank on line at any time of the day to suit. I think the future is all about opportunity, but we need to make sure we are ready for it.
No job is worth burning out for. It’s important in this 24/7 world that you establish some basic boundaries and learn to switch off. I’m not the best at it. But when I do take a full weekend out or even longer, I come back refreshed, focused and more impactful.
This week, our CEO Riccarda Zezza spoke about parenthood on Corporate Unplugged. The Podcast features people that are shaping the future of business.
What would happen if businesses saw parenthood as a way of training soft skills? What if they felt empowered to do good in the world with an ethics-first approach? Learn how Lifeed founder (formerly known as MAAM), Riccarda Zezza aims to do just that. Based in Milan, Italy, Lifeed is the world’s first and only digital training program that turns parenthood into a training program for business skills.
Riccarda herself experienced first-hand negativity at work when she had children. She had dedicated her working life pre-children to doing good work for the business she worked for, but found herself discriminated against when she returned to work after maternity leave.
“I was very surprised when I was returning to work after maternity leave. My employer saw it as a weakness. Maternity is an anomaly in the perception of a linear life cycle of work”.
She also realised that the current training providers taught soft skills with artificial tools. Yet at the same time, her real life experiences provided her with everything she needed to develop her soft skills at home and at work.
“I thought ‘why do I have to spend time in classroom simulations about crisis management? I have my two year old daughter at home, providing me with the perfect crisis management training ground? It’s a free training ground available every day.’ ”
The great thing about Riccarda’s life based learning program is that it helps make life simpler by allowing you to be you. It’s not just about being a better manager, or a better professional, but it’s about being a more relaxed parent – not feeling guilty about being with your family, and conversely, not feeling guilty when you’re in the office.
The life based learning program allows you to feel better about achieving a work life balance.
CorporateUnplugged.com hosted and produced this podcast.
“We know that, right now and in the foreseeable future, machines are generally poor at understanding a person’s mood, at sensing the situation around them, and at developing trusting relationships. This is why human ‘soft skills’ will become increasingly valuable — skills such as empathy, context sensing, collaboration, and creative thinking.”
The above statement was made by Lynda Gratton, a global expert in work organization. For a long time, she’s focused on reskilling and soft skills training and development.
The World Economic Forum have made similar statements recently on the future of work. Human beings can still be competitive workers, and will be so long as they continue to develop their “human” skills.
However, Gratton highlighted three small obstacles to this in a recent MIT Sloane Management Review article:
1) we don’t learn these skills at school because we’re stuck with an old curriculum that dates back to the industrial revolution (sit still, memorize information and obey the rules);
2) technology doesn’t use soft skills, it eliminates them (Alexa never “gets offended”);
3) workplaces create stressful conditions that stop people from fully developing and using them.
Fortunately there are many human skills training programs out there. They generate over 164 billion euros of revenue each year in the United States alone. Are they useful? Not according to Gratton:
“Unlike many cognitive skills, social skills cannot be learned in a rule-based way — there is no specifiable path to social effectiveness. Building job-related social skills for a work environment requires an immersive learning experience, rehearsed in situations as close as possible to the real job, with lots of opportunities for practice. This kind of skill development is essentially a process of trial and error, where we behave in a certain way, get feedback through subtle social cues, and try again. Practice creates the muscle of habit”.
An immersive experience that can recreate reality, with multiple opportunities to apply those skills on a regular basis. Training programs built in this way would be very expensive. A day in the classroom (or even a week!) would not give us enough time to recreate multiple practice situations to exercise empathy, understand the context and creative thinking. In her article, professor Gratton lists some good emerging practices which use augmented or virtual reality to create micro-training grounds that mimic reality. They provide feedback that generates the awareness necessary for soft skills training.
But an Italian father has recently published a post on LinkedIn with a decidedly more innovative proposal as compared to the simple use of augmented reality. A communications manager at Italgas, Mirko Cafaro’s post is titled How being a father made my job “easier”. Mirko found his 10 month-old daughter to be the perfect coach. She offers him continuous, immersive practice every day, giving him immediate feedback on 10 soft skills.
We want to share them with you, as Mirko has written them so clearly and beautifully. So, thank you Mirko for giving us permission to do so:
No boss will be able to put you under the same pressure as a little girl who cries and screams because she is hungry. Above all, when the baby bottle or the food always takes way too long to get warm. It’s Murphy’s Law.
Preparing an outing or an activity away from home is a complex puzzle. There is no check-list or supplier that can prevent you from forgetting something of vital importance (water, milk, diapers, etc.). Corporate events in comparison? All we have to do is implement the protocol.
It’s not always easy to understand and anticipate our bosses’ needs. Children’s needs are more like a riddle, especially when they cannot speak. We need to use trial and error.
How many variables surround a work commitment, a corporate activity, an event. Easy to count? Now see how many more variables there are when we think about a family event.
This point is perhaps the only one that is different from the previous ones, because in this case it is your child who dictates the agenda (in their own way). With the substantial difference that these priorities will be far greater than those of any day at the office.
Isn’t it easier to get a raise from your boss than a prompt response from a child who is busy watching their favorite cartoon?
With a little practice, improvisation can be fascinating for any profession. However when you add a child to the mix, it’s more similar to walking a tightrope – without a safety net, of course.
No action will ever be distantly comparable to delicately placing your child in bed — perhaps after having cradled them for a long time — avoiding any noise or muscle spasm that might awaken them.
Once you’ve discover what no feedback means from your child – either positive or negative – the same situation in the professional context will have the same scale and impact.
Multiple children help us to train this skill. For example, try explaining to your daughter that she can’t forcefully claim everything as hers, even when she tries to affirm her decisions with considerable strength.
In conclusion, Mirko’s company has the best soft skills training mentor at their full disposal. And that’s without them knowing it or having to spend a euro! Is there a basis to propose an alternative to AR or VR? Can we start using “reality” more?
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
Lifeed is focusing on growth, expanding outside of Italy! We’re transforming life transitions into soft skills, to benefit both businesses and individuals across Europe.
We’ve recently secured £1.3 million in funding for international growth. To fuel our expansion, Valeria Leonardi will be working as International lead, driving growth across the continent. What’s more, we’ve also adapted our programs into English to offer new materials to international markets.
13% of Italian businesses are led by women, with a similar estimated number in the UK. Italian entrepreneur Riccarda Zezza founded Lifeed back in 2015. After spending 15 years working as a manager in large corporations, she had two children. During her periods of maternity leave, she realised that her personal life had helped her to develop the same soft skills that her companies were trying to teach managers in the classroom. It was at that point that she decided to launch Lifeed, harnessing the power of learning in life experiences.
The company team also includes Milena Prisco, Legal Counsel, Fausta Pavesio, Elena Casolar from Opes-LCEF Foundation and Melody Lang, founder of MPA Education. The VC round was lead by Impact Ventures from Hungary.
10 million Europeans become parents every year. What’s more, there are around 7 million UK carers, a number that’s set to increase by 60% by 2030. At the same time, businesses spend billions training people’s soft skills in the classroom. Lifeed trains soft skills such as empathy, creativity, communication, time management and leadership, boosting effectiveness by up to 35%.
Lifeed is based on scientific research and the proprietary Life Based Learning method. Over 50 firms have used the platform to date, including Accenture, Danone, Boston Consulting Group, Amgen and UniCredit. We also have 6,000 active learners, based in 23 countries and 218 cities around the world.
Lifeed recognises that all life transitions can train our skills – from parenthood to caregiving. It’s why we’ve decided to add a new caregiving path to our platform. Riccarda Zezza commented:
“This raise is an important milestone on our journey, one that has been particularly intense and strenuous. The entire Lifeed team took part in the process and grew from the experience. This also signals the beginning of scaling and growing internationally. Our innovation is sought after all over the world: from Germany to Japan to South East Asia. This is the reason why our next growth phase, besides consolidating our position in Italy, will be outward-looking. We know that Life Based Learning combines wellbeing and personal development, and we want as many companies and individuals as possible to have access to the benefits that this brings.
Melody Lang, Founder, MPC Education commented: I am extremely proud to be backing such an impressive founder with a strong vision I totally adhere to. I am thrilled to be part of this new chapter for Lifeed. Many more parents need this solution, globally!
Italian telecommunications company Linkem has been honing their employees’ skills with Lifeed, in response to market changes. They’ve focused on skills such as self-awareness, empathy and listening, mental elasticity and complex problem solving, which have proved vital in coping well with this change.
In November 2018, Lifeed went on tour to Japan. Our CEO Riccarda Zezza spent a whole week with Managers, representatives of Institutions and Universities, students and other social entrepreneurs. It was an opportunity to share about how work-life balance should radically be redefined worldwide, and how parents should stop seeing their time off work spent with their children in conflict with their careers.
NHK World-Japan, the international service of Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, interviewed Riccarda to better explain how parents’ caring experiences can train soft skills – even becoming the equivalent to a business degree.
“What I want to say to Japanese women is that now is the time when new models are needed by women and society. If you don’t try to be perfect, think about something more fun. Don’t think about making sacrifices, think about creating a solution. It is certainly not easy to change society, but it is evident that it is not sustainable as it is now.” Riccarda Zezza on Asahi Shimbun GLOBE.
“Being a parent means bringing more complexity to your life. When you raise a child, different kinds of problems come up every day. You have to deal with them all as a parent. As a result, you will be required to have mental flexibility, and your determination and judgment will be improved. It’s a very important skill as a professional person, and it will be possible to improve these abilities through parenting What has been scientifically proven is of course some sort of thing.” Riccarda speaking to Mrs. Miwa Tanaka, editor on Mi-Mollet.com and career counsellor.
Losing ground every time a “life event” invades the working sphere. Considering every absence a crisis that is difficult to recover from. Watching the clock to decide whether a worker’s time belongs entirely to the company. These are all examples of 20th century practices. Practices that link to a reality that no longer exists.
According to recent research from Harvard, 73% of US workers are also caregivers: they provide care in the private sphere. They are mothers, fathers, children, siblings and friends.
These people are responsible for caring for others on a daily basis. Sometimes it feels more intense, other times less so. Relationships – and life in all its forms – have entered the workplace. But we haven’t mapped them yet: we look at them through a world that no longer exists. It’s becoming increasingly evident that we’re adapting corporate regulations and behaviors to something that’s obsolete. Things aren’t changing either: absences are seen as crises, clocks are used to assess workers and life is seen as an “anomaly”.
The result? Extremely high costs – some are visible, some are hidden.
The visible costs involve stress (between €300 – €500 billion per year worldwide), flat or declining productivity even as technology advances and a high turnover of staff when people leave due to being unable to “manage” their dual roles. The hidden costs related to the loss of talent and productivity are a result of companies pretending to ignore the life cycles of their people. Or maybe they actually ignore them?
The willingness to ignore the cycles of life of the people of this millennium is the only possible explanation for the way in which our approach to work is not evolving, consequently absorbing the cost of voluntary ignorance. The Harvard research data is clear (and also familiar to us):
1) An increasing number of families are “different”. The number of married couples is decreasing, while the number of single parent families and mixed family groups, for example several generations living together, is increasing.
2) The participation of women in the workplace is becoming essential to the survival of the entire economic system, and “much of the highly educated female workforce in the United States at one point or another ‘opts out, ratchets back, or redefines work,’ due to caregiving responsibilities”.
3) In 2013, 47% of middle age Americans were in a so-called “sandwich” situation caught between the care of their children and that of their parents. Intense needs that are not only about care and financial support, but also about emotional support.
At the same time, the business world is battling over talent management. How can we attract the most talented people, and how can we retain them? But the people that focus on caring for people’s wellbeing are not always the same that focus on talent management. HR teams are beginning to understand that people’s lives are increasingly complex and multi-dimensional, their needs are not only practical but increasingly human. But at the same time, they are continuing to attract workers by valuing solely their professional lives, as if they’re living in a vacuum.
Companies often invest in dozens of benefits that workers don’t even know about – and if they do, they’re unlikely to change their perception of their employees. At the same time, corporations continue to ignore their people’s real life dimensions. We’re talking about those unexpected absences, the caregiving load that’s treated as an alien concept and the project delays that are confused with poor motivation. All of these elements weigh heavily on career decisions and progress. Just like they did in the last century.
How long can a company adhere to a reality-map that no longer exists? According to Professors Fuller and Raman, co-leads of the project “Managing the future of work” at Harvard:
“The return for companies that learn how to take care and recognize the caregiving dimensions of their people, will go far beyond the hiring of employees. They will gain the potential to create an important source of competitive advantage”.
And it is not just about providing a series of useful services. Of course, that’s important, but it’s not enough. It is a matter of changing perceptions and culture. The life dimension must be openly integrated into the work cycle design. Planned and predictable life stages planned alongside career stages. Joined together, just like they have been in our lives for a very long time.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
Over our lifetimes, we all have the opportunity to influence thousands of people. Even the most introverted people can make an impact! So how can we leverage this power for the better? How can we become better leaders?
Riccarda Zezza, CEO of Life Based Value and Manuela Andaloro, CEO of SmartBizHub and international blogger, joined forces to create a series of interviews aimed at portraying impact makers and leaders who are driving change and innovation worldwide. In doing so, are raising awareness on a new successful type of genuine leadership.
New role models who base their success on strategic ‘soft’ skills, such as empathy, creativity, communication, those incredible few who spark energy and strength as they positively impact others and society.
After a very successful first interview with Chiara Condi, we continue this month with an open discussion with Dr. Mariarosaria Taddeo. She’s a Researcher Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab. Together, we talk about her work, her values and commitment to Artificial Intelligence and its applications to a vast variety of sectors.
Once I read Italo Calvino’s lecture ‘On Lightness’. I copied a passage that I keep framed in my home office: “The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times—noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring—belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars”.
It must have been 15 years ago when I first read that book. Sometime I think I have managed to achieve that lightness, but then it does not take long for me to realize I am still not there. That lightness requires constant training. It comes with a proper understanding of the world and of human nature. So I continue to strive for that lightness and to gain a better understanding of the order of the world.
More mundanely, I am a scholar. As a scholar I have passion for understanding things and solving (conceptual) problems. I like analytical thinking, precise language; a certain order in the way things are done. I am also a woman, which to me means braveness, smartness, determination, integrity, irony, elegance.
So, today, I am someone who is working to become a better scholar, a better woman, a better person; some days it looks like I succeeded, some other days less so.
I envision fun. I do not see a real distinction between work and life. The idea of balance implies a trade-off, as if one (work) came at the expense of the other (life). This is unacceptable. It should not be the way in which the two are related. I am committed to the idea that our jobs should be part of our plans to spend our lives well, not a sacrifice to go through life.
I’ve been doing the job that I have wanted to do since I was a child. I enjoy it tremendously: it enriches my life, it enables me to express core aspects of my personality, it keeps my curiosity alive and gives me the opportunity to grow as a person. At the same time, I am fortunate enough to have wonderful friends and family with whom I can share my passions, my ideas, my doubts and this helps with my work.
I realize that this is not the case for most of us. And I believe that it is important to change this. We need to have in place the right infrastructures, support, means, and leaders to prevent work from becoming alienation; that the hours we spend working do not become time subtracted from our lives. It is a complex matter, one that requires urgent and careful consideration.
Inevitably, personal and professional lives feed each other. Together they always take me on new adventures. Some days feel like being caught between Scylla and Charybdis; one needs tremendous skills to navigate through a rough patch of water and have a clear sense of the hazards therein. Other days are like having just passed Scylla and Charybdis; you look back and try to see what went well and what did not go well but with a sense of achievement. Some other days are like being at the mouth of the Straits of Messina and preparing for the challenge. The lesson learned from these ‘adventures’ is exactly this: there are days in which the risk is either ahead, past or in front of us and it is important to remember this all the time and not to lose perspective.
I work in academia so I am not sure about management in a corporation. I’ll answer your second question, ‘how not to become a bad manager’, which seems more broad. From my experience it is important to reach a balance between internal and external factors.
Internally, good managing rest on the ability to build the right team. This means getting and maintaining the right talent and resources and then carefully balancing the inevitable social and political dynamics that will emerge within the team. It is also about making sure that the ambitions of the leader are or become the ambitions of all the team members, making sure that the success of the team means the success of all its members. Finding the right equilibrium between managing and empowering the team members is also crucial. Externally, a good manager has the responsibility to understand the bigger picture, to foresee risks and emerging opportunities and to get the team ready to mitigate the former and harness the latter. Not an easy task.
There are two mistakes. The first one is, fortunately, increasingly less common, and it is to forgo ambitions or goals that appear to be at odds with cultural norms (for example, some jobs are male-dominated so women are less encouraged to undertake them) or at odds with one’s personal aspirations (starting a family, for example). To sacrifice these ambitions before even trying is detrimental to oneself and to other women. It is like a self-imposed censorship, with the caveat that it also harms other people. It is always worth trying, trying harder, and perhaps even failing.
The second mistake is making it all about being women and allowing it to be a relevant factor in career choices, more relevant than skills, background, experiences, more than one’s plan and ambitions. Do not get me wrong, protecting and fostering diversity in the work place is crucial. Ensuring equality is fundamental. I believe that it is everybody’s responsibility (women and men) to ensure that diversity and equality are respected. But this is different from proving one’s ability and value in the workplace which should have nothing to do with gender. We, as women, need a fair playing field not a different one to show that we can be an asset in our workplaces. Confusing fair with a different is dangerous and may only bring us more discrimination.
To some extent yes. The values of this generation seem to be more aligned with social and environmental sustainability. At the same time, leaders also have to deal with external factors (economic, political, technological), so these values will shape future leaders to the same extent in which they will shape future societies.
Millennials are the biggest generation in history. They have strong values and are growing and getting ready to take over a leading position. Old-school organizations will have to adapt to new models of management if they want to retain resources and talent when competing with more modern organizations. Old-school management will face pressure from their competitors and hopefully also from laws and regulations which will increasingly foster values such as diversity, equality, and environmental sustainability.
Three perhaps. One is a paper published in Nature “Regulate Artificial Intelligence to avert cyber arms race” (with Luciano Floridi), in which we described the next wave of cyber conflicts and the risks that they may pose for international stability. The second is related to the first one and is a theory for deterring attacks in cyberspace. The theory has been published in Strategic Analysis Hybrid CoE – The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats and it is likely to fill an important gap in our understanding of cyber conflicts and ways to avoid their escalation. The third one is broader and it is not my own discovery but it is equally important. It is the research and achievements of the Digital Ethics Lab. The group has been very successful. Its success makes me tremendously proud and it is a constant source of inspiration and motivation for me
It depends on the moment: trips to Puglia, dinner with friends, a video call with my sisters, a good book, horse back riding, even clubbing sometimes, are at the top of my list.
It is the passion for understanding things; in finding the truth; in solving a problem but also in getting better at my job and growing as a person. As a scholar, the ambition is to advance human understanding even only a bit and to use this understanding to shape our world. In my case, this means better understanding the dynamics of the impact digital technologies have on our lives and environment and shape this impact so that it will foster human flourishing and respect for our environment.
Impact is about shaping: offering an approach, a model, a way of thinking or doing things that others find insightful and start using. As a scholar my impact is perhaps mostly related to the way we think about cyber conflicts and the way we should regulate them. My research contributed to a shift in the way we deal with this phenomenon from an old approach based upon analogies with conventional conflicts to a new, original approach based on a deeper understanding of the nature of these conflicts.
I may also have an impact as a lecturer and mentor by shaping the work of some of my students or even just the way they approach some aspects of their future work.
I can only share the same lesson that was passed onto me when I started working in this area, “throw your heart into it”. Once you make a decision, risk it and commit to it. I should also add that one should be aware that very rarely a single decision can be made which inadvertently makes other decisions, too, which can subsequently impact other aspects of life and the lives of other people. This is why making the right decision is not easy at all; such is life.
Sociologists tell us that even the most introverted people will influence over 10,000 others in their lifetime. Can you imagine how many people we have knowingly and unknowingly influenced in our lives so far? How can we best leverage this power? How can we become true leaders?
We hear about leadership everyday, but are still left wondering who the real leaders are? Some you can see, some come with an executive job title or might even be well-known business people. But having a great title doesn’t make for a top achiever, and they might even sadly undermine our businesses and society.
Some leaders can hardly be seen, but have some of the greatest impacts. We believe real leadership is when one impact-maker influences another to drive sustainable progress forward.
Riccarda and Manuela’s idea is to create a series of interviews aimed at portraying impact makers and leaders who are driving change and innovation worldwide, and in doing so, are raising awareness on a new successful type of genuine leadership.
New role models who base their success on strategic ‘soft’ skills, such as empathy, creativity, communication, those incredible few who spark energy and strength as they positively impact others and society.
We start with Paris-based Chiara Condi, Italian-American, thirty year-old founder of Led By HER, a non-profit which empowers women who have suffered from violence through entrepreneurship.
I would say that I am at a crossroads of my life right now because I have spent the last ten years of my life working on gender equality and women’s empowerment issues and the last five years building up a nonprofit organization Led By HER, which carries out advocacy and programs for women’s entrepreneurship and women’s rights. This work that we have carried out on the ground over the years was very formative, it has given me new ideas and the willingness to do more. At this time it pushes me to advocate to try to change things on a new level through the visibility that I have gained. It has provided me with new ideas and visions of what we can do that can make a big difference for women and now, more and more, I feel that it is my job to make those ideas heard. That is why I try to participate as much as I can in conferences, media and international dialogues, because I think that it is more important than ever to raise awareness around these issues.
I think that there is no perfect formula about how to divide time in your life. The only thing that has worked for me has been setting priorities and making each decision based on those priorities. That way I never have to feel bad about the choices I made or about saying ‘no’ to something. And I believe that instead of always quantifying the time we spend on things in our life maybe we should be qualifying it instead. I do this in my own life by being fully present with whatever I am doing at the moment, whether that is work or my personal life. Even if it’s something small that I am allowing myself I enjoy it fully. When I am doing whatever I am doing at a given moment in time nothing else matters. When I try to apply this all-encompassing rule to my life I see that I feel much more fulfilled.
Yes. I believe that good parenting, like good management, is all about leadership development. Your role as a parent is to develop your child into an independent free thinking adult who will do his best in life. Much in the same way in companies; you foster people’s potential and talents so that they can be the best version of themselves. That is when they will also give their best. I also think that fulfilled individuals can become a company’s best asset as leaders.
I do not think I have formal role models, but I am very inspired by the women we helped through Led By HER because they taught me that whatever happens in life you can still show up and change your life. And if they believe that every day can be the start of a new life then all of us should. Whenever I think of them any excuse that I build up in my life not to show up falls to the ground.
Embodying your own goals is an important aspect of success. I care much more than I ever did about that and how I treat myself and run my own life. Only once you achieve that equilibrium in your own life can you unleash the potential to carry out great things. And it is not about major things, but rather about how you show up in your life daily.
If we are afraid of management it could be because we are associating it with an old style of doing things. I think that now more and more corporations are realizing that people are their first and most precious resource and that their biggest asset should be cultivating them. I think the best survival skill in any environment is always to be yourself. Whatever decision you make, don’t make it come from your environment but from you; that is the only way you will be OK with whatever happens around you.
One of the greatest qualities of new leaders is empathy. Understanding the people you have in front of you, their potential and where they want to be will enable you to make the best arise out of the people you work with. Great leaders see potential and work with it.
Not asking for their worth. I interviewed many women around the world and I realized that if there was a common denominator in their struggle it was credibility. The truth is that while a man’s work is taken at face value, a woman’s work is not. Women expressed that they have to prove themselves and work twice as much as men to prove that they deserve something.
But we cannot stop there and surrender ourselves. Even if the world is this way and these are our circumstances why can we not work on being so aware of ourselves and know our own worth to claim what we deserve? Every time you are asking for that promotion or negotiating that raise do it, go for it, for yourself and for all women because it is time we teach the world what we are worth and not settle for anything less.
Yes. I think we are moving towards a leadership of questions rather than a leadership of solutions. Good leaders ask all the right questions, not people who already know the answers. Innovation has turned the world on its head because it has taught us that hierarchy does not exist. Good ideas can come from anywhere and the best leaders are those who will be able to seize things rather than impose them.
I had the chance to give a conference about this lately recently in Cape Town for the aviation industry, which is an industry that faces great challenges in renewing itself for the future. There is potential for all industries as long as people’s voices are heard and they are included in the process. When people lose sense of their work is when they feel that their work is disconnected from what is happening around them. There is no such thing as an organization and its employees, they are just one—the organization is its employees and therefore they have to feel with every ounce of their bones that they are part of it. That is what we all want, to be part of something greater than ourselves, and organizations that miss out on providing that sense of purpose will miss out of the future.
That nothing is permanent; that I am replaceable and not to be attached to any single outcome in life. There is no single solution, but when I started I had very fixed measures of success. When you do that it makes it impossible to just be happy with whatever is happening right now and to trust that even if something is different from what you expected it can still be great.
I also realize that sometimes you start someplace and then life takes you somewhere else, and I used to fight against that, but now I have learned to listen to it and to embrace it.
I never believed when I was younger that I mattered more than what I do, but now I do because I understand that is the only way to make a difference. You can only give fully from that place of abundance, so I try to create that for myself daily.
It takes the form of daily yoga, Pilates and meditation with visualization and journal writing. And then taking longer moments of distance from my work through travels that nourish my soul. I love seeing what I have never seen before and it replenishes me entirely.
Feeling that I left the world a little better than it was yesterday.
If I can say that to myself then I can sleep well at night.
I used to think that impact was a big word and impact meant millions of people, that everything had to be big to matter. Actually Led By HER taught me the opposite. Impact is much more about doing small things in a big way. Impact is about the intention and magnitude with which you do every little thing– and that is what will move mountains. I learned that you change a world one person at a time and each of those small revolutions will foster others.
Make sure that the first person you serve is always yourself because that is the only way you will truly help others.
“How can I have more women in my management team? We have thirty-five team members and all of them are men. I want to boost our company’s gender diversity”.
A Japanese manager asked me this question while I was on a Japanese tour. I was on a business trip, visiting prestigious universities and big companies that were keen to learn more about the revolutionary ideas behind our program.
So, of course, my natural response was to talk about Lifeed.
Despite the cultural distance, I discovered that Japanese women are very similar to us. They are natural allies in our efforts to bring about change in bringing gender diversity to the workplace. Just like in Italy, the Japanese birth rate is at an all-time low. 60% of women don’t return to work after maternity leave. What’s more, their culture is also very traditionalist. It’s considered a national emergency, but perhaps it’s also a good time to change the rules and perspectives when it comes to the world of work.
There were fifteen women and one man in the room. All of them were managers in big companies. We’re in a workshop about stereotypes.
I said, “Raise your hand if you have power”. They smiled at each other, feeling embarrassed. Not one single hand went up. In all the years that I’ve been asking this question, it was the first time that this happened. I’m in Japan, and for the first time I realise that Japanese women are worse off than their Italian counterparts. Even if there are numerical similarities in terms of employment, gender diversity and representation.
So, I decided to see if the “empowerment” mechanism that I’ve experienced so many times in Europe would work in Tokyo too. I said, “Raise your hand if you have responsibilities”. They smiled at each other and all raised their hands. This time, their smiles were liberated: they had already understood where we were going. I didn’t need to say it, but I said it anyway: “You can’t have responsibilities if you don’t have power in those same areas”.
It’s so typical of women. They don’t link power and responsibility. They know they have the latter, but don’t feel that they have any power. But when we think about the powers at be, the reverse is opposite. Many people in power fail to link it to responsibility.
Finally, I ask them to raise their hands again if they think they have power. This time every time goes up. It works in Japan too. Perhaps I could say that it’s a universal principle. Women accept the notion of power if it’s clearly linked to the concept of responsibility. I’ve learned a lot about Japanese women during this trip. In just a few days, I’ve met with companies, students and the media.
Japanese women are similar to us. But they are probably also angrier. Because ultimately, they are locked into an older culture that’s still quite traditionalist. It makes it hard to enjoy being a working mother. By the end of the workshop, everyone in the workshop had glittering eyes. Perhaps it’s easier to accept that the formulas needed to activate change have come from somewhere else. Maybe it needs to be that way.
After the workshop, I talked to a second-generation Japanese businessman, the one who asked me the question at the beginning of the article. How can I have more women in my management team? How to be diverse?
I replied, “If you really want to bring women to the table, you have to change everyone’s habits. Starting with you. If you don’t want women who are the same as men, you’ll have to be ready for different questions, different incentives. For example, a nice car might not work. Women prefer to have the benefit of time, of flexibility. Women are different and they’ll shake things up. Are you sure that’s what you want?”
He listened carefully. His father is head of the company and he’s going to be retiring in two or three years. He wants to make a lot of changes and women can be his best allies. Possibly the distance between Italy and Japan (an eight-hour time difference and a twelve-hour flight) allowed him to ask bolder questions. He also allowed me to give braver answers than either of us would have accepted from our fellow citizens. In short, it’s the same with the women I meet: less mistrust than we often find among Italians, a more immediate desire for alliances. Perhaps precisely because we are so different in appearance yet so similar in substance.
This article was originally written by our CEO Riccarda Zezza for Alley Oop, Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the original article in Italian, click here.
