Winnie Byanyima is a Ugandan former executive director of the global anti-poverty NGO, Oxfam, and the current executive director of UNAIDS, leading the global effort to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. She once asked pointedly, "What is growth for, if not to help ordinary people thrive?" Leadership is inextricably linked to the people you lead. You can grow as an individual and we certainly hope you have over the last three courses of this specialization. Ultimately, however, the reason to grow is not for yourself, it is to help others grow as well. Your success is your team's success, and their success is your success. For selfish purposes, learning to lead gives you the ability to impact and strengthen the environment that you must come to work in, day in and day out. Bringing out the best in everyone else, however, strengthens everyone yourself included. They can learn from you, but you will also empower them. Just show their strengths so that you can actually learn from them. Hi, my name is Cleveland Justis, and I'm the founder and principal of the Potrero Group, a research-based strategy and management consulting firm. As organizational leaders in entrepreneurship and innovation, we as a company have been working to innovate and help others grow stronger. I've worked in that space for more than 25 years, and I've worked in consulting widely with startups, businesses, non-profits, and government organizations. Currently, I'm the executive director or the director actually of the UC Davis Executive Leadership Program. It's also the university, UC Davis, where I earned my MBA and PhD. I also teach social entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley with a focus on international students. Hi again, my name is Daniel Student, and I am a management consultant and I'm a communications specialist. I have also been a cultural, environmental, and social sector leader for over 15 years, and I bring a unique cross-section of creative and business strategy to my work. I have designed and led workshops on international teams, on communication and the implicit bias that can often show up in their storytelling and leadership, and adaptive leadership and change management. Let's start this, our fourth and final course in the specialization with discussing leadership. Cleve, how do you demonstrate your leadership? What do you say? For me Daniel, my focus on leadership is really about listening; listening to people, showing empathy to them. I tend to focus on hiring really good people and giving them skills to do their work. I'm not managing all of their moment by moment interactions, but I'm there for them when they need me. But I'm also giving them time and enough latitude and opportunity to really grow and thrive. I spent a lot of time hiring good people, training them, and then supporting them to do their best. It's amazing opportunity. I love it so much. I found that I can do my best work when I hire great people and empower them to do their best work. How about you Daniel? I think I've been often recently referenced as a servant leader, which I think has some crossover with you. It's stepping back and not putting yourself in the limelight and letting other people shine. It's less actually, I don't often come from a place of being able to hire and be empowered maybe often sometimes I'm managing up to somebody and giving them a chance to expand how they can contribute to the world, how they can share their message. That said, I would also say I'm a leader, I think with a public voice. I think sessions like this, being a communications specialist, I know how to get up in front of a group of people and say things that inspire. They say I'm a bit of a facilitator too, I'm really able to both give the direction and help people see the vision of what could be. But also say, okay, I'm hearing what you're saying, I'm going to pull that out. I would say that the unique challenge that leaders in multinational cross-cultural teams face is that, yes, even leadership as you differently, depending on what culture you're from. But it's also a fertile proving ground for yourself as a leader in these multinational cross-cultural teams. Because you are thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool, if you will. The levels of complexity in modeling such a diverse group of people that work on multinational cross-cultural teams to learn and grow and change is perhaps unlike any other leadership challenge. You may think of the United Nations and other like global meetings. Do you ever feel there's a lot of talk, or a lot of action with those groups? Culture may be a big reason for the fact that they can't often translate it into direct results. That's true. While we do not expect you to solve global challenges as a result of this course, we do expect you to be able to explain different models of leadership with proven effectiveness worldwide, to understand how cultural differences and what is expected of leadership and help bring your team and others to show them how to adapt to your cultural style, to build faith and buy-in for you in the team. We want you to be able to set up and grow beyond this course and your relationship and help build out a global connected business community and encourage our leaders to grow and evolve. We consider this, what Cleve just said, to be advanced-level material, and this is an advanced level course of this specialization. This means we will cover all the same types of material that we have previously, tools and frameworks, specific cultural differences and challenges, interesting articles and presentations, insights, of course, from our wonderful panel of experienced professionals, etc. But we will also be challenging you to practice some higher level interactions with your team. Acting as a leader, even if you don't necessarily have any established authority. We expect a lot of our students might not be in a manager position. We encourage you to just take advantage of this opportunity then. As we heard before, if you don't feel comfortable maybe practicing the set work because maybe you really aren't sure if you can work this out with your existing manager, pick another team you're on in real life or group that you feel part of just a group of friends and see if you can practice these skills with them. As always, please, set aside time to answer the discussion questions, and read and review your classmates' responses. One last time, take a moment and look around yourself. We have many leaders among us. How do you demonstrate your very own leadership? That's a key question. Think about all those other leaders or maybe the people on your team. How do they demonstrate leadership? What do you admire that they do that you wished you did? This is the challenge and the potential of learning to lead multinational cross-cultural teams. There are so many different stories and approaches to learn from to become a leader. Let's get started.
