Time To Be Presented with a Choice With Sesil Pir – Part 2

Sesil Pir is recognized as an expert Human Resource thought leader, focusing on changing the status quo of work and championing humanity into the global workplace.

Sesil is the founder and Principal Consultant of SESIL PIR Consulting GmbH, a boutique management consultancy, and Founder of Whirling Chief, a global digital collaboration & learning platform.  Sesil is an active contributor to Forbes, has been published in the Harvard Business Review, HR Zone, UK’s HR Magazine, and has contributed to several Human Resources Management books.

Today I continue my discussion with Sesil about how the art and science of human-centered leadership remind us all that it always comes down to how you lead yourself and others around you, through connection and caring. If you missed the first episode, listen here.

Key Leadership Takeaways:

  • Businesses need to serve a purpose broader than just revenue generation, organizations need to ground culture in humanity and leaders need to become more mindful of their way of ‘being’ to effectively influence a growing network of stakeholders.
  • It is more imperative now than ever for businesses to consider the potential gaps and opportunities in redefining and preparing a transition a full cycle work experience to ignite lasting engagement.
  • Mindsets are a collection of beliefs that orient our reactions and tendencies. In framing our realities, they serve a number of cognitive functions. At any given time, they present us with a choice, empower and equip us to shape our reality inside out. In the following phase of our study, we looked to understand which mindsets were most prominent in supporting the leadership behaviors described above. We discovered the following:
    • 1. Caring (over control): This mindset enables individuals to carry a sense of virtuousness towards what they get in contact with and develops an aspiration to become what they would be at their best.
    • 2. Abundance (over scarcity): This mindset enables individuals to carry a sense of on-going responsibility and supports the development of confidence to better take in, process, and utilize information and other resources more wisely.
    • 3. Wellbeing or Benefit (over welfare): This mindset makes better relatedness a possibility between individuals and supports the formation of context that offers equal opportunity to belonging.
    • 4. Productive (over defensive): This mindset enables individuals to keep a future-focused and shared reality and motivates better allocation of resources for solution-building.
    • 5. Interconnectedness (over self-orientation): This mindset provides grounding on intersections and raises interest in connections over self-making.
    • 6. Collective (over the individual): This mindset enables individuals to care equally about group goals and accomplishments over a single, dedicated task.
    • 7. On-going learning (over fixed): This mindset supports the process of discovery and injects hope towards growth possibility.
    • 8. Practice (over action): This mindset puts emphasis on consistency and time over immediate action and short-term results in reach of continuity.

Leader Action Plan:

  • Organizations are fundamentally human (living) systems:
    • Individuals inside an organization can be considered as active ‘cells’ and teams as ‘connective tissues’ grouped together to perform specific tasks. By taking a system’s approach we enable organizations to reconnect to their core for ‘being’ and unlock the full potential for renewed and sustained success.
  • Emotions are at the center of our cultures:
    • Even though emotions have been traditionally pushed out of business, we find them essential to distinguish individual and collective values and initiate content themes espoused by employees to inspire collective behavior. As culture consists of patterns of meanings that link these manifestations together, it is imperative that we focus on both the attitudes and attributes that trigger particular emotions, which in time create behavior change for individuals.
  • Change can be initiated from the top and bottom:
    • Companies are often faced with a dilemma about whether the change initiatives must be driven from the top or they should be organic from the bottom up; we believe there needs to be deliberate effort to bring two together.

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Until next time…remember that Iron Sharpens Iron, make yourself and others around you better every day!