1W1-5 - Acts of leadership

[MUSIC] The key characteristic you most cited when describing your
inspiring leaders or role models are listening skills, empathy and
humility, ability to inspire and engage others, long term vision that
is clearly communicated, and responsibility and capacity to drive
change. You have clearly identified the importance of acts of
leadership and that is the first step towards building your own path.
Let me explain, we believe that leadership is not a technique that
works with a quick recipe or tools. Leadership is an act, not a
function. Leaders are not just the CEOs or presidents of countries and
companies. They are not necessarily the ones on the top of the pyramid,
not anymore. Leaders of tomorrow are people like you who engage in acts
that create value and sense for others. Therefore, you can learn to
develop the skills that are necessary to grow as responsible decision
makers and crafters of change. Let us listen to Apolinia again, sharing
with us what she considers an act of leadership in her role of the
family business leader. Building sense and developing the bakery her
father started before her and shaping her own future as a crafter of
bread. >> Actually, my example is a bread baking example. I don't think
I necessarily took on leadership of one of my sourdough loaves, but I
very distinctively remember one of the first breads I shaped in the
bakehouse. I was just a few weeks into my apprenticeship and I started
learning how to shape our sour dough loaves. Upon shaping a loaf into a
circular round, this big hug of bread, I realize that I am with my
hands giving life to a piece of dough. Four mere ingredients and that
to me meant that I was giving sense, giving life in a way to this piece
of dough. And that fed both a sense of what I was doing very much on
the spot, but also the greater bakery project, feeding people. >> There
are acts of leadership at all levels of the hierarchy and there are
crafters everywhere. In fact, you are one of them or becoming one, as
you learn and progress in this MOOC. So as an exercise in understanding
what can be an act of leadership, just observe the following scenes and
answer the question. Is this an act of leadership? Yes, most of those
scenes exemplify actual leadership, all except for two in fact. The CO
alone sitting at his desk and the woman looking in the mirror. The
exercise of leadership can take on many different forms as you saw.
Leadership is not owned by those in power. As the course progresses,
you will learn how to find your leadership style and adapt according to
situation, tasks, and people. Your perspective may be different because
of your experience, your background, your culture or your education,
all that has shaped you as who you are. By digging and learning about
who you are, you will begin unfolding the skills you can rely on to
forge the foundations of your leadership. Therefore, to grow your
leadership skills you first need to grow your self-awareness. And to do
this, the Savoir-Relier approach can definitely help you. But you must
be wondering by now what this awkward French compound word Savoir-
Relier really means, what lies behind it. Theodore Zeldin, British
historian and philosopher, has looked inside human nature to better
understand how relationships shape people. I have been fortunate to
work with Theodore over the past 12 years and reflected upon those
issues to build the Savoir-Relier approach. Theodore describes Savoir-
Relier as the capacity to join things, but he argues that people will
be able to join things only if they are able to break away from the
ideas they are stuck with. So let us first hear those who have
experienced the method. You will know everything else you need to know
about Savoir-Relier in our next episode.