Day Six: Open hearts and leadership lessons

Note: Another long-ish blog post - I'm letting it all pour out! The short version is at the end (key takeaways and reflections on leadership and people opening their hearts)

Day Six: Thursday, May 12
 

This experience continues to amaze me - day 6 was action-packed (much like all the other days) - most of the day was spent at our client site learning about their marketing and communications strategy - they do a lot of good stuff but it's largely disjointed and there is limited tracking of their activities - part of our eventual recommendation is going to be the creation of a simple communications calendar that helps them streamline their activities. Additionally, we're going to be suggesting some basic metrics for them to keep an eye on as they invest their time, money and energy in various marketing activities. Not surprisingly, they're on the social media bandwagon as well and have a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, an Orkut page and a YouTube channel - as with much of what's out there, the content is dated and no ongoing dialogue exists between them and their target audience (afro-Brazilian youth who are in high school) - social media marketing can only work if the dialogue is ongoing and engaging - we're hopefully going to help them here. As a quick aside, early in the day we found out that their current website host had gone out of business and consequently they had lost all their webpages ... thanks to Google, I found a internet archiving project called Wayback Machine - reference link at the end. We were able to find a cached version of their website dating back to late 2010 and they were able to retrieve all the lost webpages - yay for technology! :-) - check out how some of your favorite sites may have looked 5-7 years ago - pretty radical transformation from then until now, I bet!

We also made some good progress on categorizing remaining open questions, sorting through a running idea list and identifying all upcoming deliverables and milestones on the project - as I've mentioned before, we really are working hard to manage the client's expectations and having a plan certainly helps!

One of the things I've been reflecting on is how leaders evolve and how roles emerge in any team setting - it's very fascinating for me to see how the 5 teams are assigning roles amongst themselves - at the beginning of the assignment, no roles and responsibilities were fixed - yet, just about 4 workdays in, it seems that there is some natural alignment of roles and individuals. What drives and motivates leaders? What differentiates them? How great leaders are typically leading in multiple life spheres and not just one. That train of thought has led me to thinking about what really makes great leaders great - I've jotted down below my thoughts on what behaviors great leaders exhibit - this list is based on my observations of leaders that I look up to. It's not intended to be an exhaustive list and I welcome comments/adds/deletes on these behaviors. Great leaders...
- have passion
- Persevere
- are deliberate
- are storytellers
- look at all experiences as opportunities to grow, advance and stretch
- mostly have a positive outlook on things
- serve and treat others with a high degree of respect
- know that respect does not come from title - they also know that respect has to be earned.
- know when to step-in and when to step-out
- separate the material from the immaterial - they know what's important and what's trivial
- know that being busy and being effective are two completely different things
- constantly seek to improve themselves and strive to provide opportunities for those they lead
- know that leadership is a privilege
- lead inclusively
- see opportunity in the most difficult circumstances
- take risk
- are humorous
- always put people first. Without fail. Never compromise.
- Make decisions with imperfect information
- remember things that are important to people (birthdays, family milestones)
- know that leadership is not easy and constantly work on adapting and improving their style
- are adaptable
- consistently put in discretionary effort
- ...

Moving on to the Bahi'an people - continue to be very amazed to see the spirit of the Bahi'an people - very easy-going, very warm and definitely seem very happy - I plan on doing some digging on what really drives their apparent happiness. As a quick example, on our way back from lunch it started raining pretty heavily - we ducked into the first open store we saw - it turned out to be a music store (CDs and records) - the guy who runs it is originally from Indianapolis and was very friendly and knew a lot about the music history and origins in Salvador - had a great conversation with him - he's lived here about 20 years and has the same easy-going, high-spirited nature that the natives seem to posses! Bought some great Brazilian samba CDs as a going-away thank you present for 2 of our program managers (they helped design the program and coordinated all the logistics) and are headed back to their home base of Washington DC - Muito obrigado (many thanks), Rodrigo and Justine!

Lunch today was an awesome crabmeat dish (w/ spices, lemon, coriander) and a local favorite called "Moqueca" - a traditional Brazilian seafood stew - ours had coconut milk, shrimp, palm oil, onion, garlic, tomatoes and cilantro - picture at the end - it was quite awesome! On the way to lunch, we came across the shop for a local music and drumming school called "Olodum" - if you remember the MJ video "They don't really care about us", that's the band/school I'm talking about - the video was shot here in Salvador - have include a link at the end of the blog post.

And then finally on to dinner - a totally amazing experience! On first arrival here in Salvador, I had asked one of our local consultants if there was an Indian restaurant in town (I had not been looking forward to a 30-day absence of Indian food!) ... while there's no Indian restaurant here, she told us about her British Indian friend and said that she would check with him about cooking a meal for us. Well, he totally came through! Dinner was at the community room in his apartment building - chicken curry, daal (lentils), naan, rice, raita (yogurt mix), cabbage sabzi - so awesome. Dinner companions were from all over the world (several expats) and we had a great view overlooking the Atlantic ocean! I was, quite literally, pinching myself in disbelief. Thank you Raghu for opening your home and heart to total strangers ... and I ask myself again, how often have I been the recipient of someone's hospitality and their open heart? And how can I consciously do the same and pay-it-forward. Open your heart and you will receive much much much more than you will give!

That's about it for Day 6 - have included some pics below as well as Key takeaways.

Key thoughts/takeaways
- Leadership, while challenging is also very rewarding ... great leaders consistently exhibit behavior that includes passion, perseverance, positivity, respect for others, putting people first, taking risk, making decisions with imperfect information
- Open your heart whenever you can - you'll be surprised at where it can lead you and what you will receive in return!
- People in Salvador are easy-going and high-spirited - I plan on digging into the roots of this apparent happiness over the next several weeks! :-)
- Leaders emerge in any team setting - embrace the leader inside you!

Reference links:
http://web.archive.org/ (Internet archiving)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador,_Bahia (Details on the city of Salvador)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJL6nfu__Q (MJ video shot in Salvador)

One of the sidestreets where the MJ video was shot

Yummy lunch

Music shop

Music shop