So thank you for coming today. Um to introduce myself. My name is Sarah Saban and I am an ex tech start up founder and um consultant to tech start ups. And my current business is a transformational leadership coach and consultant.So I partner with visionary leaders and entrepreneurs who are on a big mission to positively impact and change the world. So what this talk about is is, is about rather is about intelligent leadership and why that is really necessary to succeed in an exponentially changing business world.

So this talk will take about 20 minutes. I'm gonna try and leave a minute or two at the end for questions. But if you want to ask me something at a later stage that you feel you haven't got to ask, then please feel free to connect with me and just uh drop me a question. So I'd like to first start by going through what intelligent leadership is. So I love to use quotes to demonstrate points. And this quote is from Eckhart Tolle in his book, A New Earth. So cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger hole in which all things are connected, cleverness is motivated by self interest and it is extremely short sighted. Most politicians and business people are clever, very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short lived and always turns out to be eventually self defeating. Cleverness divides intelligence includes. So what I'm here to talk to you about is a new paradigm of leadership. But even before I get there, let's address the elephant in the room, which is the perceptions of leadership that exist in the old paradigm.

And when we think of leaders, we might think of job titles and power suits and a certain level of salary and we might think of a hierarchy. So the traditional organizational structure that you see and ideas and change being controlled at the top uh with slow decision making and kind of veiled communication where things are heard in whispers around the company. And um I've really lost count of the number of times that I've heard employees say nothing ever changes. They don't listen, et cetera, et cetera. So here's the thing that style of leadership is just not fit for purpose anymore. So just because you're a CEO um it does not mean per se that you're a good leader. And actually there is um a lot of data to support that. So talent smart, which is an organization set up by a chap called Doctor Travis Bradbury who uh researches all around the topic of emotional intelligence. He surveyed 500,000 people at work. So this was across industries, countries and uh levels within an organization. So from bottom up to C suite and what he found was that middle managers actually had the highest levels of emotional intelligence in the workplace. And from direct to level and above emotional intelligence actually decreases with CEO S having the lowest scores for emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Um And that's quite concerning because if a leader's primary function is to get work done through people, then you'd think the higher positions should have higher people skills and higher emotional intelligence, not less. And that's because a lot of people are promoted because of what they know.

So their technical knowledge and how long they've worked. Whereas um really emotional intelligence is very often linked to that really high performance that differentiates leaders. So the reason why I'm telling you this is because there is a real opportunity in developing your emotional intelligence to rise in the workplace of the future, which is going to call for um leaders that have more of these sort of new hallmarks of leadership, which I'm gonna go through and we are in a world increasing in VCA.

So volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and as a company. Um and as a leader, you need to be agile, you need to pivot quickly and inno innovate to stay relevant. And the reality is if you have leadership that is really far removed from the front line um and to, to add insult to injury, if they also don't listen to people on the front line, they don't listen to their customers. You quite simply won't be able to anticipate and see future trends and obstacles. So even if you're around today, you might not be around in 5 to 10 years time as a company. So it's time to kind of get on the evolution train and recognize that it's constant or die basically as a company. So it happened to Blockbusters in the naughties. Um And it nearly actually happened to LEGO, they nearly went bankrupt. And the only reason they didn't was because the leadership team were sensible enough to listen to a consultant within the organization who was promoted to CEO and ultimately saved that saved Lego. So what does intelligent leadership look like? Now, I want you to imagine a new world of work and I want you to imagine an alternative to what you might have seen in the past as the status quo.

Um And although this may be more, may more seem like it's for Corporates, I've worked with a lot of start ups that took these less positive elements of corporate structure into their start up. So within any organization, the new paradigm is not just about people at the top creating change, it's about everyone in the organization taking responsibility for being a leader. And when I say a leader, I don't necessarily mean a manager, obviously someone needs to manage, someone needs to look after the day to day. But a leader is more than that, a leader is a visionary and every single one of us can develop those visionary qualities that drives change, drives innovation and inspires people. And that's ultimately what's going to drive companies forward. So to reiterate, it's not about a job title and power suit. Although um I'm actually quite fond of the power suit on occasion, but these principles of leadership apply irrespective of title and the number of people that you lead or don't lead. So at the very least, you should be um self leading as well. So what does the new paradigm include? So here are some hallmarks of it.

So number one collaboration now, instead of thinking of a traditional organizational chart, which actually encourages competition because you're constantly thinking how to get to the next level, what you need to imagine is a bull's eye. And in the center of the bull's eye is the main goal that the main mission that everyone within the company and the team is working towards and working towards that goal is actually ultimately what's rewarded. And therefore, you've got collaborations between teams to work towards that mission and that helps break down silos because otherwise you tend to get functions each doing their own thing and lost in their own little world and they tend to lose sight of the bigger picture. Secondly, radical communication.

So um this not only means as a leadership team, you or a leader, you need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively to your employees and your team. What is going on, why you're making decisions, uh what the vision is, et cetera, but entrench that open communication amongst the team in general and what that means is that anyone can walk into the leadership team's office and say what needs to be said. Um And if that kind of open communication is encouraged, you actually have a much greater chance of um building high performing teams. Thirdly, co elevation and the collective win. So the collective win was um a concept that literally blew one of my clients minds together. We can achieve much more than we ever could by ourselves. So there's no point in having, for example, a sales team where you've got one star player who runs around doing their own thing and then a load of average performing people. What you need is for the team to take responsibility with the leaders, to cross the finish line together, to coach each other and to hold each other accountable. So you've got that kind of peer to peer coaching going on. You've got people helping to bring each other standards up. And your success measure is basically, if we fail, we fail together. If we win, we win together, fourthly, having a strong vision and purpose.

So each person should know what the company vision is and also know what their personal vision is and where they stand in relation to it. So really often when I see people that are unhappy at work, they either have no idea what their company vision or purpose is. Um And therefore sort of they're really losing that purpose motivator and that creates engagement or there's a misalignment in uh vision and values and that misalignment will inevitably lead to dissatisfaction. Um So it's really important to understand whether there is a personal and company alignment there.

Fifthly commitment to emotional intelligence. So one of the key skills of the future according to the World Economic Forum is emotional intelligence and it is something that all of us can develop. And um generally, what tends to happen is we're slightly weaker in one area of it than another. So we might be really empathetic but lack um lack the ability to have a confrontation and tough conversations, but it's 100% something that is really worth developing. Um as a core skill, six, a culture of trial and error. So to succeed. As a company, you need to be comfortable experimenting, comfortable failing and learning from that failure. And the only way that you will encourage people to do that is basically, if um you reward um measured risk taking, you reward learnings and you create that environment of safety for people where they know that they're not gonna have dire consequences if they um make a mistake and something doesn't go to plan seven, purpose equals profit.

So, um for a lot of leaders and a lot of companies, they might think, well, we need to focus on profit as number one. Otherwise we'll never make a profit. What's increasingly obvious in a lot of high growth companies is that where you f focus on purpose and impact first? The profit follows. And in the long term, it's a more sustainable and higher level of profit than if you had started by focusing on the profit first. And the last element is a coaching culture. So again, how can we empower each other to do better, perform better, et cetera? So you might say to me, OK, that all makes sense. So what's the problem? Well, the problem I observe is that many people that I've talked to and um especially women do not necessarily see themselves as leaders and are really, really reluctant to call themselves such. And why is that? Well, basically because many people associate leadership with these hallmarks of the old paradigm, so I don't have a certain job title. Therefore, I can't be a leader. Um Now this is the case, even where on deep on a deeper dive, they actually were uh constantly practicing a lot of these new leadership skills that I've just been through.

So what we need is this a shift in perception and I appreciate that it's difficult, especially if you've always experienced the type of leadership um that wasn't so positive um in your personal career because if you have, it actually becomes part of your belief system. And um really interestingly, I was talking to um the CEO of a biotech company last year and he runs his organization in a very coaching culture way. So he's one of those really new types of leader. And when I dug into why he was like that, he had worked for a manager in his formative years of his career who had that coaching style of leadership. And he saw the benefits for himself, for his motivation for his performance and the effect that it had on the team. And he could also contrast it to having a micro manager, um which I'm sure most people have probably had at some point in their career. And what he said to me is had he not had this positive example of leadership, he probably wouldn't be leading in the same way today because he wouldn't know that it really worked. So I appreciate that, you know, it takes courage to imagine a new form of leadership and redefine what leadership means to us personally. Um But anyone who chooses to develop leadership skills can start to apply them in their everyday life.

And if we don't, we actually risk holding ourselves and our career development back because of these old perceptions of leadership. And it's really necessary that we take this personal responsibility because radical company adaptability can only be achieved in a powerful leadership culture um with high performing teams.

So in terms of the solution, I'm gonna give you some practical steps here. The first step on the road to becoming an intelligent leader is to develop self awareness as to who you are, where your strengths lie and what your vision and purpose is. And that forms the foundations for the first quadrant of emotional intelligence as well self awareness. And when I work with clients, I encourage them to think of transformation as starting from the inside out. So know yourself, know that which you want to create and then you can start engineering backwards from there. But I encourage people to dream big because once you plant that seed in your mind, your brain starts coming up with ways and working backwards to help you get there.

And when you start to operate in that way for yourself, it becomes a ripple effect because you can help other people to do that too. So some steps to authentic leadership, number one, commit to knowing yourself and to being self aware. And that also um means asking for feedback. So 360 feedback is really good because often other people see us better than we can see ourselves. And once you know what your core strengths are, you start um applying those strengths that are innate to you that are authentic to you and learn to master those whilst also bringing up the areas for improvement that are holding you back. So what that might look like is for example, you're really empathetic and insightful, but you're not very good at confrontation or tough conversations. So it's about applying empathy to tough conversations in order to bring up the weakness whilst focusing on the strength. Secondly, modeling.

So this is actually especially important for people that have never had particularly positive leadership role models. But if you have had them, then you'll probably be able to think of a an example from your past or present, start to look for evidence uh that the kind of leader you want to be works. So start to look for evidence of leaders that you admire in all aspects. So you have an aspirational model of leadership that you can build a strategy around. So part one of that is knowing yourself and part two of that is finding external inspiration and validation to start shifting those belief systems that you might have thirdly set a strategy and action plan for your new identity. So basically, rather than boxing yourself into a personality type, know what type of leader you wanna be and start working towards that. So I'm actually um quite anti personal tests because they tend to only show you where you are right now, not your unlimited potential. And uh believe me, personality tests, I did 10 years ago when I was in the corporate world are completely different from the results. I got even six months ago in a personality test. So you need to decide what kind of leader you want to be.

What is your leadership mantra? Is it? I want to be an influential, powerful leader that leads uh the team around me really well. And then start developing powerful questions to hold yourself accountable and also little action steps you can take every day, every week to bring you closer to that aspirational goal. So you're gradually trying to show up more and more as the leader that you want to be. Fourthly create a compelling vision and share it. So you, if you don't know what you want, then it's really difficult to have clarity and it's really difficult to inspire others. So your vision gives you and other people clear direction and as a leader, you should also be helping other people to find out what's there, why, why are they there? What's their vision, et cetera? And then the last thing is develop a learning, learning mindset. So have the humility to know that no one knows everything and the most successful people in the world are committed to learning, learning learning. So I hope that you have enjoyed this. Um As I mentioned, I work with leaders in their teams to develop leadership skills for high performance.

So if you'd like a free consultation with me, please do get in touch or if you'd like to know more about me, please do visit my website connect with me on linkedin or feel free to drop me an email.