This weekend, I attended the Women Leaders: Mastering Organisational Strategy workshop given by Dikla Camel Hurwitz at Stanford Graduate School of Business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In short, my summary is: attend it if you have a chance, regardless of your gender. I personally think many discussions and practices we had would be very useful for male professionals as well. This article is a longer version of my summary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having been through nearly a dozen courses at Stanford, taking a workshop throughout one full weekend seems very appealing from time management point of view. I was mildly concerned that it might be too overwhelming and offer little chance to digest content between sessions compared with the courses that spread over many evenings during a term of ten weeks.
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This turned out to be excellent. To me (a very active participant), it was tremendously stimulating and stretching. My physical and mental bodies were functioning at peak throughout the course. My misery came after its completion. While walking towards my ride by the Oval, there was this strong urge inside me to not take any further step and simply drop down right there on the grass and sleep off the fatigue that built up from multiple consecutive full weeks of work. Then the thought of ants, those scary creatures, propelled me to carry on and got my ride home.
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My objective of attending this course was not only to focus on the \u201corganisational strategy\u201d part, but also to hear about other women\u2019s experiences and connect with them (absolutely not the kind of connection formed by superficially exchanging business cards and barely going beyond the title and the profession etc). Above all, to have fun and stretch myself as much as reasonable beyond my comfort zone. Glad to say that I have done that. Hooray!
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The individual conversations and group discussions remain confidential. I respect our cohort of amazing professional women and am very honored to be part of this group. What they shared there broadened my view, gave me great second-hand experience, prepared me for a wide range of scenario, and more importantly led me to believe how strong and wise each of us could become by sharing and supporting each other. I would not write about the stories I heard. I own my responses and my feelings though. Resonance, empathy, anger, passion, respect, epiphany, courage, reflection, wisdom, hope and so on.
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The six areas that I had the privilege to receive great advice from Dikla; practice, reflect and improve together with my cohort are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The major benefit of this workshop to me come from the significant amount of practices or experiential learning.
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A selected few takeaways for me are<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A few specific items of feedback given to me<\/strong>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Three out of four pieces of feedback touch upon my high level of empathy. My own self-reflection: I offered a hug to the lady next to me who became emotional while talking about her professional journey; I felt painfully hurt (not by the speaker but by the circumstances that injured her), while another lady sitting across the room was in tears and I could not offer some concrete help on the spot. I did speak up but concrete actions are always what I am looking for. Offering some insights in words often felt so weak and powerless to me. Concrete actions! Having a high-level of empathy is not a rebuttal against the feedback above though, as my objective here is not to address my personal characteristics, but to improve the behaviour and language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n To have difficult conversations<\/strong>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n During a difficult conversation<\/strong>, it is important to <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the receiving end, it helps to stay engaged and ask for clarification, such as: can you give me an example? Also assume good intention. About managing relationships in difficult conversations<\/strong>, Dikla suggested to think about: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ladder of Influence: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We live in a world of self-generated beliefs that remain untested and are often wrong. There are observable data in the open window. From that, we select a piece of data, then we add meaning to it. We draw conclusions or beliefs from that slice; then we take some actions or no action based on those beliefs. My takeaway from this discussion is to do the Ladder of Influence exercise frequently. We\u2019d be surprised how many wrong directions we have leaned ladders towards once we examine our thoughts closely. On Executive Presence<\/strong>, Dikla reaffirmed my belief that leadership presence comes from within. She also taught me that perception is the co-pilot to reality. Sometimes, it does not matter whether I can, what I did; if I am not perceived as X, then I am not X in other people\u2019s views. Prior to this workshop, I had not thought much about perception. This was very thought-provoking. One excuse popped into my mind at the time: \u201cThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.\u201d You can find many other reasons to disagree with Dikla\u2019s point here. But I choose to see the great value of this advice. On teamwork<\/strong>, I found the Kantor Four-Player Model very useful. There are four different types of roles in a group dynamics: movers, followers, opposers, bystanders. Without movers, there is no direction; Without followers, nothing gets completed; Without opposers, nothing is corrected; without bystanders, there is no perspective. We assign too much value to movers typically. To lead well, it is important to have the flexibility to switch among these roles. It is useful to read the room to find out who is taking up which role and what role is missing, fill that gap temporarily, adjust the role I play flexibly. On strategic communication<\/strong>: I love the acronym AIM := Audience + Intent + Message. This one is self-explanatory. I am very grateful to my fellow attendees and our coach Dikla. This weekend, I attended the Women Leaders: Mastering Organisational Strategy workshop given by Dikla Camel Hurwitz at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In short, my summary is: attend it if you have a chance, regardless of your gender. I personally think many discussions and practices we had would be very useful for male professionals as … Continue reading Women Leaders: Mastering Organisational Strategy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-and-leadership","category-professional-development","category-rant"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saFL7T-1274","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1274"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274\/revisions\/1328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dongpingzhang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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