When you work in the public sector, everything goes back to one thing: People. Whether you’re leading a team, or are part of one, this conversation with Isabel Guerrero, former Vice President of the World Bank, will leave you with practical tips and ideas on how to improve your leadership skills.
(2:48) Isabel’s journey
Isabel was born in Chile but moved to Peru when she was a teenager. It impacted the way she thought about poverty and diversity. She decided Economics would be the most powerful way to contribute to a solution. Isabel joined the World Bank and worked there for 30 years. Listen to some of the challenges she faced and how she pivoted to helping organizations working with the base of the pyramid scale up.
(6:57) Being a woman in a leadership position
Many times, Isabel was the only woman in the room but instead of feeling insecure, she used it to her advantage. She knew people would listen to what she was going to say, so she made sure it was the best. She advises us to be prepared, to be the best. But, we have to own who we are and enjoy being a woman. We also talked about gender balance in teams and the advantages of hiring women.
(13:30) Characteristics of a good leader and how to foster them
One of the roles of a leader is to create a space to take risks and fail, to allow people to show who they are. Creating that space of trust is easier said than done. You need that space to generate innovation and try new things. This space has to be created with accountability and responsibility.
Isabel says that leading a team is like cultivating a garden. You prepare the soil in the best possible way. The team are like the seeds. You take care of them, you help them grow until they become flowers. You do it without knowing the final result.
(17:09) How to have difficult conversations with your team
First, understand that receiving (or giving) positive or negative feedback is not personal. It’s part of the process. All of us need to be willing to accept that there are always parts where we need to improve and having someone help us identify those areas is a gift.
Frequency matters. It has to be a permanent process, not something you only do at the end of the year.
When you need to give bad news make sure to start with the positive, then transition into the negative. Always give concrete examples so it’s easier for the other person to understand what’s happening.
(19:58) How to create the space to innovate in a hierarchical organization
Start by understanding the system and the expectations from you. If you deliver on that, with excellence, several times, you earn that capital to innovate and make mistakes. Then you spend it, build the capital and spend it again.
(21:20) If you have a bad (or a terrible) boss, this is what you can do
Consider having a ‘terrible boss’ as an opportunity to learn. It’s unpleasant and not always easy. But, as long as your boss doesn’t cross any lines in terms of values, you can learn from their mistakes. Listen to how Isabel did it.
(25:45) How to manage conflict and improve coordination among teams
As a leader, you have an additional responsibility on top of delivering results. You also have to focus on relationships. The higher up you are, the more relevant it is. Conflict will come from the corners you expect the least. It often happens when you are only managing results and not relationships.
(30:20) Before you learn to manage your team, you have to learn about yourself
Start by knowing yourself, your own issues. Your ‘shadow’ is the term Isabel used to refer to the things that aren’t great on us, but unfortunately, we don’t always see.
(32:00) About IMAGO and its approach to improving the way organizations work
“Being poor is about not being able to change the world around me”. That was the inspiration to found IMAGO and start the work at the personal level and then with the organization. The process of co-creation starts by working together, not as an expert, but as someone that has the tools to help them do it faster. Respect and value the expertise the poor have about their own environment.
(41:00) Final lessons on implementation in the public sector
- Get into the details (sounds familiar?) and then simplify, find the easiest way to do this.
- Identify who will implement the project and how.
- Don’t make assumptions or take something as given.
Final reflections
I once read that you can be a manager, but your people make you a leader, they choose that, not you. What we can do is to improve our leadership skills. Make sure we’re doing our best to get the best of the people working with us by creating a space of trust. That also means we have to go first, deliver results and open that space.
I believe that learning from others’ experiences is a great way to learn and I hope that this conversation with Isabel gives you some inspiration.
About
Isabel Guerrero worked for 30 years at the World Bank, including five years as Vice-President for the South Asia region, managing a US$36 billion portfolio. In 2014, along with Zachary Green, she co-founded IMAGO Global Grassroots, an organization focused on giving people living in poverty the tools to build their own destiny. In addition to her work with IMAGO, Isabel is on the board of the Presencing Institute at MIT and a Council Member of the United Nations University.
She is an economist from the London School of Economics and a psychoanalyst trained at the Washington Psychoanalytic Society. Isabel teaches “Scaling Up for Development Impact” at Harvard University and was a Senior Lecturer in leadership at MIT until 2017.
Resources to complement this conversation
- Imago Global Grassroots
- An excellent book on leadership, Trillion Dollar Coach
- Interested in design-thinking? Get the best free resources here.
- Why has Peru been so badly hit by COVID-19?
Credits: Intro: “Too Cool” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
