This is the Leadership Journey series on the Choosing Leadership Podcast.
I believe we all have a lot to learn from each other’s stories – of where we started, where we are now, and our successes and struggles on the way. With this series of interviews, my attempt is to give leaders an opportunity to share their stories and for all of us to learn from their generous sharing. If you know a leader whom you would like to see celebrated on the show, please send me a message on LinkedIn with their name.
In the interview, Andrea spoke about constantly moving across continents and how that has shaped her attitude to flexibility and adaptability. She spoke about a key moment while leading a team at Fresh Direct in which she showed up a leader in an emergency situation. We also discuss confidence, finance, creativity, and storytelling from a leadership perspective.
You can find Andrea at the below links
In the interview, Andrea shares
- I always had like a very big interest In the world in general.
- I think there are many different things you pick up, uh, when you live in different countries. I think you become very flexible. Um, because, and adaptable, because you have to do it every so often. Um, I think you also, um, learn appreciation actually because you learn to appreciate like the different things in different places.
- because you are faced with making new friendships from start, so, You actually kind of get skills in how to understand people, in how to deal with different kinds of people, obviously languages and the ability, to communicate with people at different levels.
- at the end of the day, leadership is about dealing with people
- I’m not doing it because I think it’s a fancy thing to do. or a, let’s say timely thing only. It’s like a trendy thing to do, rather, That’s the right word to use. It is a real problem in society.
- there will always be doubters like, there will always be doubters on anything you do, so you might as well just find the ones that believe in it and go for those and, partner with those people.
- I’m a strong believer that there are new ways of managing and leading than I think the ones that I have seen used many times in my career.
- I’d like to refer you to a professor that I had at Harvard. Her name is Frances Frei, she uses this methodology. It’s a triangle that she says that it is really critical factors in leadership if I remember them correctly. It’s one authenticity two empathy and three logic and basic ability to do what you to do, to execute, to think, to put your mind, uh, and develop interesting solutions.
- I have seen many times when people leave companies and are very destroyed because of management styles, and leadership styles, and I think that’s a pretty bad outcome for an organization. if we would measure things a little bit differently, um, then we would lead differently
- if you have a person come to work and being fearful, uh, scared about the reaction of the manager or the boss, uh, insecure about what he or she’s bringing to the table, you may not get to listen to really great ideas that can change the outcome of a project, you may not get to experience a great team, an environment that can actually create different outcomes. So I think there’s much more to be done on that side still in the world of business
- I think children are a great source of creativity and like really, like it almost feels, um, weird, but when you spend time with kids, I think you really. Kind of disconnect from the day-to-day and therefore kind of a new window opens up in your head.