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, Leslie shares how travelling to China opened up his perspective and helped him become an entrepreneur. He also shares his vision of trust and transparency that he sees in the world of HR in organisations. We also explore how every leadership journey is also a personal journey, he shares how he has grown and evolved over the years.

You can find Leslie at the below links

In the interview, Leslie shares

  • That he has been working in the HR space for about 15 years where he mostly worked within startups and also into scale up.
  • He describes himself as a leader who has strong hands-on experience.
  • I studied and worked at the same time which was very beneficial for my own development.
  • I started to work for booking.com and I think this was personally the first company where I truly experienced, professionalism in a way and hyper-growth and the use of data to make really good decisions.
  • I had the support also of my parents and that was great. But I also realized this kind of pushed me to go out of my comfort zone so I decided to do an internship in Shanghai China because I felt that I needed to do something that was not very obvious.
  • I think we can Restore trust to become more transparent, to become more clear and to overcommunicate on the expected impact, right before we actually start a work. 
  • It’s becoming more and more important that employees would also like to have a stronger say to have more access in the organizations that they work for so they would like to influence a certain process.