The 5 Virtues of the Transformational Leader

Por David Lamka

Do you want to start an organizational transformation but don't know how? Do you want to renew your leadership skills for the current challenges in the region? Do you feel called to lead to leave the world a little better than you found it?

In The 5 Virtues of the Transformational Leader, David Lamka invites you to embark on a significant journey of transformation. It is time to recognize that what generated success in the past no longer works. The current reality is placing new demands on you, new challenges that demand radical changes in your leadership, your company, your methods and what you contribution to the global community. In this book you will discover the 5 virtues that you and your team of leaders can develop to initiate an organizational transformation and turn it into a triple impact company, like BCorp, where success is newly measured not only in economic, but also social and environmental impact.

In each chapter you will find:
·       The mistakes that bosses usually make.
·       The virtue to achieve success with higher purpose and triple impact.
·       Interviews and videos of inspiring business leaders from Latin America.
·       A virtual self-diagnosis and tools to become a true transformational leader.

You will discover the 5 virtues:
1.     Your enthusiastic leadership to break old paradigms that do not work and create new ones more appropriate to the VICA era of transformation, connected to your life purpose and legacy.
2.     Your empowering leadership so that collaborators feel confidence, commitment, passion at work and feel called to develop their own extraordinary leadership.
3.     Your triple impact leadership so that millennials, consumers and collaborators vibrate with the purpose of your company, generating sustainability for society and, at the same time, being economically successful.
4.     Your global vision leadership to consciously see that in order to achieve economic results in the short and long term you need to develop the organizational culture, attitudes and customs that will sustain it over time.
5.     Your integral leadership recognizing that to be coherent you need to develop a deep self-knowledge of the conscious and the unconscious, having presence and flexibility to act from different polarities.

Does what you read resonate with you, motivate or inspire you? Do you feel any emotion in the face of this call? So, welcome!

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Hipertexto
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 19 jul 2023
• ISBN: 9789942441232

Vista previa del libro

As my wife said at our wedding ceremony, an event that begins with gratitude cannot end badly. So I begin by sharing my deep gratitude for life, which has placed extraordinary teachers in my path whose inspiration has allowed me to complete this book that

To my companion on the road, my mirror of love and personal growth, Margarita Pareja-Stoyell.

To my parents and siblings who taught me to love, to decide what I want and don’t want in life.

To my ancestors who transmitted me the restlessness to emigrate to new horizons.

To Julio Olalla and Daniel Taroppio for their wisdom and teachings that transformed me.

To Gonzalo Muñoz, Luis Carrasco, Denis Gallet, Pedro Arellano, Rick Stoyell and all those who have been my mentors and helped me develop my life purpose.

To BCorp movement, Conscious Capitalism, Ken Wilber and Fred Laloux for the inspiration and purpose to transform conscious organizations and impact the world.

To my first reader and editor, Federico Gómez.

To my subsequent editors, Gastón Sánchez, Margarita Pareja-Stoyell,Joseph Solis and Carmen Virginia Carrillo.

To Juan Gándara for inviting me to his haven of tranquility and contact with nature to write.

To Mario Morales for the idea of writing and Sandra Mateus for her advice.

To all the business leaders who committed to a different kind of leadership and agreed to be interviewed for this book.

To Latin America for being the place in this world where I feel at home.

To all the great Masters and Sherpas who accompany us on the path of life to live fully.

Thank you,

INTRODUCTION

t is said that the Chinese ideogram that represents the word crisis is made up of two different words: danger and opportunity. The world is changing and I am sure you recognize it. You probably sense that this is an important moment in history and you have the power to decide how you want to experience it: as a threatening danger to defend against or as an opportunity to become the leader you feel called to be. Your choice will define whether you will be recognized as the boss who failed to act or, on the contrary, as the inspirational leader who led the entire organization toward transformation.

If you want your company to be a market leader, with an innovative and transformational culture, you need to change in yourself what you would like to change in your company. Nobody is going to do it for you, it is YOUR responsibility to do it.

It is time to decide to work on yourself. This book is a tool to take advantage of all the potential you have to be a transformational leader and turn your organization into a model for Latin America. This leadership is focused on the mobilizing force that a leader generates when he or she leads with enthusiasm and coherence towards an inspiring purpose, empowering people through an inspiring culture to achieve extraordinary results.

Developing these new qualities requires you to be willing to face the mistakes that have accompanied you in the way you manage. My commitment is to help you determine what kind of boss you are, and then, through the strategies I am going to propose, achieve the necessary transformations and become the leader your company needs.

Below I describe the 5 styles of bosses that usually prevent successful transformations:

1. Apathetic bosses: They do not find a purpose for leading, therefore they do not inspire their work team, they bore them and thus do not follow him or her.

2. Tyrant bosses: They do not trust and need control and fear to manage. Employees do not dare to say what they think or share their ideas for fear of being punished and as soon as they can, they change jobs.

3. Avaricious bosses: They maximize profits and do not see that the environment has changed, that employees want to work with meaning, beyond a salary, and that consumers boycott companies that are not responsible. As a result, companies miss opportunities and market segments.

4. Short-sighted bosses: Fail in their technological change processes because they believe that employees can simply be asked to adopt new tools and do not perceive the gap between the current mindset of their employees and the culture needed to achieve this transformation.

5. Finally, incoherent bosses: They say they want change, but they tell their employees to change and they themselves do not do it. This breakdown generates distrust in employees and little commitment to change.

In this book, I will propose to replace these weaknesses with virtues that great transformational leaders have developed to hit the target of their objectives. These inspiring people, whom you will meet through your reading, I have met professionally and interviewed because they managed to take their organizations to the forefront, among them: Sergio Cardone, the president of the largest chain of malls in Chile; the Ecuadorian entrepreneur Carla Barboto, who manufactures and exports worldwide the most awarded chocolate in the world and one of the best chocolates I have ever tasted (and, for me, it is no small thing to say, because I come from the homeland of chocolate, Switzerland); Gonzalo Muñoz recognized by the Davos Economic Forum, in Switzerland, as the worldwide social entrepreneur of the year 2015, and several more inspiring examples.

But be warned, the potentialities you are about to develop through this book are outside your comfort zone. It will require you to look at yourself, which is often the greatest challenge we will confront in our lives. Aristotle said, To know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom. Without this step, none of the virtues in this book can be fully achieved. This is the key to developing your potential to be extraordinary. If you accept my invitation, you will achieve momentum in:

1. Your enthusiastic leadership to be a change agent and break old paradigms that no longer serve in the current era of transformation, aligning your purpose and life legacy.

2. Your empowering leadership to impulse your employees and colleagues to feel confident, committed, passionate about their work, and feel called to develop their extraordinary leadership

3. Your triple impact leadership to inspire consumers and employees to vibrate with your company’s purpose, generating a positive impact on society, the environment and at the same time achieving economic success.

4. Your global vision leadership to carry out an integral transformation of the company, creating a bridge between technology and the human through a unique organizational culture that generates economic results in the short and long term.

5. Finally, your integral leadership to reflect coherence with your collaborators from a deep self-knowledge that gives you the presence and the flexibility to act from qualities that seem opposite, such as the ability to be efficient and empathetic at the same time.

This book is for all men and women who want to make a quantum leap in the way they lead. I will share with you innovative concepts, tools, exercises, and examples of Latin American business leaders, to inspire you to change, and thus alter the DNA of your company and get the results you truly want. I firmly believe that leaders from the rest of the world can greatly benefit from these experiences because the so-called developing countries can be more resilient and creative in the face of crisis and constant uncertainties that they go through almost daily.

For practical reading purposes, I will talk about a leader, however, everything in this book refers to the leadership of men and women. In addition, the names of companies, industries, and individuals that exemplify the mistakes of leaders have been changed for the sake of our clients and our commitment to confidentiality.

For more than 15 years I have been a witness and accomplice of the transformation of thousands of leaders in Europe and Latin America. I have worked with leaders of the largest and most traditional companies, as well as the smallest and most innovative start-ups. I got to know their dreams, their fears, their challenges, and their particular styles. Now or in 20 years, I will always consider myself a learner of human beings, leadership, and organizations.

Honoring my roots, this book wants to be your Swiss Army Knife that shares INTEGRAL, SIMPLE, and EFFECTIVE tools, fruits of my experiences, that will help you catapult you to become a transformational leader.

Does what you are reading resonate with you,motivate you or inspire you?

Does this call awaken an emotion in you?

So, welcome!

An uncomfortable present in Latin America

To develop the 5 virtues of the transformational leader it is necessary to understand, in a profound way, the present of Latin America, to place oneself in the here and now and, from that reality, to understand the challenges, needs and opportunities of the new entrepreneurs and business leaders, who are called to transform the continent.

The inventor and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller discovered in 1982 that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, it was doubling every 25 years. Today, human knowledge doubles every 13 months, and according to IBM, it will soon double every 12 hours, meaning that what we thought was true a year ago may no longer be true in a month, and soon, what we thought was true 11 hours ago may no longer be true in an hour

Figure II: Buckminster Fuller knowledge doubling curve aggregated with IBM post-1982 predictions.

A study by the famous Babson College in the United States reports that 40% of the 500 largest companies in the country that existed in 2000 disappeared by 2010. And now they predict that the average lifespan of a company will be 15 years, in which time a disruptive competitor will win the market.¹ In Latin America, the mortality rate of family businesses is approximately 84% in 20 years and 85% disappear in the third generation.² And, according to author and leadership expert Mark Murphy, one-third of executives are fired because of failed organizational changes.³

Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix in 2000 for $50 million, however, it turned down the offer because it did not see its potential. We all know that today, after just 19 years, Blockbuster does not exist and Netflix is the giant that is worth more than 150 billion dollars.

In Latin America, we also have representative cases of disruptive companies that changed the market and risked the existence of their competitors: Cabify, the cab company present in most of our countries does not own vehicles. Mercado Libre, the leading online store in Latin America, has no inventory. Rappi, the fastest-growing home delivery company in the region, does not own any distribution vehicles.

Leaders of companies that were born before the Internet boom of the 1990s face major challenges, as the business precepts that once made their businesses grow are no longer the same. For example, 3 or 5-year strategic plans are being replaced by flexible plans that can be reviewed at least twice a year. Or employees who used to work all their lives for the same employer are now demanding new conditions that were unthinkable before, such as welfare and power-sharing.

What used to work no longer works, or will stop working very soon. Such as the traditional education system you find in Latin America and most of the world, which was created in 1800 and has hardly changed in two centuries. The issue is that it continues to train people with obsolete skills for a working world that requires very different competencies that are mostly still not being taught, such as emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, entrepreneurship, innovation, effective communication, etc. Additionally, companies that continue to hire leaders only for their resumes are emphasizing the same hiring criteria and, in turn, perpetuate the overvaluation of a system that is inadequate. Do we