Widen Your Lens: Becoming the Panoramic Leader the World Needs

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the host and their guests and not those of W4CY Radio, its employees, or affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implied shall be extended to W4CY Radio or its employees or affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W4CY Radio. What's working on purpose anyway? Each week, we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want, working on purpose. Now, here's your host, Dr.

0:58 Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of 2015. Thanks for tuning in this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. Most leaders are sitting on untapped human energy, and I help them unlock it. I'm an organizational psychologist, workforce advisor, Vistage chair, and the founder of the Gusto Now movement. But the title I live by is much simpler. I traffic in energy, not surface level motivation or another engagement initiative, but the deeper force, what I call Gusto, the life force for performance that drives commitment, perseverance, and genuine ownership of a shared mission in the clients we serve. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at gusto-now.com or my personal site, elisecortez.com for information on my speaking and books. Today's program we have with us Cornelia Cho.

1:49 She is a global leadership expert and the founder and CEO of the Leaders Alliance, an organization empowering C-level leaders on five continents. Cornelia guides and supports top leaders spanning diverse sectors, including the heads of some of the largest multinational, multilateral organizations, governments, and global enterprises, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. She's the co-author, with Marshall Goldsmith, of The Panoramic Leader, How Great Leaders See Differently, which we'll be talking about today. She joins us today from Geneva, Switzerland. Cornelia, a hearty welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you so much, Elise. I'm very excited to share this conversation with you. And thank you so much for welcoming me onto your show.

2:31 You are so welcome. I'm so grateful and happy to meet you. And I want to celebrate what you and Marshall brought into the world. There's a beautiful book. It's gorgeous. um, you know, one of the great things about hosting the show for, especially for so long is like 98% of my guests come to me through a public relations representative or a publisher. And that's how I meet a lot of you. And so I love it when I get to read your book, as I said, and I feel like I know you, and then I get to have you on the, on the program and share you with my listeners across the world. So wonderful to meet. Thank you. Likewise. So I really appreciated, um, your collaboration with Marshall Goldsmith on this book. And I would love if you could just share a little bit about how it came together. How did the two of you come together to write the book? And a bit just about to distinguish your perspectives for the book.

3:17 Absolutely, Elise. So Marshall and I were having a conversation a few years ago, and We noticed that we were doing exactly the same thing with slightly different context. And we were bringing together people who were very different and leaders who saw the world very differently into small circles to help them solve their problems. And what we found happened when we bring together leaders who are at the same level but who see the world very differently is that they're able to look in all different directions and including your blind spots. And if someone's looking in the opposite direction of you, they're able to see what you can't see and to be able to benefit from their perspective and their insights and to help solve problems together with that added benefit was incredibly powerful. And so Marshall suggested that we write a book together and we had been aligned for many, many years. Marshall has his stakeholder centered coaching practice, which helps leaders work with a lot of different stakeholders within their organizations. And we found that what I work with across continents and with leaders in different industries is that I do the same thing, helping leaders work with different stakeholders inside and also outside of the organization. So it came together very naturally. And so he suggested this idea that we write a book together

4:48 and Within about 10 minutes, I was convinced that this would be the right thing to do. So that's how it started. And it's been a great partnership. Marshall is such a wonderful friend, partner on this book, and co-author to share this journey with. Yeah. Well, it's delightful. I love it when those collisions happen, right, and something magnificent comes out of it. So really enjoyed it, got so much out of it. And now that we've gotten that as to where it came from, I was startled, Cornelia, by some of the statistics you have in the book. You talk about there's something published by the Corporate Executive Board that somewhere between 50% and 70% of new executives fail within their first 18 months on the job. So that's the need for this book. So if you could say a bit more about, you know, you mentioned this as part of the chapter on the missing piece here, there's stuff going on here that I think is really important to surface as we get into your book.

5:50 Yeah, the biggest question that Marshall and I got from leaders is how do I lead in a world of continuous change and continuous unknowns and uncertainty? And we've always had unknowns in our leadership, but to have change coming from all different directions simultaneously from around the world and to have many, many more stakeholders than we've had before. Today, leaders need to pay attention to suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, as always, but also governments from around the world who can now impose tariffs on you, an influencer who can bring customers to your company's products or not. And with this proliferation of complexity, both through the number of stakeholders and the amount of change affecting leaders, we wanted to make sure that leaders understood that even very, very intelligent and experienced leaders are having a hard time navigating these changes.

7:01 So the missing piece for leaders today is a new skill that we need to develop in order to be able to handle this much change. And it starts with a realization that no leader today can see everything anymore. We have the image of the leader on the top of the hill with one leg forward looking through the telescope and being able to see everything. And today, change is affecting different members of our teams, different partners we work with in ways that we can't know. And another statistic that came out from a study from Gartner is that 34% of CEOs and CFOs see eye to eye with CMOs. And another study from 2024 also is that from Gartner is that 84% of CMOs believe that there's strategic dysfunction in their companies and their business units and silos.

8:07 And so it's becoming extremely complex for leaders to lead their teams as well as to manage all of the stakeholders around us. And if we think about what we are able to see, we're able to see a piece of what's happening. But no leader today is able to see everything. And just when you think you understand everything, the world will change again. So in this case, the problem that we're seeing more and more often is perspective blindness. And that's not being able, understanding a section of what's happening around you, but thinking that that's the whole picture is the biggest risk. because there could be other changes happening around you that will come sideways and that can blindside you.

9:02 I think you've oriented us so, so well here. Some of those numbers are just so startling though. I had no idea that there was so much failure happening in like within 18 months on the job. I mean, and I, for the work that we do with leaders, Cornelia, you know, I have a lot of compassion for leaders and then that is, it is really hard work to be a leader today. It is absolutely. And again, We're facing dual challenges. On one extreme, we have a fear of the unknown. And there is so much change and unknown happening around us, it's hard to know what to do. And so it's easy to default to fight, flight, or freeze reactions. And a lot of leaders do default to this reaction in the face of so much unknown. And the other challenge extreme danger that we have is autopilot. And that's assuming that we know what's happening around us and that we have that assurance and that we're moving and making our judgments and our decisions on autopilot. And this is where a very interesting paradox is surfacing because we experience up until now has been a great benefit. We're always looking for leaders who are very experienced. And in a world that's changing when you're going forward, yet the map flips on you, believing that you know what's going on can be the most dangerous assumption. And so in the book,

10:39 we talk about our internal maps. And that's our internal GPS of how we see the world our values what we've learned from our successes and our failures and the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works and how we're going to succeed and in a world that's changing we need to update our map all the time and so in order to be able to see the whole picture and to make good decisions we need to change from leaders who are experts to chief investigators. And this needs to be on a continual basis. It was so beautiful. I do want to also weave in here because you've hinted at two of these, but you talk about some major challenges that leaders are facing.

11:27 You've already alluded to the overwhelming and constant barrage of change. The second one, though, that I think is really interesting is that we're living in an increasingly integrated world. And then the third one is this increasing range of stakeholders. And this is becoming, as a conscious capitalist, and who practices stakeholder capitalism, a lot of people, especially a lot of leaders, aren't necessarily accustomed to that. So those three challenges are enormous to add that more complexity to a leader's plate. Absolutely, Elise. And there are some tools to help us with this enormous exponentially expanded complexity facing us. And the first is leadership. something we talk about in the book called optimistic fear and it's the ability to recognize that there is danger around us and we do feel fear but to move closer to our stakeholders and whether we can talk to them and schedule a meeting with them during the week or at a conference or whether we can only read about the stakeholder or the stakeholder group or talk to an intermediary there are ways to get up close to people, to situations, to new ideas, and to be able to see more. Because when we get up closer, as long as we're not in danger, we see more options. And we're using our fear to propel us forward instead of using it to close down our

13:00 options and only think about survival. Because when we get up close, we see that there are a lot more pathways, a lot more solutions than we previously thought. And a lot of CEOs in the recent past have used the ability to get up close to customers, to get up close to even hostile parties, competitors. Al Malali got up close to the then CEO of GM, Rick Wagner, to understand more about about that stakeholder and so there are a lot of tools that we can use another tool is courageous curiosity and this is the ability to use our courage to become more curious and we don't generally think that curiosity necessitates courage because it's just a question we have in our mind an investigation that we can follow if we think that what we find though can change our perspective or cause us to pivot then we need courage to back that up because it's not necessarily just the exploration that is helpful but what we find and if we're willing to truly allow that to change our minds or help us pivot then we need the courage to back that up to after we discover something to then go to the rest of the management team

14:30 or talk to the board and introduce a new idea or a new finding. So much richness in what you're sharing here. I want to take us back a little bit further here to talk about the actual lenses of your panoramic leader. But I think before we do that, let's grab our first break. So I'll cue that up for our listeners and viewers to be able to think about your perspective that you're going to provide to us about the three lenses of the panoramic leader. But let's grab our first break first. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. We're on the air with Cornelia Cho. She is a global leadership expert and the founder and CEO of the Leaders Alliance, which is an organization empowering C-level leaders on five continents. We've been talking about the issues that so many leaders are facing today and starting to think about some of the ways, some of the tools they can start to address those things.

15:18 After the break, as I said earlier, we will talk about the three lenses of the panoramic leadership. We'll be right back. Dr. Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose-inspired leadership and meaning-infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at EliseCortez.com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose.

16:11 This is Working on Purpose with Dr. Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise, A-L-I-S-E, at EliseCortez.com. Now, back to Working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez, as I am dedicated to helping create a world where organizations thrive because their people thrive. They're led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness. And we do business that betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books. So one of my latest came out. It's called The Great Rip by Liz Eason, How Activating Meaning and Purpose Can Radically Enliven Your Business. And I wrote it to help leaders understand today's very diverse and discerning workforce. What do they want and need to give their best and want to stay with you? And then I provide you 22 best practices that you can use to equip that into your leadership and your culture. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site, EliseCortez.com.

17:11 If you are just now joining us, my guest is Cornelia Cho. She's co-author with Marshall Goldsmith of The Panoramic Leader, How Great Leaders See Different Light. So speaking of that, I think it would be remiss of us if we didn't actually talk about that wonderful formula that you have in your book that includes the inner lens, the relational lens, and the outer lens, if you could address that for us. Sure. Panoramic Leader uses three different lenses and brings them together to help us see an accurate picture of what's around us. And there are three lenses, as Elise shared, that help us see, put everything into focus. And the first lens is our inner lens, where we're able to change what we see inside. of our minds. And that's predominantly our internal map that we were talking about, which is the internal GPS that we use to navigate our lives.

18:15 And it's the stories we tell ourselves about what works and how we want to conduct our lives. And if we look at our inner map, it needs to change constantly to be able to help us adapt to the realities of the world that are changing around us. And our willingness to change or adapt this map to what we learn is controlled by our inner lens. And to give you an example, if we look at Aubert Jolie, when he first started working as CEO of Best Buy, He'd worked in other industries before, like the travel and leisure industry, but he'd never worked in retail before. And so he was willing to learn and to change his assumptions about how he needed to work. Yet he had already transitioned into different industries before. So he used those learnings about how to transition into industries and to help adapt his map, but was ready to replace some of the learnings in his map. For example, learning about floor space and mobile phones. So that is controlled by our inner lens. Now, our outer lens is our interface with the world around us. And that's extremely important because we get a lot of information from different stakeholders, different situations and experiences that that we filter into our inner map

19:48 and that interface with the auto world can help us get up close to different employees, to suppliers. And Uber Jolie was able to get up close to a wide range of different stakeholders, including competitors who were supposed to run them out of the market, like Amazon. he got up and created a friendship with Jeff Bezos. And he was able to go really into the front lines, so to say, and put on a blue shirt and khakis and work at a Best Buy with a label that said CEO in training. And so he had, it was wonderful.

20:32 And so he had a very developed and open outer lens as well. Now, the third lens is the relational lens that stays between the inner lens and the outer lens. And that really is our filter. It controls what we allow from our outer lens into our inner lens. It helps translate that. So as I mentioned, being able to pick out what we learned from the outside world, like the complexities of floor space, the intricacies of what we learn, for example, from suppliers and And when Hubert talked to some suppliers like Samsung and Microsoft, he was able to realize that they have a need that Best Buy could fulfill.

21:17 And that was floor space and footfall that customers would bring to stores within stores, within Best Buy stores. And he created these amazing partnerships with different suppliers, whereas a lot of people had said, they would run Best Buy out of the market as well. And so that's a fantastic example of how we can use our relational lens to filter really good insights that can help us update our map and come up with good ideas, more options as we get closer to situations. And yeah, go ahead. I'm just going to say that was a beautiful illustration for the lens of Huber Julie. That was a wonderful way to illustrate that. So thank you, Cornelia. That's what I wanted. Thank you.

22:02 Absolutely. Okay. Well, one of the other great things that you do in the book is you introduce the GEM method, which is the actionable steps to panoramic leadership. And I wanted to talk through as many of those pieces as we can, or at least high level. So I know it's mindset first. I don't know where you want to start with this, but if you want to say more about the GEM method first, before you go into the steps, whatever you think would make the most sense for our listeners and viewers. Sure. Just to set us up to explore the GEM method, it's really about being able to combat perspective blindness. And there are two main problems that lead us to perspective blindness. One, as we discussed before, not understanding enough about what's happening around us, not getting out there, not getting enough information, not having the right relationships. But the other cause of perspective blindness comes from Not fear of the unknown, but from autopilot, as we discussed before. And that's when we don't exactly know what's happening around us, but we fill in the information with our own assumptions. And as humans, we often fall back on the practice of saying, well, I see it this way. So I'm sure it would be natural for other people to see it this way as well. Right. And I catch myself doing this as well.

23:30 But that can lead us. It can be a trap. It can lead us to make assumptions that don't really fit with what's happening around us to make decisions that don't fit with a senior management team, for example, or another stakeholder who would be confused or confused. decide not to go along with what we're doing causes to lose buy-in. And so this is really the purpose of the GEM method, to help us reduce perspective blindness. Okay, that does help, tremendous. So the first step, you said mindset first, and some of this you've already mentioned.

24:11 You mentioned the courageous curiosity, you know, adopting a growth perspective, you mentioned those things as well, but You also talk about, you know, taking a close look at yourself. Are you sticking with familiar patterns of behavior? Are they no longer effective for you? And then, of course, the step three you have is to know your map and keep adapting it. And this is, you know, this is real work. And as you said earlier in the show, it's constant work. Yeah. So the three steps to the GEM method are first to get up close, second to establish meaningful bonds, and third to to map and constantly map your evolving perspective.

24:51 So I'll go through these three steps one by one through the example of Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford Motor Company. And the first step really entails getting up close to a wide range of stakeholders, not just the ones that we default to or that we are comfortable around it really entails us asking ourselves who's not at the decision table and who's not who do we need to learn about who can affect our company or our family or um our our group but we're not familiar with them uh we don't have a relationship or we don't know how they think and so we can use a lot of courageous curiosity and optimistic fear to get up close to a lot of different people. And as I mentioned before, this can include reading about them or watching a documentary, but it's best if we can to initiate a conversation with them. Now, As leaders, we don't always hear the truth. We often hear what people think we want to hear, but in order to be able to really understand what our stakeholders are thinking, it helps to create a relationship with them. And hopefully we care about our stakeholders enough to get to know them and to follow up with them. But when we work

26:24 with stakeholders over time, we're able to see how their thinking evolves and to create a partnership, as we discussed before with Uber Jolie, to be able to create partnerships that are win-win where our suppliers are able to pay us for renting out space in our company and on our floor and for us to deliver a service in exchange. And so looking at these first two steps that really help us understand our stakeholders and really do the valuable job of being able to see in different directions as we do in my leader circles. Alan Mulally, when he started at Ford Motor Company, got up close to an extremely wide range of stakeholders, calling reporters directly and even startling a few of them, meeting with... Some of them didn't believe it was actually Ellen calling. Sure, I'm sure.

27:31 Which is very interesting. Meeting with government regulators, even the head of the United Auto Workers, which is very uncommon for the CEO of a, or at least back then, a a car manufacturer with suppliers, heads of dealerships who at that time weren't very happy with Ford and their performance. And then investors and bankers who for a company who is making an enormous loss would be a fairly uncomfortable meeting. And another wonderful practice he had was to eat in the employee cafeteria instead of the executive dining room. And he would grab his tray and wait in line. And the whole time he would be talking to people. And if he just did this once, he would probably talk to a lot of people who were very nervous and to talk to their bosses, bosses, bosses, boss. But because he was able to do this often, he was able to create a norm and an honest or a more honest person. relationship with a lot of employees at Ford.

28:41 And this really helped him learn a lot that he otherwise wouldn't have learned or learned about in his position as CEO. And so creating this longer term relationship and initiating it covered the first two steps of the GEM method to get up close and to establish meaningful bonds. Now, what did he do with the information that he learned? He was able to help himself map his evolving perspective, so to say, and to update his understanding of what was happening to Ford both inside and outside of the company. But it wasn't just his map that he was able to evolve. He was able to bring together different executives at Ford and to create a one Ford strategy and plan.

29:33 And he had something called a business plan review or a BPR where every Thursday morning he would get together with all of his senior executives and all of them from you know one to the the last one would give an update and a ranking or a rating rather of green yellow or red to share what was happening in their operations and And this was amazing because it really opened up the information to the entire senior leadership team to understand not just what was happening in their department, but what was happening all around the company and how that related back to their actions. And so he was helping Ford collectively update their maps. And that was really a great way to continuously stay on top of what was going on. And Ford really turned around within a very short amount of time from when Alan joined. So it was a very concrete way to operationalize the gem process and to make it a organizational muscle so that Ford was able to scale panoramic leadership across the organization instead of just keeping it within the CEO's brain because If it's just in one person, in the leader's brain, then it can't scale and the company won't be able to benefit from it at a large scale.

31:07 Beautifully explained, Cornelia. And I don't know if I read this in your book or someplace else, and I don't know if it was under Alan Mulally's tenure or direction or not, but I also remember reading something that when he began to have those meetings and asked for this kind of red, yellow, green, that the first time someone stuck their neck out, to share that they had a red reading, he applauded. Is that Alan's work or somebody else's? That is Alan and it was Mark Fields. And up until then, the culture at Ford was very different. When Mark finally shared a red and was able to discuss what was happening in his operations, it's written that a lot of senior managers thought, Two people would come in and physically remove him from the premises, yeah. Or potentially the building. But the fact that Alan clapped really was able to create a safety in sharing problems and not having to be perfect. And this is when... panoramic leadership really proliferates because we need this psychological safety and the ability to feel that we belong enough and that we are accepted enough to be able to be supported instead of judged really opens up people's ability to share honestly

32:42 what's happening and to get a good idea of different people's realities. Because honestly, One thing that leaders are learning more and more is that people are right in their own reactions according to, and they're very logically, they react very logically according to what they see and the part of the landscape that each leader sees. The CFO, for example, may want to limit costs in the meantime or invest in AI technology in the medium term, but then expect a lot of return after that. Whereas the CHRO may be thinking more about employee morale, the CTO may be thinking about the rollout and how they were going to execute and operationalize AI or implement it within the company.

33:35 And so everyone is looking at a different reality. And each person is reacting logically and is right in their mind according to what they see. But Today, with so much change, it's no longer enough to be right. And that's the paradox. People can say, according to what I see, this is absolutely right. And that can be true. But when it's no longer enough because there's something else that they're missing in the landscape, then we have to really work in a coordinated fashion as Alan Mulally did in being able to bring together our senior management team.

34:17 Oh, so much good richness there, Cornelia. Let's let our listeners and viewers also chew on that as we go into our next break. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. We're on the air with Cornelia Cho. She's a global leadership expert and a founder and CEO of the Leaders Alliance, which is an organization empowering C-level leaders on five continents. We've been talking about the GEM method, which are the three actionable steps to panoramic leadership. After the break, we're going to talk about cultivating personal growth and empowering others. We'll be right back. Thank you.

35:01 Dr. Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose-inspired leadership and meaning-infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at EliseCortez.com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with Dr. Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise, A-L-I-S-E, at EliseCortez.com. Now, back to Working on Purpose.

35:54 Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. As you know by now, this program is dedicated to empowering and inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential. If you'd like to learn where you are on the Gusto Leadership Spectrum, go to LinkedIn, find me, Elise Cortez, and scroll to the featured section. You can find the free assessment there. You will learn a lot about yourself and the spectrum of potential awaiting your ongoing development. And while you're there, be sure to connect with me as well if you haven't already. If you are just joining us, my guest is Cornelia Cho. She's co-author with Marshall Goldsmith of The Panoramic Leader, How Great Leaders See Differently. So for this last segment of our conversation, Cornelia, I wanted to talk about this whole idea of the ongoing cultivation of personal growth, empowering others, and cascading this whole idea, as you said before, of panoramic leadership into others. So if we could start first, you talk about three principles for making panoramic leaders work. If you can share those three principles, and if you've got a way to thread them through another one of your clients, people that you work with, that's wonderful.

37:00 Being able to execute panoramic leadership is key for helping it benefit our organizations and not just ourselves. And so we have a few key tips for being able to operationalize this. In addition to that, I'd just like to note that this is something that we can use in our companies, but we can also use this in our families, in our personal lives. So these metrics and these tips may sound very corporate, but they can be adapted and I'll show how for each metric. The first is to make sure that your priorities are clear across the organization.

37:50 And this is, it's harder than it sounds at least because Our priorities are shifting all the time. And one department or one family member, for example, may suddenly have something that came up and completely changed their schedule for the day or the agenda. And we get a lot of, I feel like it's increasing the frequency, but a lot of surprises. But as a leader or as the head of a family or an organization or a group or a company, it's really up to us, just like Alan Mulally did, to ensure that everyone is still aware and on board with shifting priorities. And the second tip is really related to this, and it's to ensure that all of our incentives are aligned with our current priorities. And so let's say, for example, that suddenly, instead of speed, we want to cause... during the summer to do a deep dive into what our strategy is or do a perspective audit and see and ask ourselves, do we really understand all of our stakeholders? Do we see everybody? Are we aware of all of the people who can affect our businesses? And suddenly for these two or three weeks, our priorities will be different. To be able to ensure that our incentives are aligned so that people are both

39:20 interested able to easily adapt without having to worry about whether they're going to fulfill their targets, and their KPIs, to really embed these inside your KPIs, whether it's a short-term KPI or part of the annual KPIs, and to say, I understand we're asking you to do something different. Here is what we're going to do. you will be recognized for this and appreciated for it. And to make that very clear. And the third one we've discussed very briefly, and that's to ensure that there is safety within our families to be able to share different opinions. And this is our families or our organizations or our companies. And this really is modeled and begins with the leaders reactions to when we hear information that either doesn't align with what we're looking for or is a surprise or leads us as an organization to pivot. And as Elise, as you mentioned, Alan started clapping and that was a very clear and open signal support for the behavior and the incentives that he was looking for in helping other executives share problems that they have and for them to know that it was accepted for them to have that space

40:53 to share concerns, that they didn't have to be perfect. And this is so important for panoramic leadership because if we don't have and we don't have the ability to share, then all information stops and we're not able to build the relationships we need to. And so these are three recommendations we make that can be adapted to corporations as much as to families. Hmm. You know, I appreciate your whole share there, Cornelia. And I want to echo something that we talk about quite a bit on this program. And that is that the higher you go in your organization, certainly at the CEO level, the less information that you get and the less truth that you get. And so one of the many reasons I really appreciate your book is as you're helping to increase that visibility, you know, by through the panoramic lens and your action steps to get there. And I really, really applaud that. It's otherwise, you know, as you say in the beginning of the book, you really are flying blind.

41:56 And it takes humility to be able to recognize that we don't see everything. We are not actually the expert anymore. And it pays more to be curious than to demonstrate that we're the expert. But as we've just discussed behind that, we need to be able to establish a culture of open-mindedness and flexibility so that we can be imperfect and still lead and to keep on growing even though we don't have the quote-unquote assurance that everything is going well.

42:38 Well in the interest of time here i'd love for us to i you've mentioned something about this because this is a way of life that we can take all across into our families and our communities but i would love for us if we can How do you treat this notion of helping others become panoramic leaders? How do we do that? I love this question, Elise, because panoramic leadership is so helpful for leaders themselves. But when we're able to spread this in our organizations or our families, then a magic happens and we're able to really multiply the results and be able to really increase the amount of cooperation and information and possibilities that we generate. And we can do this in many different ways. But first, creating the bed of safety is the first step. And to demonstrate this as a leader is probably the mindset that we need to establish first before getting going. And secondly, creating a forum that's structural where people are able to share their ideas and to have a norm where we come together and share ideas can be extremely helpful. And whether we do this on a regular basis or not, whether it's around the dinner table or whether it's at a weekly meeting at the office, to be able to ring fence

44:08 a certain amount of time and say, look, this isn't going to be a daily activity in a formal manner to still be able to create a norm around information and perspective sharing can be an extremely good first step in getting people to go through this action and to be able to listen to what other people are thinking, to get their perspectives and to see the evolution over time. And part of this is demonstrating this ourselves, but the other part is to create both the mindset and the structure for other people to follow suit and then to give them space to see where they go with it and to, um, to guide them. And Al Malali actually has a family plan review where every, every Sunday they'll go through and pick up the house first of all.

45:04 And after that come together with their notes, notebooks and their agendas and share how they feel about what happened during the week. Um, and to, to be able to bring their maps together in that, um, sense um creates a very good example for everyone and then to share who needs a ride and all the details that they need to take care of so it's both practical and um very insightful to be able to share this and model this as a group. I just am struck that how what a fantastic head start his children must be getting to have that experience that is incredible just incredible.

45:44 Absolutely Yeah, and I've started doing this in my own family as well. Oh, I love that. Well, we're close to a finish here, Cornelia, and I think you probably know that this show is listened to by people around the world, and it's been on air for 11 and a half years. People that listen in tend to are interested in helping develop themselves as individuals and certainly as leaders. What would you like to leave them with today? I'd like to leave you with optimism. And in a world where we're filled with uncertainty. There is change all around us and a lot of unexpected, a lot of unexpected events happening. There is a way for us to get on top of this change and to understand more and more as we go and to create these, hopefully these enjoyable relationships with different stakeholders around us. So I would urge you to do, whether it's a formal perspective audit or just to think about who is really important in my life, but I haven't gotten close to them or I haven't been able to understand who they are.

46:52 Schedule a meeting, reach out to them and get up close and see how they're thinking and how they see the world and try to put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself, what experiences have they had that has allowed them to think and to see in the direction that they're seeing right now. And you don't need to be exhaustive about seeing every single perspective, but taking that first step and getting going is extremely helpful in helping us understand more about the world and gaining the confidence we need to increase our optimism, our optimistic fear, and to understand what's happening together instead of sitting there alone.

47:38 What a beautiful invitation, Cornelia. I am very grateful that our paths have crossed and that I got the chance to read your beautiful book, be informed by it, and then share you with my listeners and viewers around the world. Thank you so much for writing the book and coming on the program to talk about it. Thank you so much, Elise, for reading the book and for leading such an insightful and enjoyable discussion about it. We've covered so many different topics around it, and I'm so grateful to have met you and to share this with your listeners. Thank you. Likewise. Thank you. Listeners and viewers, you are going to want to learn more about Cornelia Cho and the work she does as a global leadership expert and the founder and CEO of the Leaders Alliance. You can start by visiting her personal website. It's CorneliaCho.com. Let me spell that for you. C-O-R-N-E-L-I-A-C-H-O-E, CorneliaCho.com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it via recorded podcast.

48:35 We were on air with Owen O'Kane, who is recognized as one of the United Kingdom's leading mental health experts. He is a practicing psychotherapist and a former national health security clinical lead. See you next week for another educational and nourishing conversation. Let's continue learning how to help more people flourish, elevate your operating system as a leader, and create destination workplaces where legendary business takes place. Let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose, featuring your host, Dr. Elise Cortez, each week on W4CY. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires in passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there. Let's work on purpose.