A Guide to Collaborative Leadership by Lorna Davis, September 2019, Ted Talk, Mumbai India
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I knew exactly what my call to action was, which was "One in every four times a ___ eats a snack, it will be one of ours." I emphasized that we knew how to measure our results and that our future was in our control. Embarrassingly enough, I finished up with "If not this, what? If not us, who? And if not now, when?"
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In short, I wanted to be a ___. A ___ selling chips and biscuits in a pink suit.
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The problem was that no one knew what they were expected to do. And most importantly, they didn't know that I ____ them.
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Actually, I'm going to tell you that in a world as complex and interconnected as the one we live in, the idea that one person has the answer is _____. It's not only ineffective, it's dangerous, because it leads us to believe that it's been solved by that hero, and we have no role.
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We don't need heroes. We need radical _____, which is just another way of saying we need each other. Even though other people can be really difficult, sometimes.
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And in recent years, I've spent a lot of time with the B Corp community, originally as a corporate participant and more recently as an _____.
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B Corps are a group of companies who believe in _____. There's a tough certification with about 250 questions about your social and environmental performance. You must legally declare your intention to serve the community as well as your shareholders and you must sign the declaration of interdependence.
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One of the things that inspires me the most about the companies in this movement is that they see themselves as part of ______. It's sort of as if they imagine themselves on a big, flowing river of activity.
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True collaboration is possible, but it's subtle and it's complex. And the leaders in this space are doing a few things very differently from traditional heroic leaders. They set goals differently, they _____ those goals differently and they have a very different relationship with other people.
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Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, start with a goal that's really important, but is actually ______ to achieve by one company or one person alone.
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I want to give you an example from the clothing industry, which produces ______ tons of waste a year. Patagonia and Eileen Fisher are clothing manufacturers, both of them B Corps, both of them deeply committed to reducing waste. They don't see that their responsibility ends when a customer buys their clothes. Patagonia encourages you not to buy new clothes from them, and will repair your old clothes for free. Eileen Fisher will pay you when you bring back your clothes, and either sell them on or turn them into other clothes. While these two companies are competitive in some ways, they work together and with others in the industry to solve shared problems. They take responsibility for things that happen upstream as well.
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Around the world, there are around 300 million people who work from home in this industry, most of them women, many of them in very difficult circumstances with poor lighting, sewing on buttons and doing detailed stitching. Until 2014, there was no protection for these workers. A group of companies got together with a ______ called Nest to create a set of standards that's now been adopted by the whole industry.
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The second big difference for collaborators is their willingness to _____ their goals before they have a plan.
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Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, want other people to help them, so their announcements are often an invitation for co-creation, and sometimes, they're _____.
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But they also knew that we had seen our role in the river that is the food system, and we wanted _____.
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Now when you gave goals that you ____ achieve alone, and you've told everyone about them, inevitably, you'll end up at the third big difference, which is how you see other people, inside your company and outside.
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Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, understand that they need other people. They know that meetings are not just mindless calendar fillers. These are the most precious things you have. It's where people collaborate and communicate and share ideas. People ______ in meetings like this, wondering where they might fit in.
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We had a problem with hero culture. We kept on launching new products that failed. And we would find out afterwards that everyone in the company knew they were going to fail, they just didn't ____ to tell us.
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And sellers had to man their stalls and sell their ideas as persuasively as possible, and people who were convinced bought them with fake check books. Creating just a bit of silliness with the environment and a hat or a scarf _____ and causes ideas to spread like wildfire.
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There's no recipe here, but time together has to be carefully ____ and created so that people know that their time is valuable and important, and they can bring their best selves to the table.
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I want to apply these ideas in an area in which I have ____ credibility and ____ experience.
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I'm originally South African, and I'm deeply passionate about wildlife conservation, most particularly rhinos. But clearly, stopping ____ is a goal way too big for me. So I'm immediately in interdependence land. I'm declaring my goal on this stage.
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Why does hero culture persist, and why don't we work together more? Well, I don't know why everyone else does it, but I can tell you why I did it. Interdependence is ____ than being a hero. It requires us to be open and transparent and vulnerable, and that's not what traditional leaders have been trained to do. I thought being a hero would keep me safe. I thought that in the elevation and separation that comes from heroic leadership, that I would be untouchable. This is an illusion.
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The joy and success that comes from interdependence and vulnerability is worth the effort and the risk.
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