Unpacked with Ron Harvey
People Always Matter. Join Ron as he unpacks leadership with his guests.
Unpacked with Ron Harvey
Balancing Values and Success in Leadership
What if leading with humanity could transform your professional journey? Join us as we sit down with Geraldo, a seasoned entrepreneur and leadership coach from Switzerland, who offers invaluable insights into the challenges and triumphs of leadership. Geraldo shares his compelling journey from a young entrepreneur in the family office industry to overseeing a global business with 400 employees. We dive into his transition into coaching, focusing on humanizing leaders and organizations, and his innovative ventures like a corporate coaching program and a performing arts show aimed at fostering authenticity in leadership.
In our conversation, we explore the weighty decisions that come with leadership, such as job cuts, and the importance of aligning values and priorities. Geraldo underscores the significance of choosing freedom over financial gain and how these choices shape career paths. As an executive coach, he emphasizes the growing need for coaching to cultivate purposeful businesses and humane leadership. We also discuss the impact of AI on the workforce and the irreplaceable human intelligences that technology cannot mimic. This episode is a profound exploration of the critical role awareness and humanity will play in the future of leadership.
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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization or entity. The information provided in this podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered as professional advice. Listeners should consult with their own professional advisors before implementing any suggestions or recommendations made in this podcast. The speakers and guests are not responsible for any actions taken by listeners based on the information presented in this podcast. The podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice or services. The speakers and guests make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in this ...
Welcome to Unpacked Podcast with your host leadership consultant, Ron Harvey of Global Core Strategies and Consulting. Ron's delighted to have you join us as he unpacks and shares his leadership experience, designed to help you in your leadership journey. Ron believes that leadership is the fundamental driver towards making a difference. So now to find out more of what it means to unpack leadership, here's your host, Ron Harvey Good afternoon.
Speaker 2:This is Ron Harvey, the vice president and the chief operating officer for Global Core Strategies and Consulting, based out of Columbia, south Carolina, and my wife and I run a leadership development firm and we spend all of our time honestly helping leaders become more effective to take care of the people they're responsible for and responsible to. So how do we help leaders just be really good at what it is called leadership and taking care of their teams? We love it. We enjoy it. We're both retired veterans of the Army and we figured out you know what do we do. That's bigger and more important than ourselves, and helping leaders has been a tremendous value add to us and to the people that we get to help out. So we love it. We do executive coaching, leadership development workshops, seminars, keynote speaking engagements so we love to have a conversation, if that's something that you may need at some point. But we pause and we do our podcast, which is called Unpack, with Ron Harvey, and what we promise during the podcast is that we're going to have a lot of conversations with people from around the world to talk about leadership. None of us know the questions we're going to ask. I don't know how they're going to respond, but what we do promise is that we'll have an open, very candid conversation. Let you behind the curtain. We're going to be human beings. We're going to have conversations that sometimes you don't hear in rooms that you wish people would talk about.
Speaker 2:But I'm super excited for our guest that's joining us for this particular episode is Geraldo, and he's long distance. I mean, he's at another time zone, he's already in the afternoon and I'm just now starting the afternoon, so he's in Switzerland. But I'm excited that you said yes, that you're willing to take this journey with us for the next 20 minutes on adding value to our listeners and making a difference for the people that are watching and listening to us. So thank you for helping us offer something to the people that follow us. So, gerardo, welcome to the platform. Man, let me let you introduce yourself and share whatever you wish, or whatever you don't wish. We may get to it later. What would you like to share and introduce yourself?
Speaker 3:Hi Ron, thank you for having me. Yes, hi everyone. I'm going to just give you a very brief outline of my professional path. I spent the first 20 years of my career as a CEO entrepreneur in the family office industry. I started my own business when I was 29 and then this family office grew up to 400 people, operation 10 offices around the world 10 offices around the world. In 2016, I kind of said, okay, I've done what I wanted to do, so I exited my business and started my professional path as a coach. So I re-qualified as a coach with the ICF and started working as a leadership coach with the purpose of humanizing leaders and organizations.
Speaker 3:Over the past decade, I've been a member of an organization called YPO Young President Organization, which is the world's largest community of CEOs 35,000 members across 140 countries and I actually founded and chaired chapters in Italy, switzerland and globally for YPO. One of the things that I actually love, especially with this new work, is learning by creating. I'm very creative, so I created a corporate coaching program called the Preludes and a postgraduate training program that I'm teaching this business school here, a postgraduate training program that I'm teaching this business school here. And my latest creation is Out as Humans, which is a performing arts show that I feature for corporates, organizational leadership, associations, conventions, to lift authenticity and humanity of leaders, wow. So that's, in brief, about 40 years of career 35.
Speaker 2:Yes, in fact, in a couple of minutes as well. You know so, really brief, high level, but you've had a pretty extensive career running a business as an entrepreneur, getting into, as I call it, reformatting, reshaping, re-identifying who you are, what you do. After you've had such a great career as an entrepreneur, it's rebranding yourself, rebuilding or retooling or reskilling yourself, which we'll probably get into in some of the conversation. So, as you think about, like the work that you're doing now and where you've come from as an entrepreneur, what were some of your biggest challenges, like to take over the family business. What were some major challenges that you had to overcome to be successful in that space, to go to 400 employees as an entrepreneur, you mean yes, yes.
Speaker 3:Well, the biggest challenge I had is that I didn't take over the family business. I didn't have any family business, wow. So I started, you know, in a service office in London, myself and a secretary. The biggest challenge was that the industry I was, which is a kind of advisory industry, really likes gray hair or no hair, okay, one or the other Like now, but unfortunately at the time when I was 39, I had more hair. So the challenge was really a kind of you know. So the challenge was really a kind of, you know, credibility as an advisor, consultant, in a family office industry at the age of 29.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, so age wasn't working in your favor at that time.
Speaker 3:No, what do you know Like?
Speaker 2:you're too young to know all of this. What are you talking about? You're coming in to be a consultant. You're going to advise us. You don't even have enough years behind you yet.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, I was trying to be older at that time.
Speaker 2:Now I'm trying to be younger. That's the way life works. So if you're listening, you work hard to be older so you're respected and you seem like you're wise. And then when you get older, you try to be younger so people feel like you're staying hip to what's really happening around you and you're not outdated. So that's the game of life Like when you're younger, you want to be older, when you get older, you want to be younger. So everybody join that bandwagon. We all get there at some point. What made you successful? Is there a recipe like things that you did every day, automatically or often enough, where it was consistent, that helped you be successful?
Speaker 3:I think it was the fact that I brought in, at the very beginning and throughout time, partners, so I actually partnered with other people. That was what made it successful. You know, I think four or five, six people do more and better than one. It's challenging because, coming back to your first question, the second challenge is partnership partnering with other people. It's not easy and there's a lot to learn by mistake, but at the same time, it is what made it successful.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes. So if you're listening, I want you to really listen. He said it's hard, but it was necessary in order for him to really achieve the goal. Partnership is hard. You learn from mistakes, but it makes you better, go faster, further, using less energy of just all your energy. So partnerships are important, but there's a way to do them that makes it work and there's a way to do them that makes it a catastrophic event, but they're super important if you're going to be successful, and that's whether you're running an organization or whether you run a department. Having relationships and partnerships as a leader is vital to your success. Absolutely critical to have more people on the team that help you see things you don't see, because I haven't met a person yet that sees everything.
Speaker 3:You know, I think from my point of view, the tricky part is what diversity is acceptable and what diversity is not acceptable. Yes, you need some form of alignment, like, for example, one for sure is, and you know it may seem distant, but the reality is it is going to be challenged at a certain point in time. It's a value alignment. You need to partner with people who have similar values to the ones you have. So first you need to be clear about your values, especially when things don't go well, then everything comes out. That was my experience. When things went well, perfect, everything you know, no problem, and business growing, everything perfect. And when things start not to go so well, then those differences come out and they're really put at a challenge. You know.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, that's very accurate and thank you for unpacking that. Go back to your values, because if things are going well, nobody's looking at your values. They're happy with the profit margins, they're happy with the productivity, they're happy with the success. But when things go chaotic and people are not happy with the fact that the money's looking different, the product or the service is looking different, their clientele list is shrinking. Your values are the one thing that will withstand the test of time, so I love that you're bringing up, if you're listening, as a leader, know what your values are.
Speaker 2:What's the behavior during challenging times and good times? And there has to be a standard barrier for us as we think about leadership, when we think about running organizations or we think about being successful. What do you stand for? What is the deal breaker? And there are things that will be deal breakers. If you're in a partnership or you're into something that doesn't go well, people are a little bit intimidated by crucial conversations, or conflict, if you will. How do you manage conflict effectively, which is a challenge, because it's a matter of time before something shows up that's going to cause some conflict. How do you manage that effectively as a leader?
Speaker 3:Well, I think it all depends if you're a part of the conflict or you're not. Obviously, if you are a part of the conflict, it is more difficult and at that level, you know, at the level of it also depends on the positions, okay, so if it is you, being a leader and somebody in the organization is completely different than being, you know, at same level, as partner in a business. If you are referring to myself as a partner with my other partners, it was very difficult and that's because of different values, and I'll give you a very quick example of it. If you need to restructure your group and think about having some job cuts, cutting some jobs, it really touches the value For you. This is a serious and important aspect. One maybe not cut some jobs and some other would cut some jobs and favor something else, you know. So it's very, very difficult.
Speaker 3:To be honest, it was very difficult for me. Probably I was fortunate enough, or maybe it was sent to me. Somebody decided to send it to me at the time that I had already decided to change my career, and so it was something that really pushed me, was an additional reason for me to take that decision and to take that step, but to me it was very important, up to a point where I said, to be honest, I don't care about the money aspect, so how we organize the exit from a financial perspective, I choose freedom before money and that was very important for me. And I didn't have the best financial exit, yes, but it didn't matter to me. I wanted freedom.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and knowing what you want. I mean in those situations, knowing what you want, what is going to be satisfactory for you, what you can live with and what you can't live with and it's going to be different for every partner and when those things come up, if you don't have values in place, it becomes really difficult to be able to navigate that space. You end up burning a lot of bridges that you wish you didn't have to burn. When you think about the work that you're doing now, you're an executive coach and you're helping a lot of people navigate that space. Why is it becoming such a hot topic now? Why are so many people or why is coaching important now?
Speaker 3:I think, because we care more about others. In everything you see in business, you see, purposeful businesses, I think, because we care more about others. In everything you see in business, you see, you know purposeful businesses. I think the cultural evolution, the evolution of the society, brings us to pay more attention to others and therefore the essence of coaching is really to unleash the beauty of other people, really to unleash the beauty of other people, and so that is an aspect, and certainly also more attention to humanity. I think no, so that's why more and more people walk that path.
Speaker 3:I mean, for me it was peculiar in the sense for me I wanted to work as a coach to humanize leaders and organization. For me it was more of a tool than, if you want an end, no, and in fact now, having started this big project about the show, I kind of see myself more as a show runner than as a coach. So I'm going, I'm walking towards another direction. I spent time with acting coaches and things like this, but I think that is the reason. The reason is, you know, we think that, and I'm going to take this example, you know, look at AI. Yes, so AI, you think, oh, what's going to happen to is going to replace a human. See that. But the reality is that AI is making humanity the scarce resource and the most important leadership skill in the future, because that is what is making us different from AI. So everything is going towards belief, from my perspective, an evolution, a positive evolution of the world towards more humanity.
Speaker 2:Phenomenal. I mean I'm glad you brought up AI because it's in every conversation most times You're going to see it. You know, if you go through it out here in AI one day, it's probably because you're disconnected or disengaged. Being that that's happening, it's causing a ripple effect, a fear of change you said it where people think they're going to get replaced by AI. How do you help leaders, first of all, feel safe that AI is the way that we're going, but also take care of their workforce that feels like their jobs may get replaced by AI? I was just at the airport last night, traveling back in, and the machine that was cleaning the floor used to be run by a human being. It's a robot now. I go to the gas station or I go to the cash register, and how do you help humans embrace this new way of moving forward without the fear of it's replacing me?
Speaker 3:I think the mental approach is very important. It is how you see things. If you see it as a threat, you the kind of the mentality that you see. If you see it as a threat, then it's like if you see it as an opportunity, the reality is, everything that is coming is coming as a positive opportunity for you. Okay, when you have this in mind and you read everything that comes to you in this way, you'll be able to spot that positive, because everything that comes, if you're looking for it, if you're looking for the positive side, everything that comes, everything, okay, everything, even the most negative, even worse, yes, okay, it is an opportunity and it comes for your positive, yes.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to tell you about ai. This is funny, you know, a friend of mine recently shared something with me. He asked the chart gpt, what would be the kind of human intelligences that would be least likely for AI to surpass humans? And the answer from Chachapiti was five kinds of intelligences Bodily, kinesthetic intelligence, naturalistic intelligence, existential intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence. Existential intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, interpersonal intelligence. Okay, now, everything you know is down to awareness, which is a very important specific skill for leaders to develop, because it's awareness of nature, awareness of your body, awareness of somebody else, awareness of yourself. You know this is all about awareness, but this is to say that even Chagipiti, the LA Gloob, for AI is going to be impossible to surpass humans in terms of humanity.
Speaker 3:So where do you want to go in the future? If you want to, you know, have a good life and not be threatened by obviously AI will change. You know, jobs threatening by obviously ai will change. You know jobs will change, professions will change. There will be new professions, but the reality is we have an opportunity also. Think about a very simple thing, okay, very simple little thing. See, think about if you program AI not to respond to you, if you don't say please or thank you, think about the change that that is going to provoke, you know. So it's just a way of seeing things.
Speaker 2:Phenomenal information. Ai is a hot topic, so you know I'm glad that you brought it up and we're having a conversation and it's a mindset. How do you think about the change that's happening and are you thinking about it in a way that allows you to embrace it or fight it all the time, Because it's coming? I mean, someone said in the room the other day we're in a room If you really don't like change, you're really not going to like extinction, and that resonated because if you're not willing to change at some point, it may die off and you become irrelevant. So if you don't like change, you absolutely are not going to like the fact that you're now extinct.
Speaker 3:Look, I will tell you. You said something which is, for me, fundamental Change. In my youth there was no attention to that. Now it's a fundamental skill of every human being. Change. And I have two daughters yes, younger 15 and 13. You know I made them change school every single. So so, nursery, one school, primary, another school, secondary, another school, high school, another school. They need to get used, they need to and you need to build this skill your first, somehow. It's very important and if you have kids, please do the same.
Speaker 2:Yes, because that's what the world is doing like. It's changing faster than we can keep pace with. But the human brain is phenomenal if we would embrace it. Most of the time it doesn't happen because we're fighting and upset about it and don't want to change. But the brain is very, very capable of making the change and the switch if you allow it to. So I'm glad you shared. We've covered a lot in a short amount of time here. You know, if you had to put a recipe together, the magic answer. It doesn't work for everybody, but what would be some things that you would say in order to be an effective leader in today's society, the way the world is changing? What are some things you're noticing as a coach that you will help me if I was a new executive?
Speaker 3:Say, ron, executive, say, ron, you're gonna need to be able to do these three things. Well, what would those three things be? You know one thing, one, one thing, the most fundamental one is be your true self, unpack that. What does that mean? It means just show up, do, say you know everything that you do as a person and as a leader. Just just be who you are, with everything your genius, your fragilities, your black and white.
Speaker 3:You know, everybody is black and white. We tend to always show the white, yes, and not show the black. The most important thing is to show everything that you have, because then, at that point, you unleash everything, you unleash all the beauty that you have, because then, at that point, you unleash everything, you unleash all the beauty that you have inside and you make other people around you, as a leader, do the exactly the same, yes, which is the work of a leader. You know, the work of a leader is an inside out job. So first you have to do it inside and unleash everything, and it is to unleash the beauty of the people around.
Speaker 2:Yes, leadership is an inside out job. It starts inside, you know. So the most important person you get to lead is you. First, and that's probably the most difficult one too, is to hold yourself accountable, to continue to look for professional development, professional growth and be authentic. And also, how do you lead? You will determine how you lead others. So if someone wanted to reach out to you and they want to make contact with you, how would they reach out to you and what are the things that you do so people can know? Hey, here's what giraldo does and here's how he can assist you. What are the things you do and how do we reach you?
Speaker 3:Well, it's very, very easy. Just visit GerardoSagatcom, my website. Yes, there you find information about me, information about my coaching program, corporate coaching program, preludes and information about the show Autism Humans with you know, clips, pictures, et cetera. How to get involved in my contacts?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing Again. I always bring you guests that come in, they pour into you, they want to give you something that adds value. They always give you their websites or their links, and there's tons of content on there that they're giving away. So they come check us out.
Speaker 2:So we're not here to sell you anything, but we would love to be of service to you. If you need our services, we'd love to help you, and if you ever need anything from me or you're interested in coming on to the podcast because you have value to add, reach out to our team. We'll be happy to get it scheduled for you. We'd love to have you on. We normally spend about 20 minutes with each guest, dropping information and knowledge and opportunities for you to get better as a leader. Our primary goal is to add value and make a difference. Hopefully we've done that in this segment. Hopefully we've walked away with something that makes you better than you were when you joined us. And until then, gerardo and I will sign off and thank you for joining us for Unpacked with Ron Harvey. Once again, until our next episode, we're signing off.
Speaker 1:Well, we hope you enjoyed this edition of Unpacked Podcast with leadership consultant Ron Harvey. Remember to join us every Monday as Ron unpacks sound advice, providing real answers for real leadership challenges. Until next time, remember to add value and make a difference where you are, for the people you serve, because people always matter.
