Speaker #0Hi everyone, Malou speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Grit. I speak about career, science and well-being. Okay, enough. Let's talk. What advice would you give to young leaders? So, first of all, I would encourage them to find out about their strengths, because that's the most important thing. Then I would also encourage them to understand how do they perform, because like strengths, how do you perform is also unique to you. So there are some people who learn by reading, others learn by listening, some people are happy with other people, other people prefer to be alone. There are people... who prefer to work in a structured, predictable environment. Others prefer to work in a loose environment where they can let their creativity work. So they need to figure out and find out what their strengths are, how they perform. And then also one important point, what are their values? And in the choice of the organization they need to see if the values, because organization like people have values, so they need to see if the organization they are applying to has the same or similar values and don't need to be exactly the same but they need to be able to coexist. They need to be similar for example if you are and I had the experience a couple of times in my life that the ethics of the company where I chose to work at some point was not in accordance with my ethics and as a physician this is very important and we are treating patients so you For me, cutting corners was not an option, so I didn't last long in this kind of environment. But you need to know that, and young leaders need to know that values are important and that they need to pay attention. So then they see where they fit in. and where can they make a difference actually, because that's where they will be happy, where they can make a difference. I think in essence... Know who you are, know your strengths and know your passions. This is even more important today than it has ever been because today with a 50 year Work life, you have to sometimes change jobs, change industries, so you really need to know what you are good at and what your passion is, because that will make you successful. If there is a value problem, for example, in the company, meaning that your values and the company values do not align, then in any department you won't be happy. There is no department where you can be happy because the values are not corresponding. If you have a technical problem, maybe you are more a clinician rather than a pre-clinician and you are in a pre-clinical department, then eventually you should switch to the clinical department. Or if you are... a regulatory person, then you should switch to a regulatory department. It depends on your technical skills, but values are the same in every department. So you are probably not in a good company when you have value problems in one department. I think they need to know if their strengths are exploited in the position where they are. It's probably usually from what I find out is that the strengths are not applied. That you are in the wrong position because you are not good at what you are doing. And regardless of... You know, time going by you will never be good at what you are not good at to begin with. So you need to change and I think that's probably the most difficult thing for a young person is to know who am I and what are my strengths. And you need sometimes time to find out and you need sometimes to fail and experiment. I think even in my case I have experimented some different jobs sometimes to find out what fits me best because I didn't know I didn't know myself enough to know that's where I feel best So that's a question you need to experiment and failure is not a bad thing. You learn a lot from failure. You learn that you are not in the right place and that gives you the opportunity to go in the right place later on. To become a leader... When you are optimistic, I think you need to be optimistic to be a leader and no challenge is insurmountable to some extent. Whatever people tell you, because there are always reasons, things are changing, it changes all the time and you have to adjust, you have to adapt. That's also part of leadership, is that you need to be... humble enough sometimes to learn new skills, to be adapted again to a new environment, and have no problem with having to step back a little bit to advance faster later. I think and then you have to inspire other people to be better to be the better version of themselves I think that's for me the essence of leadership is to inspire other people to overcome their own limitations and to to be better than they thought they would be at the beginning
