The Global Leadership Institute
ILA members are doing amazing leadership work around the world. We are pleased to shine an ILA spotlight on the programs of our members. Based in Chile, The Global Leadership Institute practices a multidisciplinary, multidimensional approach to leadership development framed under the concept of wellness. Gabriel Lama, one of the founders, shares more in this interview with ILA Board member Aldo Boitano.
ALDO BOITANO: I am here with Gabriel Lama, one of the founders of The Global Leadership Institute, and Laura Illanes, who is a journalist and the person in charge of public relations at the institute. Thank you so much for being here. Gabriel, before we started the interview you told me a little bit about your multidisciplinary, multidimensional point of view when working with organizations and individuals. Could you elaborate for our readers?
GABRIEL LAMA: Aldo, thank you for the opportunity to participate in this interview. In answer to your question, first of all, our team is a multidisciplinary team. We have many different professionals working with us including engineers, doctors, physical educational teachers, and journalists. They all have different professional backgrounds and different kinds of knowledge. We bring those different points of views together to examine the issues and problems within organizations. Our work is done on the individual and team level, providing coaching and other activities.
ALDO: Can you give some examples of the work you do at The Global Leadership Institute?
GABRIEL: We work with national and international companies, usually middle-size companies. Sometimes, we do a workshop or a lecture or work with them on something small such as motivational speaking. Sometimes we work with organizations over the years, providing individual coaching with leaders, coaching in different areas of the organization, or working with big workshops and conferences. We do different activities to try to move the organization to the same thought, to align them about the leadership and the important role that the each one of them has — not only the traditional leaders, but also those who practice leadership without a title.
ALDO: As I understand it, you frame all of your work under the concept of wellness. This is very much in keeping with your past experience and training as an Olympic athlete in Judo.
GABRIEL: Yes, there are a lot of similarities between an Olympic, or a high performance, athlete and a high performance person in a corporate setting. They both have very important goals, a lot of challenges and the need for perseverance, discipline, and team work to achieve their goals. But at the same time, there is a side of the athlete that nobody knows and it’s related to the athletes’ self-care, their wellness. This includes not only their physical wellness but also their emotions and their social environment as well as their spiritual and intellectual dimensions. In terms of the workplace, in a high performing corporate setting, all of these dimensions should work in synergy in order for the corporate executive to achieve good results inside of their organization.
ALDO: You’ve developed a model that you use in your work. Could you elaborate a little bit more on how wellness is built in to the model?
GABRIEL: Leaders need to bring in all of their different dimensions to their leadership of an organization. Leaders need to start with themselves as a location of change, shifting the reality outside of them is elemental to achieving better results and being a happy person. Making little changes in life, in the physical dimension, can be great for one’s performance. For example, we ask leaders how many hours they sleep and how many hours will be enough so that they wake up in the morning with a lot of energy, go to work with this energy, and come back home with that same energy.
With the emotional dimension, we focus on self-awareness in our workshops. It’s the first step to trying to manage in the best ways possible one’s emotions. Self-awareness enables leaders to relate with others in a better way. All the time we try to come back to the person. The leaders need to be in charge of themselves first before they try to lead others. Leading others is the second step. It comes after the leader’s commitment, effective communication, and team building appear.
ALDO: You use both technological coaching and other dimensions of professional coaching. How do you mix those two concepts?
GABRIEL: We don’t work with just one model, one school of thought, or one kind of information. We try to mix things together to get the best result possible and change the behavior of people. Our work starts at the essence of a human being, but sometimes the client is not really open to start working from there. We need to be very flexible to connect and build trust with the coachee. So we start step by step, making little changes. Then, later on, maybe that client will be open to go deeper in to this work.
We believe in a very open posture and we try to integrate things as much as possible. Everything is an opportunity of learning. Being here with you just now in this interview, there is something to learn. We are searchers of learning so we try to integrate different theories, models, and knowledge as we start working with the companies. For example, we work with the models of emotional intelligence, outstanding leadership, and one from the Human Performance Institute.
They have a really beautiful model. This year, I went to their headquarters in Orlando to do a master training in the corporate athlete program. They talk about four dimensions, the spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual. We add the social and the occupational dimensions. A few weeks ago, we learned of the energy project from an article in Harvard Business Review about how the energy of people can impact their performance every day in their work. So now we’re thinking about how to integrate that learning into what we do.
ALDO: You work with their bodies first and then their minds. Once they gain knowledge and control of their own person, then you start talking about how they can lead themselves, and finally how they can lead and work with others.
GABRIEL: Yes. Every one of us needs to be the best we can be. That is part of the energy. That is part of taking care of ourselves. If you are in the best way as possible, it’s like you can infect others with this energy, with this power, with this vision, and you can share thoughts in a better way. You can hear in a better way and try to create changes in not only the companies but in the world. Here in Chile we have severe problems with leadership in the companies. Eighty percent of the companies work in a very old school way. They only focus on the results, not on the person, control rather than trust. Our vision is to try to change that.
ALDO: That’s the larger purpose — to produce change in these organizations.
GABRIEL: Yes. We’re trained to find ways to connect with people in these organizations. We are flexible with them in order to help them transform the organization. We understand that it takes time.
Now that we are members of ILA, we look forward to gaining even more views, more models, more possibilities, and more connections! It is too early for us to make a presentation, but we are looking forward to being in Brussels at the 2017 Global Conference to soak in the learning.
We have only been in existence for five years, but already we have worked with more than sixty different companies. But to do the kind of transformational change that we’re interested in, we need to work even harder, be more prepared, have more networking, and build an even a bigger team than we have today. We are positively ambitious in our growth moving forward.
ALDO: So ILA members should feel free to email and send you ideas or connections, to help you expand your network and contacts?
GABRIEL: Please! We would be grateful if that could happen. We’d particularly like to hear if there is some theory or hypothesis that other ILA members would like to share with us. Please let’s be in touch. Let’s exchange ideas via email or on the Intersections community discussion board, HubILA.
ALDO: Again, thank you for your time, Gabriel. I’m pleased we could do this organizational spotlight on The Global Leadership Institute. Is there anything else you’d like to add to our conversation?
GABRIEL: A final thought. Years ago I played judo in the Olympic Games where the highest level is the black belt, when you suppose to know “everything.” Our mission is just the opposite, being permanently a white belt, open for all possibilities and opportunities relating to learn more about leadership, trying to receive and give at the same time.
ALDO: Great. Thank you so much.
GABRIEL: Thank you, Aldo, for this opportunity.
Aldo Boitano is the founder/executive director of Executive Development, a world class deliverer of executive education programs and workshops. He serves on the boards of the International Leadership Association and Electra, a renewable energy company. He is a guest professor at Universidad de Chile, and formerly an associate professor on International Business at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte Belk School.