Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Ricardo (4s): Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes podcast. Around two to three months ago, we started all this chaotic environment, ah, with the coronavirus where the lives of people or companies, government, everything flipped upside down, right. It was really a very traumatic and critical moment for all of us. And I remember one day I decided to have a chat with my friend in Canada, Vinci Molinaro I, this is an expert in leadership. So he works a lot on the leadership side, helping organizations to improve their leadership potential.
Ricardo (45s): And I started telling him and say, Vince what's going on? What's going on? What, what is happening? What is missing, why we were not able to forecast this or to answer this in a proper way. And we started seeing all the mess regarding assistance too, the victims economic recovery, everything. And then he said, Ricardo, is everything goes back to the leadership. And then we decided to put together a book that we are releasing this week and this book is free. Okay, it's free. You can download it. And we said, look, I think we need to share with people what we really think. And this book is called Regaining Control Leading Projects and Delivering Results into a blend Times and the central piece is Regaining control.
Ricardo (1m 33s): Because one of the things I, you felt mostly is that something looks like completely out of control. And then I started doing some quick research and I started the book saying. We were warned. And this, something incredible because most of the people said who warned us? So let me tell you that in September we receive it a report from GPMB a global preparedness monitoring board, and this area that is part of the world health organization. And they prepared a report called a word at risk. This report to you can download.
Ricardo (2m 14s): And its the link is on the book too. Telling that that was a big risk that we have a pandemic, and what happened at the end? People just stored this report It may be some drawer, put maybe a lock and that's it. So why nobody took action on that? And I'm not saying nobody, Ricardo, but why nobody took an action effective. And then in a couple of months after that report, the word just got into a chaotic state. And then we started trying to understand, so we started to investigate that and we said look, the lack of soft skills from global leaders.
Ricardo (2m 56s): Of course we have some very strong exceptions and the lack of the soft skills from business leaders. Project managers are really hurting. The Results are really hurting the society. And then we took some of the concepts that Vince put in his book, leadership contract and we try to frame some of the questions. And this book is a fantastic book and he wrote the leadership contract with four terms. The first one, he says leadership is a decision. So there is no way you can be a leader with an ambivalent position. It's not something like Oh, I want to be leader only if we are winning the game.
Ricardo (3m 41s): But if we are losing then, I don't want to be a leader. Leader is a leader. It's a commitment, it's accountability. So it's a strong decision of taking the stakes that it will take to Delivering these turbulent times. The second one is leadership is an obligation. What do we mean by the concept of obligation? Obligation means you have obligations that are both and beyond your own self-interests, because maybe you may say, look, I will direct my project this way because it's good for me, but maybe it will not deliver the results for the society.
Ricardo (4m 22s): So in these turbulent times, you will need to make decisions that go above and beyond your company, interest your business interests, or even your own interest. And this drives me to the third one that Vince said, leadership is hard work. It's not, because leadership it's in some ways of a word that is surrounded by some positive feelings, right? Or this is my leader. It's something that creates a very good perception. But what is really important is that you need to be resilient because it's hard work. You need to make unpopular decisions.
Ricardo (5m 3s): You need to provide feedback. You need to work with people and project managers. We're not the best on doing that. And I need to tell you that, okay, it's changing. But the roots of project managers, management, are in software development or in engineering. And these are not very, I would say, look at, please take this in a very positive way because I'm an engineer. But if it's not something I like very human-centric, right? kind of work. So we need to be very hard on taking the right decisions. And this is not easy. It's not just pleasing people. And I loved the sentence.
Ricardo (5m 44s): That William Ury that for me is one of the top professionals in negotiations. He said you must be hard with the problem and soft with the people. Exactly. You must be heart with the problem, but softer with the people. People are suffering now. So you cannot say, oh let's go back to work. And now it's easy. Let no, people are traumatized and you need to understand that. And last part of the leadership contract is leadership is a community. You know, it does not have to be a lonely pursuit. It's something that you should develop with others. You need to have a sense of trust.
Ricardo (6m 24s): You need to have a sense of community and engagement, creating, a win, win situation for everybody. Let me tell you, we felt these four pillars and without understanding the contexts, that is an underlining is impossible to regain control. You know, and what I'm afraid and, this is why we wanted to, honestly, we wanted to release this book before, but we were not able to finish it before because now it's the time for us to regain control, trying to really, really go over the challenges and deliver the results that will benefit our companies, our projects, and mainly that will deliver the results to the society.
Ricardo (7m 10s): So if you want the book, it's absolutely free of charge. Okay. We produced this in a good intention to help people so you can download it in rvarg.as/regainingcontrol So it's on my website. So you can just download there and this week we are planning to do, Vince and I, a live on YouTube on a June 11th at 11:00 AM, Eastern time, 12:00 PM, Brazil time and, 04:00 PM, London and Lisbon time. So this is just for us to discuss a little bit more. And also, if you want, please participate and put your questions. So we want really to contribute to better results with more predictability in these very tough times, So have a great week and I hope you'll find the book useful.
Ricardo (7m 59s): Take care.
