This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Panoramic Leadership: How Great Leaders Expand Their Perspective in Times of Change with Cornelia Choe | 422

Starting point is 00:00:00 Right now, for a limited time, everyone's part of the Buick team, even you. Buick's Employee Pricing for You event is on now. Get a purchase credit of up to $3,168 on a 2026 Buick Envision. Surround yourself with signature Buick refinement from an available massaging driver's seat to an expansive panoramic moonroof and a stunning ultra-wide 30-inch diagonal screen. Don't miss Buick's Employee Pricing for you event. Visit buick.com for more details. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

Starting point is 00:00:33 When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us.

Starting point is 00:01:08 I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And since around here, woman's work is doing whatever feels true and real and right for you, that means we must cover a wide variety of topics on this podcast. It also means that we have to say no to a lot of amazing guests with important topics because there may be overlap or similarity to topics we've already covered. The two exceptions, though, the two topics that I have a borderline unhealthy obsession with

Starting point is 00:01:51 are leadership and confidence. Because when they're done well, they change everything for you individually and for us collectively. And when they're done badly, I mean, it's hard to not rage out a little, right? And listen, I'm not sure if leadership has ever been harder than it is today or more desperately needed. And yet, for something that matters this much, we're still talking about it in ways that feel outdated, insufficient, and frankly, overly simplistic given the complexities that we are all navigating. And here's where I think we may have gotten it wrong. We've been taught to think

Starting point is 00:02:28 of leadership as decisiveness, certainty, having the answers, being the one people look to when things get unclear. But what happens when everything is unclear? When the pace of change outpaces your own experience, when the playbook that you were handed doesn't work anymore. What I see over and over again are smart, capable leaders defaulting to the way it's always been done, not because they're lazy or unqualified or that they don't care, but because it's efficient, it's familiar, it's what has always worked until it doesn't. But what if the real problem isn't that leaders don't know what to do. It's that they're not seeing the full picture. Because leadership today isn't just about decisions. It's about perspective. It's about expanding

Starting point is 00:03:15 your field of vision beyond your own experience, your own bias and your own corner of the world. It's about recognizing that your blind spots aren't a character flaw. They're a given. And the risk isn't having them. It's pretending that you don't. So if we're going to redefine what woman's work looks like in leadership, then we have to move beyond the idea that it's about having all the answers and start actively seeking the perspective of others, especially those that challenge you, slow you down, or make you rethink what you may have initially thought was obvious, which brings us to panoramic leadership and Cornelia Cho. Cornelia is an international leadership expert and CEO of the Leaders Alliance, advising

Starting point is 00:04:00 CEOs and C-suite leaders across five continents from governments to Fortune 500 companies on navigating complex global change. She holds degrees from Georgetown and Harvard Kennedy School, has lived in seven countries, speaks three languages, and is currently based in Geneva, Switzerland. With a background in private equity at Morgan Stanley and experience across Asia, Europe, and North America, she brings a truly global lens to leadership. And she's here to help us expand how we see think and lead. So Cornelia, welcome to the show. And I'd love for you to set the stage for our conversation by explaining what a panoramic leader is and what is it that they're doing differently than regular leaders or what makes them more effective. Absolutely, Nicole. It's such a

Starting point is 00:04:49 pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for such a warm welcome. The biggest question I get today is how do I deal with so much change? And this change is, it's nonstop. It's different than it was before because change had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And today, before one change process can end, another begins. And so it feels continuous coming from all directions. We have wars, inflation, tariffs, our daily lives are affected by AI. And so people don't know how to handle this new nature of change in leadership today. And we're having a real. crisis in leadership. And we have an unprecedented level of CEO turnover. And it's not that leaders are lacking intelligence or good experience. They have this all. But in this new world of incessant change, we have to be able to understand all perspectives. And to understand change in all of its realms, what's happening in the world will affect our teams in different ways. And we can't know how all the time. So we need to stay close to all of our stakeholders or our team members, people inside the

Starting point is 00:06:04 company, people outside the company, so that we can bring their perspectives together into a 3D understanding of what's actually happening in the world. And I've worked with a lot of leaders who have found a lot more confidence and adaptability through this. And so this is helping us adapt to the new nature of the world. And the level of change is only going to get faster going forward. Yeah, I can't imagine that there is a leader listening in that wasn't nodding their head incessantly as you were talking because that's exactly right. It is constant and continuous, this change. It often feels, as you said, like you haven't finished anything or almost accomplished anything before you're moving on to the next. And I couldn't agree more that there's

Starting point is 00:06:54 a crisis and leadership from where I'm sitting, and I'd love your perspective on this and feel free to challenge me if I'm off base, the crisis, I think, is twofold. First, it's become harder for all of the reasons that you said. And also because it feels like there are so many more eyes on it, from social media to all media, to the global connections that we have, to It just feels like you're under a microscope a lot more and everything is being judged and critiqued and you almost feel like you can never get it right. And so then what I think my second thing that I think is happening is the good ones are like, this is too exhausting. It's too draining. It's not working.

Starting point is 00:07:46 And so they end up leaving. And we're sort of left with the not so great ones that don't seem to care as. much. What are your thoughts? I think it's hard to know going in if a leader is going to adapt well or not, but the nature of leadership today is no longer about whether we're right or not. As you said, it's about whether we're seeing the whole picture. And the good news is that we don't need to prove that we're right all the time. We need to make sure that we're constantly adapting to the world and constantly plugging in to our stakeholders to see if the way we see the world is on the mark. And this is something we call our mental map. And the way we see the world or our operating

Starting point is 00:08:33 system, it's the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. It's our values that we've collected throughout our lives, what we've learned through successes and failures. And all of that together forms our mental map, and that's what we use to decide how to react to different change happening in the world. And this map needs to be updated, but the good news is that you don't have to be right all the time. The more just going through the process of updating this map is extremely helpful because the biggest danger isn't getting it wrong. It's stopping mapping. And a lot of times in our lives, we're mapping as we're in our 20s and 30s, but oftentimes when we find success, we stop mapping and go on autopilot.

Starting point is 00:09:23 And this is the biggest danger of all. So if you keep on mapping, it doesn't matter if you're 100% right, keep on connecting with your stakeholders. And that'll give you so much more insight, especially if you connect with people who think differently from you and who think opposite from you. because when you're talking to someone who sees in the other direction, they're able to see behind you. And they can see your blind spots, which can be extremely helpful if you have the right kind of relationship with them. So our maps never really feel complete.

Starting point is 00:09:58 And we are always on the quest to continue adapting to the world. But that's where we get our confidence, knowing that we are plugged into a lot of different stakeholders and that we do see a more realistic vision of what's happening around us. Okay. So for the leader listening in who is like great, I want to work on updating my mental map. I want to grow, become a better leader. What are the different skills that need to be prioritized and practiced? If, for example, back in the day, decisiveness was a leadership skill that people maybe honed in on. I think that sort of goes by the wayside a little bit today and maybe gets replaced by curiosity or something like that. My question is, what sort of skills should the panoramic leader be focused on developing on a regular basis?

Starting point is 00:10:53 We have a very simple three-step process to becoming more panoramic in our thinking and in our leadership. And it's called the gem process. The first step is get up close. The second step is establish meaningful bonds. And the third step is map your evolving perspective. So I'll break these down for you. The first is to get up close. And it takes a lot of courage and curiosity, as you mentioned, to get up close to people we don't know and who may even be hostile to something our company is doing, for example. But a study from the University of Chicago shows that they talk to Chicago commuters. before they went on their commute, and they asked them to do one of three things,

Starting point is 00:11:43 first to connect with the stranger, and then a second group, they asked them to remain disconnected. And the third group, they asked them to commute as normal. And the results were astounding, because the group that they asked to connect with a stranger had not just more positive results, but significantly more positive reactions. And we often think that, well, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:06 we don't want to bother. someone or I'd rather just go through the commute alone and have some time for me. But we underestimate how productive and how much we enjoy connecting with other people being seen and seeing other people, even if we don't know them yet. And so this first step, get up close is it's perceived to be more difficult than it actually is. And it can be a joy to connect with a lot of different people. It's always fun to learn new things. So the wider of a group, of people we can talk to, and the wider the group of perceptions and perspectives we can gather, the more interesting it becomes, and for us personally, and the more helpful it is in

Starting point is 00:12:50 establishing a wider, more panoramic view. Now, the second step is to establish meaningful bonds because getting up close to people is a great first step, but developing these relationships and creating trust and more honesty, a relationship where we can, can really share our feelings and understand the true perspective of other people is so much more rewarding. And especially if we're at the top of an organization, it's so hard to get honest feedback. We often hear what people think we want to hear, which is always interesting, but it's not always going to help us become a more panoramic leader in the true sense of understanding what's happening around us. So established meaningful bonds is very helpful in

Starting point is 00:13:37 deepening our relationships because it's all about connection and understanding. And the third step is to map your evolving perspective because what do you do with all these perspectives and opinions once you get them? How do they affect your mental map? And this really answers how you feel and how open you are about accepting new information. The question isn't, do they agree with me or not? Or is this going to integrate into my map? The question is, am I learning? Are you? Are I learning? something new, which could involve rewriting part of your map or expanding it through what you learn. And so that's how we maintain an open and evolving mental map. And that's really the basis of being a panoramic leader. The last step after that is to use your mental map to help the people

Starting point is 00:14:27 around you through your leadership. And one key way we do this is through microtranslation. And we often think that the people around us think very similar to us. But having worked in women's leadership and then private equity, I wasn't able to even mention my previous work in women's leadership to my team in private equity. I would have been left out of the room. And so people's realities, as you know, can be so different. So honoring that and recognizing that and adapting to people's maps and presenting information in a way that they can actually register it easily,

Starting point is 00:15:08 that's what we call micro-translation. And that's how we help share what's on our mental map with the outside world. I've become more convinced over the years that good health isn't about one dramatic decision or big change. It's about the small choices you make over and over again. Getting enough sleep, moving your body, eating reasonably well, and yes, drinking water tops the list.

Starting point is 00:15:34 If water is something you're consuming every single day, and it should be, it makes sense to think about the quality of it. That's why we use cove pure. Cove pure is a reverse osmosis water purifier that's lab certified to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants, things like PFS, heavy metals, fluoride, and even pharmaceuticals. What I love is that it's incredibly easy to use. It sits right on the countertop, requires no installation, and gives us fresh, hot, or cold water whenever we need it. It's one of those everyday products that makes life and your health a little better. Right now, CovePure is giving our listeners $250 off for a limited time. Go to covepeer.com slash T-I-W-W.

Starting point is 00:16:15 That's C-O-V-E-P-U-R-E dot com slash T-I-W-W to get your CovePear now. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year, too. A round of Jameson, ginger, and lime arrives at the table. smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball.

Starting point is 00:16:40 Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. Hey there, I'm Travis Hoym, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know.

Starting point is 00:17:03 and the story's moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industry shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing, and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Starting point is 00:17:26 Okay. I have two sort of logistical, potentially dumb questions, but I'm going to ask them anyway. There are no dumb questions. I don't agree with that. But I'm okay. I'm going to go with it anyway. When you say mental map, like, are we actually mapping something?

Starting point is 00:17:45 Like, do we, is this a physical thing that we have or do you? Is this more, like, how do we create a mental map and how do we update it? That's a great question. A mental map is like a internal GPS. So when we have a new experience, we look through the catalog of our past. experiences and we say, okay, this is familiar to me. I've done something like this before. This is how I reacted before. Do I want to do the same thing or not? And each person has a different set of assumptions and reactions that we have. And that's really what we call our mental map. You could map

Starting point is 00:18:24 this out if you wanted to. But the point is that we have something to guide us. And people are always so surprised when they see how different our mental maps are from each other. Okay. My next question is around making sure you're getting the, I'm going to put in air quotes, right perspectives and maybe even the right amount of perspective is because there could be the potential to just be in perspective gathering all the time and not get into action or not get into decision. Is there any advice around how many different perspectives do we get and for how long before we begin to move toward action or decision or result or whatever the case may be. Yeah, absolutely. So when I was at the Harvard Kennedy School, one of my professors, Ron Hyfitts, taught us about a really wonderful way of thinking

Starting point is 00:19:26 about leadership. And it's the balcony. And a lot of people have heard about this. And a lot of people. but it's being able, when you're in the heat of the moment, to step back and look at the overall picture and to say, ah, okay, I can imagine myself down there. That's what's going on and to get more context and perspective. And that is extremely helpful, except for in times of change, when you can't really see what's happening on the dance floor from the balcony. And that's when we need to get down to the dance floor and kind of work the floor and talk to new people and get more perspective. And a good guideline to help us is if we come to a event, a change or a idea that we can't quite digest and something is hitting us wrong, then we need to get back down on the dance floor and canvas more opinions and get to know more people. And, you know, there might be a party crash on the floor, but we can't see that from the balcony.

Starting point is 00:20:24 And so we need to get down on the floor and get more perspectives if there's something that we can't understand. Now, if there is a perspective on the floor that we don't understand, then we need to get back up on the balcony and look at the overall picture and say, ah, this is really interesting. Does it fit on my map? Does it extend my map? Is it an opinion that is creating a completely new idea or am I going to replace something on my map? out. To give you an example, when I was 19, I was working as an intern in the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations in Geneva. And there was no more room in the intern's loft. And so the question was where was I going to work? And my boss, who was the special assistant to the high commissioner, agreed to have me in his office facing the wall in the corner at this table for a week. And during that week, I was able to listen to, uh, world leaders as they had conversations and negotiations, and I learned how they talked to each other, how they negotiated, how they treated their team. And the most important thing, Nicole, is that I got

Starting point is 00:21:36 a familiarity and a comfort with world leaders being by far the youngest person in the office. And on my first day, I was so intimidated. I didn't say anything. But had I used my energy to try to impress them or be seen more, I might not have gotten that comfort. and that real understanding of familiarity with leaders. It's not a black or white scenario. You don't need to throw out your entire map when you're adapting to the world and updating your mental map.

Starting point is 00:22:09 You just adapt incrementally as you learn new things from your stakeholders and new perspective. So the point is when you're able to get enough opinions that you're comfortable with your map and you see that things go smoothly, then you know that you have enough perspectives. I wonder your thoughts on,

Starting point is 00:22:32 I'm going to say, I believe it to be an outdated style of leadership, that command, control, fear, I'm going to put in our quote to respect model. I feel it's outdated, and yet we see it today in the upper echelons of many of the leaderships of this country and several others.

Starting point is 00:22:50 How does the panor? leader transform away from that? How do you update your map to understand that that leadership doesn't work for you and for others, even though we see it in our faces on a regular basis today? That's a great question, Nicole. And it is actually opposed to panoramic leadership. Because when you have a command and control style of leadership, chances are, you won't give your teams and the people around you the safety to share what they actually think. And so either you won't get a lot of perspectives or probably you're not looking for a lot of perspectives because you're just going forward with what you know and keeping your life very simple.

Starting point is 00:23:43 It's hard to get a lot of perspectives and it's hard to keep on updating your map. It takes a lot of courage, curiosity, and humility as well. So if you're not open to receiving feedback and your teams aren't feeling comfortable enough to share that with you, it's not going to be a very productive panoramic session with your teams. And so that's a problem that a lot of leaders are having today in that they're not able to understand and predict the changes that are happening in the world. And in order to be able to see around corners, you have to talk to a lot of, lot of stakeholders, especially the ones who aren't at your table. And so I often ask leaders to question themselves and say, who's not at my table? Whose opinion might change my perspective right now?

Starting point is 00:24:35 And do I understand their opinion? You don't have to agree with it and you don't have to integrate every single perspective, but you do need to be aware of them and to get a better understanding of how things are changing around you. And command and control probably isn't interested in knowing about that. But the danger is that suddenly when the world changes and you realize that your assumptions no longer fit, that's the big surprise that can, you know, lie waiting for you. Yeah. It feels a little bit like a paradox, right? This idea, I think we sometimes see command control. I have the answers as strength in my experience, it takes far greater strength to be open, to be curious, to ask questions,

Starting point is 00:25:24 to say, I don't have all the answers. Help me understand what you're seeing, right? Yeah. So I said this in my intro, and I do think we have a lot of well-intentioned leaders who are busy and overwhelmed, and as you said, you know, so much change. And so there is this tendency to default to, to whatever got them to this point. What's worked for me before, I mean, this is autopilot, for lack of a better term. Any advice about how to override that or recognize it when it's happening so that we don't take these sort of leadership shortcuts of defaulting

Starting point is 00:26:04 and stay in that more panoramic leadership space? Absolutely. The two dangers or the risks I see for leaders today, that's contributing to a lot of turnover is either subscribing too much to the fear of the unknown and feeling completely overwhelmed by the unpredictability of change today, or on the other hand, autopilot and putting too much of your decision-making on autopilot, which is what we often do when we don't want to change our maps. we have found some kind of success and we've told ourselves that we're done. We've made it now.

Starting point is 00:26:48 And that works in a world where that's very stable and where we don't have a lot of change. And it actually can be helpful because if the world's not changing and you have understood it, then it makes sense to offload a lot of your thinking. And actually, the brain, science has shown us that the brain takes about, about 2% of the weight of our bodies, but 20% of the oxygen and energy. And so, of course, we want to offload as much of it as we can. And I like to do this as much as everyone else. But in a world, that's completely changing. We think we're driving on the highway, but our institutions are changing. And, you know, our lane markers are no longer there. So we're not on the highway anymore. We're

Starting point is 00:27:35 on open road. And cars can come from any direction. In that case, we need to be. We need to be a to come more off of autopilot, especially when we're making decisions and be very aware of what's happening around us. Cornelia, I have one million more questions for you, but we're out of time. So I just want to remind you the listener that if you or any other leader in your life want to continue to grow and evolve into the leaders that we need today, go get your hands on this book, The Panoramic Leader by Cornelia Cho and Marshall Goldsmith. Or you can go to Cornelia's website at corneliacho.com. to put the links all the ways to find and follow her in show notes. Cornelia, thank you for doing

Starting point is 00:28:16 this incredible work, for helping us lead better and for being here today. Nicole, it's such a pleasure. Thank you very much. My pleasure. All right, friend, I know a lot of what we're seeing right now across leadership and politics and in the media flies in the face of everything we just talked about here. And I think part of the problem is that it keeps getting rewarded, that it keeps getting voted for because too many people are still clinging to an outdated definition of leadership. One rooted in control, command, and I have all the answers. But that's just noise. It's ego. It may be bold, but it isn't strength. And it may be loud, but it's incredibly limited. We've been sold this version of leaderships that says, if you speak loudly enough, decide

Starting point is 00:28:58 quickly enough, and never admit uncertainty, you must know what you're doing. But I think it's pretty obvious. That version isn't working. If this conversation, made anything clear is that real leadership doesn't come from narrowing your view. It comes from expanding it. Because the leaders who will shape what comes next aren't the ones clinging to certainty. They're the ones willing to widen the lens, challenge their assumptions, and value perspectives beyond their own. To see more, to consider more, to include more. Because that kind of leadership doesn't just change outcomes. It changes people. It changes cultures. It changes what's possible for all of And that, my friend, is leadership.

Starting point is 00:29:39 And it's also woman's work. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

Starting point is 00:30:01 Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Panoramic Leadership: How Great Leaders Expand Their Perspective in Times of Change with Cornelia Choe | 422

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.