Maribel:
04:05
So we're very happy to have you today with us, Dalia, for our conversation. It was just pure luck that I reached out to you and you were so kind to say, “Yeah, sure, I’ll come on your show.” So we’re very grateful for that.
Dalia:
04:25
It’s audacious that I need to be on this podcast because it's what it’s all about. So thanks for reaching out and great to be here.
Maribel:
04:35
Thank you. So I'd like to start first, asking you to share with our audience who you are, and what are the audacious things, or the audacious thing, that you've done that you’d like to share with us.
Dalia:
04:55
Well, my book is called Dare to Lead Like a Girl, so that's audacious. Hi everyone, my name is Dalia Feldheim. Today I'm an organisational psychologist. I work with companies on bringing purpose and joy to the workplace. I'm also founder of a company called Uppiness, which developed a game for bringing purpose and joy to work, together with my mentor. But this is a pivot in my career that I took five years ago. I’ve done a few audacious things but pivoting my career was a big one because I left a very lucrative corporate career as a CMO. I was at Procter & Gamble, CMO Asia, and then in another company and most of my career in marketing. I loved it. I call my P&G years the years of flow, where I was completely aligned to my purpose, which I discovered early on was about empowering people, empowering women to be the best that they could be. And P&G is very much a company of ‘Take care of your people and the business takes care of itself.’ And the company really enabled me to live my purpose every day. I became a training junkie, meaning we always trained from within, so any training that happened in P&G I volunteered to do the train the trainer as a team builder for my own team, but also as a marketing director and one of my probably most famous campaigns was Run Like A Girl. I don't like to say it's mine, I was one of four global marketing directors that led the brief for this, but the idea really came out from the agency. But that Run Like A Girl became one of the most viral ads of the year 2014. It won 14 Cannes awards and it was chosen by Forbes as one of the most influential campaigns of the decade and I really could see that was the first audacious… really deciding that we're not selling pads, we're selling women empowerment, and how do we use the voice of our brand to make an impact to what the world needs? And that led me throughout my career on how can I use my power to make a bigger impact in the world. And P&G enabled me to do that within my campaigns, but then I came to a more challenging experience in a second company, where I felt like my wings were chopped off and I ended up working with a boss that was very challenging. It took me three years to name it and say that was bullying. And when I left that three years, again I just decided I want to live closer to my purpose and to enable… I remember leaving and saying to myself, “Wow, what a waste of human potential.” In one company I was motivated and I gave 200% every day because they believed in me. And in the other company, I was so busy defending myself that I know I gave them 10% of my ability at best. And I said to myself, “That's my new purpose. That's what I want to pivot my career.” And I guess that was audacious because I was the main breadwinner at the time. My husband had just established his high tech company, I have three kids that were going to international school, the housing was paid by the company as an expat, and I left it all behind and took this leap in creating my own company. But really working every day on what I believe is important, which is helping more individuals and companies with what worked so well in P&G, where employees really feel empowered to give their 200% every day. So that's kind of a little bit about me.
Maribel:
09:10
Well, where do we start?
Helen:
09:15
Can I start? Dalia, thank you so much for that. I'd like to go back to what you were saying about purpose and living your purpose. And I wonder if you could say something about, how did you know what your purpose was? Was there something within you saying this is what you are meant to be doing, this is what you've been called to do? What can you say about that?
Dalia:
09:40
Well, today that's what I do. Most of my time is working with employees within big companies to realise their purpose. And when I introduce it, then the CEO goes, “Oh but they’ll find their purpose and they'll leave and they'll go to live in the Himalayas, right?” And I always say, “Yeah, maybe a few, but I don't expect more than one.” So whether they discover it now, but for most of us, we can really find what we love in what we do. It's a great question, when did I know? One of the stories that came to mind is I was a very young associate brand manager and I was responsible for femcare in Israel and we were the leading brand. And Cortex, our key competitor, was announcing that they're going to launch and it was a very big threat. And the best form of defence is attack, right? So I started to do this lifecycle to see where we're weaker and tore out all our areas and I noticed that we were losing share among 18 year old girls. And where are 18 year old girls? They’re in the army. So they join the army, it’s compulsory here. They suddenly don't have the budget to buy the most expensive, which is Always and our share was declining. So I really wanted to get to these girls in a way, and sample them and talk to them in a way that we become relevant for that life cycle. And I can remember my first day in the army and you get all the uniform and all the elements and so I said I really want to give them a gift that they will get in the first day to sample them. But when you go to the army, everyone goes to the washroom, you take your pads and tampons, everything gets wet. So we created this washbag with compartments that basically make sure that they stay hygienic. And I went and I sold that to the army and they loved the idea. And a week before we launched, I felt like I wanted to do more. And I sat down and I asked the agency to come up with a letter to add and I wasn't quite getting what I wanted. So I sat down and I wrote a letter myself as an example for the agency and I talked about the importance of hygiene in the army and why we created that gift. But I also talked about my own experience, as a platoon commander knowing you just said goodbye to your parents and your friends and you're sitting here and you're kind of worried and how proud you should be serving your country as equal, and I remember I was so carried away, I was in flow. And in flow you lose track of time. And I literally fell asleep in the office. And my boss came the next morning and he's like, “What are you doing here?” And I said, “Oh, I was just drafting a note to the agency.” And he said, “Can I read it?” And I'm like, “Sure.” And I let him read it. And he read and he teared, and he said “Dalia, this is amazing. I want you to sign your real name and we're not going to change it. I want us to print it as is and send it.” So we sent it out and what happened is basically a few days after the campaign launched, our service line was inundated by calls from girls and moms all excited. Basically they called to say thank you for being there at such an important milestone. I tear up when I just remember that. And I thought to myself, “Wow, something so simple can touch the relevant points.” And that's when I realised I'm not in the business of selling pads. I’m in the business of women empowerment. And I guess that was the first time it dawned on me and then I have evolved and every time I was drawn back into femcare — feminine care — because I felt that that's where we can make the biggest impact. And then in Russia I did a programme with a scholarship for girls. And then in India, and that's a famous story, I created a campaign that really started the conversation on the woman empowerment way before #metoo. And that led to the global brief on Run Like a Girl which, as I mentioned, became much more than an ad. I can tell you as a marketing director. I'm very proud of the business result, but as a mom of three I'm even more proud that a few years after the campaign first launched, my youngest daughter Anna called me from school all excited, “Mom, they’re showing your ad in social studies!” So, much more than a commercial, it became an icon for women empowerment and I really felt that I could use my personal passion to help the business. And that's what I do with companies. Basically, what is purpose? It's the intersection, and I talk about it in my book, actually, the first chapter is Find Your Purpose and I created a methodology that's built a little bit on Simon Sinek but a little bit on psychoanalytic, it’s going into drawing. I basically ask, I do it in workshops or individually, to draw their life map, their highs and lows, but drawing, no words because that's how we get into our subconscious. And when we do that and we tell the story to someone, you suddenly start seeing these red threads because purpose is really about our heritage. Everything that happens to us in our life, all our highs and our lows in our life, really determine what our purpose is. So I do that with my coachees and my teammates. Basically it’s the intersection. It's looking at, what are you good at? For me, it was about people and insights, and turning insights into ideas, big ideas. What are you passionate about? And that's where I realised I'm really passionate about women empowerment and people empowerment in general. And then the purpose is, how do you bring your strength and your passion areas into what the world needs, and that could be the big UN causes, but that can also be your business. And what is your business about? How does your business, beyond selling more, in what way does your business that you're doing now change people's lives? And I can tell you, I do it in companies, I think I've done 5000 leaders help them find their purpose in what they're doing now. And people are always shocked to see that, “Hey, within what I'm doing, I can give it a twist and bring more of what I love to what I do.” And I had one woman I'll never forget. She was working for Danone, she was a lawyer and she said, “I need to leave. I realised that working with you that my purpose is around green energy. And I want to go and work for an NGO.” And I said, “Wait. Before you leave, have you had a conversation with your line manager about what you're passionate about?” So we built the conversation and we planned it and two days later she called me and said, “You won't believe it. I had the conversation with my line manager. And she was so excited because her line manager said Danone just decided to launch this huge green energy project and they were looking for a project leader. And so that lawyer became the project leader for Asia. So, I always say, really purpose is where it all starts and Dare to Lead Like a Girl is not about per se, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later, but the first model — I have a whole model, five P model, of leading like a girl — the first P is all around Purpose. It's really about bringing your full self to work. And what happens is a huge boost of energy, huge loyalty, right? Because your job is no longer a job. It's a calling. So that's where I found my purpose and how I help others find theirs.
Helen:
17:50
Lovely. Do you have a question? I've got another burning question.
Maribel:
17:55
I do, but I can wait.
Helen:
18:00
So what I'm understanding, Dalia, is you said there's two things to it. You have to find out what you're good at, so that's the gifts and the talents that are within you. And then the other thing is what you're passionate about and you said, for example, women empowerment, girl empowerment. So if we're focusing on the passionate part, that for me sounds like that's what your values are. You've said what your values are, I believe, but how do you allow other people to find out what their values are, if they don't know what their values are? How do we do that?
Dalia:
18:30
Well, there's two methodologies that I use. You do a strength finder. I also encourage people to reach out to their best friends and find out, why are you my best friend? What is it about me specifically that makes you, that’s a Simon Sinek technique. And I did that the first time and I remember my husband, it was really weird and it was very interesting to see what were your friends, seeing how you add value. So I first encourage them to find their strengths and how they add value to others. But it's not always exactly the same as the passion areas. And the passion areas, one is your values. A very simple value exercise that I also put in my book is the value sheet of all most common values. And I encourage everyone to do it, especially anyone in a partnership, in a relationship. It's basically by elimination, I ask them to circle the first 10 values and then to try and bring them down to five values. And then I ask them to do the same with their partner, and to try and align as a couple what are your top parenting values, for example. So that's one exercise and a way of getting to your values. But another one, which I just talked about your passion areas, come from that life mapping, from looking at your highs and lows, because in many, many cases, your pain or things that you've seen, turns into your values. And where did women empowerment…? For me, it probably just started when I worked in a domestic violence home, coaching there when I was in university, and I could see the pain there, but also, when I could see women's pain in general, and I could see that I could do something about it, and it just became, Okay, if you're seeing pain in yourself or another, that's a very strong motivator to take action. And the story that I didn't share, the story of India, is where I walked into in-home visits and I saw a girl sitting on the floor, and her mom comes in and she served drinks to us and then she bends over and she serves her on the floor in metal plates, as if she's an animal something, that was my connotation. And she was sitting against a blue wall and I noticed that the colour was faded. So my strength was around insight. I was like, “What is going on here?” And I asked the agency and she said, she's on her period. And I said, “So what?” And then she told me they have all these myths, that girls on their periods are impure, so they're not allowed to go into prayer areas or in the kitchen. And maybe it had a good origin. Originally they wanted to protect these girls. But actually the girls just felt humiliated in a way and I noticed this only when, towards the end of the interview, aunts and uncles walked into the room and for a moment I noticed that really sad, embarrassed look when the uncle greeted her and immediately he knows that she's on her period because she’s sitting on the floor. And then I learned more that girls in India lose almost a week a month because they don't go to school in many cases. So that was the pain, seeing that pain, and I said to the agency, what can we do and she said, “Oh, we have these myths. We even believe that a woman on a period cannot touch pickles because she can make them go sour.” And I remember I couldn't sleep because this insight was driving me crazy, this pain. Why should the girl feel left behind just because she’s a woman? And the next morning I said to the agency, what can we do about it? I'm a foreigner and it’s customs. So we worked together for 10 months and in the end we came up with this campaign called ‘I Dared to Touch the Pickle’. And we decided to use humour as a way to bring to life these myths that don't make sense in the modern day. And I told you I'm proud of a lot of things with P&G and Run Like a Girl, etc, but that's probably the one I’m most proud of, because it's really about noticing pain and then saying, so what do you do about it? And that becomes your passion area and whether it's green energy or whether it's empowerment or whether it's just the smallest things that you can start making a difference. That's a long answer to your question.
Maribel:
23:05
Well, the stories bring it to life, so thank you for that. I'm particularly interested in human personality and the potential that each one of us has. And you gave us the example that the same person — you — when you were working at P&G you flourished and you were able to give even more than they were expecting, you said 200%. When you changed to the next company, it’s the same person with, from your perspective, a completely different result. So, as an organisational psychologist, what is the difference in corporate culture that can make someone amazing or not?
Dalia:
23:55
I think that really puzzled me because the second experience, the company was great, the CEO was great, the CMO, I really loved their vision, it seemed like a dream role. One month into the job I basically got a new line manager and everything that I believed to be my space before not only he didn't appreciate but he totally diminished. So, I was too good with my people, I was too passionate, I was even too positive. And to be honest, it was just a very strong feeling that I can't bring my strengths to work and suffocating. And then there were elements that I talk about in the TED, he basically humiliated me once for crying in the workplace. He gave me feedback and we used to call it tough love. There was no love that day. It was just tough, denigrating, humiliating. And I was holding it in but then I got so angry as he started humiliating my team and it was just so unfair. So a tear appeared in my eye. And he looked at me and he smiled and I noticed something weird about the smile, almost evil, and he offered me a box of tissues and then he turned the box around and on the other side of that box was a handmade sticker he’d prepared in advance which read: Dalia’s tissue box. So not only he basically knew he would make me cry, and he just made a joke of it. And I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is an HR assault” and he's like, “Oh, Dalia, stop being so emotional. It's just boy banter. I know you have a sense of humour.” And I can tell you the interesting thing, for me, I grew up quite audacious. One of my strengths was that I was always fearless, never afraid to challenge the norms. You close a door on me, I come in through the window, I don't take no for an answer. And I just wasn't able to bring my strengths to the workplace. And I'm not a quitter. I was a competitive gymnast. And I said, “I'm not going to leave. Why should I leave? He should.” So I stayed there for three years. And those learning during those three years were later reflected in the book because I said to myself, if this kind of experience I kept on saying I can change him. Fight is the first reaction, right? I can give feedback, I can change and I quickly learned you can't change someone that basically doesn't want to change. So the second year was more around flight and avoidance and we met our objectives, but I became totally sick that year because I realised that I left my heart at the doorway. And what happened in the third year is that I actually attended a P&G alumni event and I walked into the room, and I literally plonk myself down in the seat and I said, “Whoa, this is what culture should look like.” And that perspective helped me realise how toxic that work experience was, and that's when I decided I was going to leave but not before I win back my heart in the workplace and created a campaign. I wanted to bring back my strengths. Only when I was able to come back to my strengths I was able to perform. I almost said, “Even if he doesn't care about those things, people and creativity, this is who I am. So I'm going to bring that, no matter what he thinks.” And only then I was able to succeed, only then I was able to make an impact. So, I spent a lot of time when I left after that campaign was very successful, and I realised I found back my Mojo and I realised it was time to move on. And that pain over three years, it took me three years to qualify that as bullying. I remember I told it to my first boss, and he said, “Dalia, this is bullying.” And when he named it like that, I was like, oh my God, I was like a frog in boiling water because I kept on thinking I could change it. And I think that's a critical thing, and I did my thesis on that, can you coach yourself out of toxic environments? And my answer was, Yes, you can build resilience, but when it comes to really toxic environments, the answer is No, you can't coach yourself out of it. There really is only one strategy that works and that is zero tolerance. No sense of humour, not trying to coach. And I spoke with domestic violence, I knew the pattern where you're trying to change from within someone that doesn't want to change. So that became the pain that led me to write the book. The book is all about what I’ve learned from that experience, both for you, as an employee, but for companies. And for companies, zero tolerance is the most important element. You can create company values and paste them on the wall but if you don't live them every single day, and especially when they’re violated, you say, “We don't talk like this in our company.” No matter if it's the local CEO, if someone violates the code of values that you want in your company, you need to act on it immediately. And another thing that I would say to companies, so there's a lot of things. It's just the whole element, the whole five Ps. It's around how you help people find their Purpose by focusing on their strengths, because your strengths strengthen you, so when you have every person, you put the right people on the right seats on the bus. You put them where they're strong, you don't try to change them to what you think they need to be doing. That's the first P. The second is really about how you help them fail, how you help them understand it's not something to denigrate them for, you help them fail forward. You help them understand how they learn from their failure. And they grow. I love when I went to Google in 2016 and I saw the graveyard they have at the entrance to the company, the graveyard of projects. Every failed project, they requested the team to do a fail forward analysis, what did we learn and how will we make sure that doesn't happen again? It's okay. If we don't do, we don't fail, right? You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so we want to encourage our employees to dare, to be audacious and to try but we need to respect, when they didn't succeed, what have they learned? So that's the second P which is all around Perspective. The third P is all around Power up. And this is another important thing that employees need to take care of, which is all around the energy of their employees. It's not about managing time, it's really about managing energy. In P&G I worked like crazy, but I was on fire. I was pumped, I knew to take digital detox. My bosses would come, I remember we went rollerblading on the lunchtime and skiing in summer and some days, I remember I had one boss, we had a business review. And usually that’s a process of three months. And this boss said, “Okay, we're going to crunch it into one week. I just don't want you to drag out. One week we're going to work really hard. But then the week after you all get a week off. And for that one week, whatever you do, that's what you do. The insights that you don't find in the first week are probably not big enough for you to act on.” And that one week, we worked like crazy until four in the morning. He would come in at 1am with pizza. It was a little crazy. But we all put our hands up and said, “Yeah, let's do it in one week. It's never been done before.” And then the week after we all went skiing together. Stress is okay, stress is good for us, it puts us into a focus, it's proven, right? It puts us into a focus spot, it increases our mental capacity. Our issue is not stress, our issue is lack of recovery. And that's the Power Up. This is when you keep expecting your employees to be at 100% every single day and you don't let them recover, is when you don't do digital detox. I am now working with a company on an innovation that will close the inbox at 6pm. You cannot send emails, you can write them but they won't go anywhere, and you only get them at 9am. So if you want to do some work at night, that's your choice, but your employees will not get it or your peers will not get it until the working hours. So those things, the importance of sleep, the importance of food, all those kinds of things and I sometimes come to companies and they say, “Oh yeah, we do wellness at work. We teach yoga.” And I'm a yoga teacher as well. But it's not just that, it's really the holistic view. So that's the third P. The fourth P is people and that is the number one driver. This is research by Harvard, they did their longitudinal research of 75 years to discover the secret of happiness, what the number one driver of our happiness is the quality of our relationship. The quality of our life, the quality of our relationship. And then Gallup replicated in the workplace and they found what is the number one driver of your happiness at work? Do you have a best friend at work? And CEOs were like, “What is this stupid question? We're not a family, right?” And the reality is yes, number one driver, do you have a best friend at work? And number two is do you have friends at work? So what do you as a company do to foster those relationships? If it's taking your team out rollerblading on lunchtime and skiing on the weekend or getting to know your people as human beings, or asking them how you're doing really and caring to listen to their life holistically. So that's the fourth P and the last P is really around Positivity. This last boss used to laugh at me that I'm too positive. He actually nicknamed me Miss Kumbaya. And I kept on saying, “Oh, maybe it's not good to be so positive.” And then when I left, I actually met Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, who became my mentor. He basically heard me speaking in this conference and I was sharing some of my stories and he's like, “Oh, Dalia, you need to speak on TED, and you need to write a book.” And I remember saying to myself, “Me? I'm any girl next door.” And he said, “Well, that's why it's so relevant.” And he invited me and I started studying with him, the science of positive psychology. And I did in parallel my organisational psychology and positive psychology and when I studied with him, suddenly everything that I learned intuitively about leadership in P&G was grounded in research. Including positivity is good for us. It's good for our mental health. Our brain is 30% more productive in a positive state. But it's also good for not only employee engagement, productivity, creativity, every single measure of productivity goes up when we're in a positive state. And it's all five of these. There's not one thing, you can't do just one. The only definition of happiness is wholeness, said Helen Keller. So companies need to look at how they create holistic programmes. That's what I do today. I do a year-long programme where I work on all of them because it needs to start with understanding your employees’ passion areas and core and making sure not every employee is the same. So making sure they're all working. Each one has a passion project. It doesn't mean 100% of my time I only do what I love and I don't do any boring jobs. That's not realistic. But believe me, if you work five days a week and one day, you work on your passion project, you will have such a boost of energy that will compensate for those more mundane tasks that you do the other days. So as companies, how we work on the purpose, on the growth mindset that comes with failing or taking that as a stepping stone, the personal physical state of our employees, how we take care of them, the people, their sense of belonging to the company, that they feel cared for as human beings and finally, positivity which is not about being happy happy all the time. Some companies also I see that, that it's this chase of happiness, we will do all these fun events and parties and that's all they do. That's not the right definition of positivity either. It's really about being emotionally brave. It's about recognising all range of emotions. It's about giving ourselves the permission to be human. It's okay not to be okay. And what does it mean and how do we help employees grieve? How do we show real empathy, putting ourselves in the seats of others, seeing the world from their view? Empathy is very different from sympathy. And empathy is where the world is crashing today. And we see that in research. Research shows that university students finishing university today show 40% less empathy than university students 30 years ago. And when you think about it, it's really scary. Because this younger generation are Zoomers, everything is online and they break out with their girlfriends online and they don't need to have these tough conversations. And empathy is such an important trait and the good news, and why I do all I do, is that all of these can be taught. All of it. You can teach someone to be more value-based and focus on their strengths and we still know, even though we know that strength drives performance, we still know that only 30% of employees know their strengths. And only 17% of employees use their strengths every day. So if you asked me, What's the one thing I would focus on, would be strengths based leadership if there's one thing of all of this and that's why I always start with Find Your Purpose, always. Because that's the essence of it. And then comes the rest and we finish off with that sense of emotional, it's beyond emotional intelligence, it's beyond managing, it’s the emotional bravery. It's the gratitude. It's recognising employees. Who doesn't have negative emotions? Only psychopaths or dead people. So, recognise if you have negative emotions, it's great news. But then as a leader, how do you help them accept negative emotion? Don't try to hide them. Don't try to ignore them because they will just burst out somehow in some toxic behaviour or passive aggressiveness. I recognise this is a tough time, do you want to talk? What does help look like? It's also not deciding as an employee that you know the solution for grieving employees. “I can't imagine what you're going through. I'm here, do you want to talk about it? Why don't you take the day off? Let's understand what can help you currently.” And then slowly making sure that they don't drag into depression, that you help them, as a leader, see hope, see new possibilities, see growth. The whole notion of post traumatic growth is about understanding. Resilience is about bouncing back. But what I talk about in the book is post traumatic growth. We can all grow in our pains. And that’s what management needs to do. Zero tolerance, it starts with zero tolerance for any violation of values, and then focus in on those five P models.
Helen:
40:00
So, Dalia, the last P you talked about was Positivity and you mentioned negative emotions and it's okay not to be perfect and it's okay to have those down days, for example. I'd like to talk about the inner critic because you're coming across as a very positive person who's been very strong and audacious throughout your life. What have you done when you’ve had these moments of self-doubt, self-questioning, whatever? Have you had them and how do you deal with them?
Dalia:
40:30
Impostor syndrome, right? We all have it. 70% of people have experienced it. Impostor syndrome is this belief that your successes were external and your failures were internal. So if you failed, you’re not good at it or you personalise it, even though in most cases it had nothing to do with you or very little to do with you. And then on the flip side, you externalise success. “Oh, I was lucky. I had a great team.” And you keep on going about it afraid that you will be caught one day that you're not that amazing. And I remember every assignment I was like, “Wow, I was really lucky.” It took me a long time to realise it can't be that 17 years I was really lucky. So, even though I had those 17 years of really kickass success, I can tell you, I was on a roll. I mean, it's not that I didn't have bad bosses, I did have those as well, but I was able to manage through them because the overall culture was so people-oriented. I was able to find my passion areas. I was really on fire. And so, despite having all that positive experience when I came, I wasn't able to be myself, this imposter syndrome just blew, maybe I'm not that good. And my boss actually said, I think you're better than what you really are. So, not only did I have impostor syndrome, it was extenuated itself. You're too positive, I need to make you negative for you to be balanced. It was a very interesting kind of dynamic, because he specifically was a six sigma, really believed that everything is about learning from our mistakes. That was his operating system, he had great success in his career by working systems. And in his view, people were just a system. So let's analyse where you failed and we will focus on that. And he told me, “I'm not going to tell you what you're good at. I'm only going to focus on what you need to fix.” And it's a very interesting dynamic because when you only focus on what you need to fix, everyone has areas they’re weaker at, and if you just focus on that and you're not able to bring your strengths to life, that was a death dynamic in that experience. Because it's not that we ignore our weaknesses. Never. We can't ignore them. But, fixing our weaknesses will just help us not fail. It's like a sailing boat. I like to use the analogy. Our strengths are our sail, so if it's not up, we won't be able to move forward. Our weaknesses are the holes that we have in the sail. Should we close those holes? Yes. But if we close the holes and the sale is not up, will we move forward? No. So the idea is to put your sail up and to do whatever you need to neutralise those weaknesses, to close those holes. But really, most of our time focus on our strength because it's much harder to close a weakness to neutral than to move from neutral to strength. So neutralising our strengths is hiring people for your weaknesses or going on training programmes, but it's where your balance is. And I think that important element that I'm seeing more and more, I teach at Singapore Management University, and I asked my students what's more important, 99% of them said weaknesses, that's how we grow. So, educating the generation. It's proven when you focus on your strengths, you have two times more likelihood to succeed. So it's really about how can we work with our employees and ourselves? Courage is not the absence of fear. I'm full of fears. I have a fear of failure. I have this impostor syndrome like all of us. The weird thing is that I also have a fear of success because I have a fear of jealousy. Because when I was young, like all of us, our limiting beliefs are caused by traumatic experiences in childhood that our infantile brain tells us and creates this limiting belief. So I had a limiting belief that if you're too successful, it will hurt. I even had my mom said, “Don't straighten your teeth, because you always need something not perfect.” So that became a limiting belief. And it's only recently that I realised that I was in a Catch-22. I can't fail, but I can't be too successful. So I never brought my whole self to life. And reality is, we all have fears. So the first thing I do, after we go and we find what success looks like, what is your dream? We ask ourselves, “Well, why aren't you there? What is limiting you?” And by going back to your heritage and the stories, and tell me the first story of pain in your life. Think back on when you were five, and you will be shocked by you look back and say, “Wow, that limiting belief is still influencing how I am today. It's so stupid. Okay, I dropped my ice cream. And my mom bought my brother but she didn't buy me.” And I made this story, I'm not good enough. I hear all these crazy stories, but they become reality for us. So the next step is recognising those limiting beliefs. And I have a whole methodology, it's called CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Theory. It's years of research on how you bring up those limits and bring them up to the awareness and then you refute them, you realise how silly they are. And you replace them with more empowering beliefs. I am good enough. Being successful is important. Marianne Williamson's quote landed on me and she talks about dimming yourself is no service to others. Actually, when you're super successful, you're inspiring others to be their best. And I had to reframe success or jealousy. It's not painful. It's actually you're setting a bar, you've given people a roadmap of what success could look for them. So I had to do all these reframing. So I always say courage is not the absence of fear. It's about facing your fear and then going back to your superpowers and daring. That's what Dare to Lead is all about.
Helen:
47:10
Wonderful.
Maribel:
47:15
Shall we go for the last question?
Helen:
47:18
Yes, sure.
Maribel:
47:20
Dalia, our podcast is called AudaciousNess and audacious is being bold and taking this audacity and putting it in your life. And the ‘ness’ actually is an archaic word that means a spit of land. So the question is, while you're pursuing all these audacious goals that you've mentioned, how do you stay grounded in all the things that life is throwing at you?
Dalia:
47:50
I think it's first recognising that life will throw pain at you, that pain and suffering is very different. So it's your decision what you do with this pain. Do you turn it around and make it your driver for post traumatic growth? And the other element for me is, when I left that corporate I left a very lucrative salary and I opened my own business. It took me about three years to get to a quarter of what I was making before, which was my target, and my husband is like, “What's your business plan? Aren’t you feeling wasted?” And for me one of my fears is also feeling wasted. So you have all these voices, and you will always have these voices. So for me, I think the ‘ness’ is your strength. Are you able to bring your full self to the world in a way that helps others? And I guess that pain in the corporate experience, and then starting to teach at the university, I had one student lift his hand and said, “Thank you, Prof. I now know what my purpose is. But I know I need to be a corporate slave for a few years and then I'll do what I love.” And that became my wake up call to pivot my career, to decide I know it doesn't need to be that way. So I'm going to dedicate my second career to working with individuals and companies on showing them it doesn't need to be that way. Don't wait to do what you love, life is short, bring what you love into the here and now. And that takes courage. And I'll just end off with one of my ex bosses, Paul Polmanm who became the CEO of Unilever and one of the big activists, green energy and others. He told me recently that the word courage is probably the most misunderstood word. People think that it's about making decisions that others don't make, etc. But it really comes from the word cour, which in French means heart, because the real audaciousness, real courage is when we're aligned with our hearts. So that's when I go back and I say, “Am I aligned with my heart?” And if yes, that's my ‘ness’, to continue pursuing and know in your heart that you're making an impact. And it doesn't matter if that impact is one person. When I did my TED, I got a lot of calls from women and men standing up for bullying and men changing, and one guy called me to say, “I realise I'm an asshole. What do I do?” So whether it's one person or 100 people or 1000 people, we have a sentence: Anyone who saves a life saves the whole universe. So what is your ‘ness’, your heart, your strength, realising that yes, I have the fears, but courage is going ahead anyway. So that's my ness.
Helen:
51:10
What a lovely way to finish. Thank you so much, Dalia.
Maribel:
51:15
Absolutely!
Dalia:
51:17
It’s been a pleasure. I love the topic. And it's been just such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
Helen:
51:23
Thanks so much for your time.
Maribel:
51:25
Thank you.
04:05
So we're very happy to have you today with us, Dalia, for our conversation. It was just pure luck that I reached out to you and you were so kind to say, “Yeah, sure, I’ll come on your show.” So we’re very grateful for that.
Dalia:
04:25
It’s audacious that I need to be on this podcast because it's what it’s all about. So thanks for reaching out and great to be here.
Maribel:
04:35
Thank you. So I'd like to start first, asking you to share with our audience who you are, and what are the audacious things, or the audacious thing, that you've done that you’d like to share with us.
Dalia:
04:55
Well, my book is called Dare to Lead Like a Girl, so that's audacious. Hi everyone, my name is Dalia Feldheim. Today I'm an organisational psychologist. I work with companies on bringing purpose and joy to the workplace. I'm also founder of a company called Uppiness, which developed a game for bringing purpose and joy to work, together with my mentor. But this is a pivot in my career that I took five years ago. I’ve done a few audacious things but pivoting my career was a big one because I left a very lucrative corporate career as a CMO. I was at Procter & Gamble, CMO Asia, and then in another company and most of my career in marketing. I loved it. I call my P&G years the years of flow, where I was completely aligned to my purpose, which I discovered early on was about empowering people, empowering women to be the best that they could be. And P&G is very much a company of ‘Take care of your people and the business takes care of itself.’ And the company really enabled me to live my purpose every day. I became a training junkie, meaning we always trained from within, so any training that happened in P&G I volunteered to do the train the trainer as a team builder for my own team, but also as a marketing director and one of my probably most famous campaigns was Run Like A Girl. I don't like to say it's mine, I was one of four global marketing directors that led the brief for this, but the idea really came out from the agency. But that Run Like A Girl became one of the most viral ads of the year 2014. It won 14 Cannes awards and it was chosen by Forbes as one of the most influential campaigns of the decade and I really could see that was the first audacious… really deciding that we're not selling pads, we're selling women empowerment, and how do we use the voice of our brand to make an impact to what the world needs? And that led me throughout my career on how can I use my power to make a bigger impact in the world. And P&G enabled me to do that within my campaigns, but then I came to a more challenging experience in a second company, where I felt like my wings were chopped off and I ended up working with a boss that was very challenging. It took me three years to name it and say that was bullying. And when I left that three years, again I just decided I want to live closer to my purpose and to enable… I remember leaving and saying to myself, “Wow, what a waste of human potential.” In one company I was motivated and I gave 200% every day because they believed in me. And in the other company, I was so busy defending myself that I know I gave them 10% of my ability at best. And I said to myself, “That's my new purpose. That's what I want to pivot my career.” And I guess that was audacious because I was the main breadwinner at the time. My husband had just established his high tech company, I have three kids that were going to international school, the housing was paid by the company as an expat, and I left it all behind and took this leap in creating my own company. But really working every day on what I believe is important, which is helping more individuals and companies with what worked so well in P&G, where employees really feel empowered to give their 200% every day. So that's kind of a little bit about me.
Maribel:
09:10
Well, where do we start?
Helen:
09:15
Can I start? Dalia, thank you so much for that. I'd like to go back to what you were saying about purpose and living your purpose. And I wonder if you could say something about, how did you know what your purpose was? Was there something within you saying this is what you are meant to be doing, this is what you've been called to do? What can you say about that?
Dalia:
09:40
Well, today that's what I do. Most of my time is working with employees within big companies to realise their purpose. And when I introduce it, then the CEO goes, “Oh but they’ll find their purpose and they'll leave and they'll go to live in the Himalayas, right?” And I always say, “Yeah, maybe a few, but I don't expect more than one.” So whether they discover it now, but for most of us, we can really find what we love in what we do. It's a great question, when did I know? One of the stories that came to mind is I was a very young associate brand manager and I was responsible for femcare in Israel and we were the leading brand. And Cortex, our key competitor, was announcing that they're going to launch and it was a very big threat. And the best form of defence is attack, right? So I started to do this lifecycle to see where we're weaker and tore out all our areas and I noticed that we were losing share among 18 year old girls. And where are 18 year old girls? They’re in the army. So they join the army, it’s compulsory here. They suddenly don't have the budget to buy the most expensive, which is Always and our share was declining. So I really wanted to get to these girls in a way, and sample them and talk to them in a way that we become relevant for that life cycle. And I can remember my first day in the army and you get all the uniform and all the elements and so I said I really want to give them a gift that they will get in the first day to sample them. But when you go to the army, everyone goes to the washroom, you take your pads and tampons, everything gets wet. So we created this washbag with compartments that basically make sure that they stay hygienic. And I went and I sold that to the army and they loved the idea. And a week before we launched, I felt like I wanted to do more. And I sat down and I asked the agency to come up with a letter to add and I wasn't quite getting what I wanted. So I sat down and I wrote a letter myself as an example for the agency and I talked about the importance of hygiene in the army and why we created that gift. But I also talked about my own experience, as a platoon commander knowing you just said goodbye to your parents and your friends and you're sitting here and you're kind of worried and how proud you should be serving your country as equal, and I remember I was so carried away, I was in flow. And in flow you lose track of time. And I literally fell asleep in the office. And my boss came the next morning and he's like, “What are you doing here?” And I said, “Oh, I was just drafting a note to the agency.” And he said, “Can I read it?” And I'm like, “Sure.” And I let him read it. And he read and he teared, and he said “Dalia, this is amazing. I want you to sign your real name and we're not going to change it. I want us to print it as is and send it.” So we sent it out and what happened is basically a few days after the campaign launched, our service line was inundated by calls from girls and moms all excited. Basically they called to say thank you for being there at such an important milestone. I tear up when I just remember that. And I thought to myself, “Wow, something so simple can touch the relevant points.” And that's when I realised I'm not in the business of selling pads. I’m in the business of women empowerment. And I guess that was the first time it dawned on me and then I have evolved and every time I was drawn back into femcare — feminine care — because I felt that that's where we can make the biggest impact. And then in Russia I did a programme with a scholarship for girls. And then in India, and that's a famous story, I created a campaign that really started the conversation on the woman empowerment way before #metoo. And that led to the global brief on Run Like a Girl which, as I mentioned, became much more than an ad. I can tell you as a marketing director. I'm very proud of the business result, but as a mom of three I'm even more proud that a few years after the campaign first launched, my youngest daughter Anna called me from school all excited, “Mom, they’re showing your ad in social studies!” So, much more than a commercial, it became an icon for women empowerment and I really felt that I could use my personal passion to help the business. And that's what I do with companies. Basically, what is purpose? It's the intersection, and I talk about it in my book, actually, the first chapter is Find Your Purpose and I created a methodology that's built a little bit on Simon Sinek but a little bit on psychoanalytic, it’s going into drawing. I basically ask, I do it in workshops or individually, to draw their life map, their highs and lows, but drawing, no words because that's how we get into our subconscious. And when we do that and we tell the story to someone, you suddenly start seeing these red threads because purpose is really about our heritage. Everything that happens to us in our life, all our highs and our lows in our life, really determine what our purpose is. So I do that with my coachees and my teammates. Basically it’s the intersection. It's looking at, what are you good at? For me, it was about people and insights, and turning insights into ideas, big ideas. What are you passionate about? And that's where I realised I'm really passionate about women empowerment and people empowerment in general. And then the purpose is, how do you bring your strength and your passion areas into what the world needs, and that could be the big UN causes, but that can also be your business. And what is your business about? How does your business, beyond selling more, in what way does your business that you're doing now change people's lives? And I can tell you, I do it in companies, I think I've done 5000 leaders help them find their purpose in what they're doing now. And people are always shocked to see that, “Hey, within what I'm doing, I can give it a twist and bring more of what I love to what I do.” And I had one woman I'll never forget. She was working for Danone, she was a lawyer and she said, “I need to leave. I realised that working with you that my purpose is around green energy. And I want to go and work for an NGO.” And I said, “Wait. Before you leave, have you had a conversation with your line manager about what you're passionate about?” So we built the conversation and we planned it and two days later she called me and said, “You won't believe it. I had the conversation with my line manager. And she was so excited because her line manager said Danone just decided to launch this huge green energy project and they were looking for a project leader. And so that lawyer became the project leader for Asia. So, I always say, really purpose is where it all starts and Dare to Lead Like a Girl is not about per se, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later, but the first model — I have a whole model, five P model, of leading like a girl — the first P is all around Purpose. It's really about bringing your full self to work. And what happens is a huge boost of energy, huge loyalty, right? Because your job is no longer a job. It's a calling. So that's where I found my purpose and how I help others find theirs.
Helen:
17:50
Lovely. Do you have a question? I've got another burning question.
Maribel:
17:55
I do, but I can wait.
Helen:
18:00
So what I'm understanding, Dalia, is you said there's two things to it. You have to find out what you're good at, so that's the gifts and the talents that are within you. And then the other thing is what you're passionate about and you said, for example, women empowerment, girl empowerment. So if we're focusing on the passionate part, that for me sounds like that's what your values are. You've said what your values are, I believe, but how do you allow other people to find out what their values are, if they don't know what their values are? How do we do that?
Dalia:
18:30
Well, there's two methodologies that I use. You do a strength finder. I also encourage people to reach out to their best friends and find out, why are you my best friend? What is it about me specifically that makes you, that’s a Simon Sinek technique. And I did that the first time and I remember my husband, it was really weird and it was very interesting to see what were your friends, seeing how you add value. So I first encourage them to find their strengths and how they add value to others. But it's not always exactly the same as the passion areas. And the passion areas, one is your values. A very simple value exercise that I also put in my book is the value sheet of all most common values. And I encourage everyone to do it, especially anyone in a partnership, in a relationship. It's basically by elimination, I ask them to circle the first 10 values and then to try and bring them down to five values. And then I ask them to do the same with their partner, and to try and align as a couple what are your top parenting values, for example. So that's one exercise and a way of getting to your values. But another one, which I just talked about your passion areas, come from that life mapping, from looking at your highs and lows, because in many, many cases, your pain or things that you've seen, turns into your values. And where did women empowerment…? For me, it probably just started when I worked in a domestic violence home, coaching there when I was in university, and I could see the pain there, but also, when I could see women's pain in general, and I could see that I could do something about it, and it just became, Okay, if you're seeing pain in yourself or another, that's a very strong motivator to take action. And the story that I didn't share, the story of India, is where I walked into in-home visits and I saw a girl sitting on the floor, and her mom comes in and she served drinks to us and then she bends over and she serves her on the floor in metal plates, as if she's an animal something, that was my connotation. And she was sitting against a blue wall and I noticed that the colour was faded. So my strength was around insight. I was like, “What is going on here?” And I asked the agency and she said, she's on her period. And I said, “So what?” And then she told me they have all these myths, that girls on their periods are impure, so they're not allowed to go into prayer areas or in the kitchen. And maybe it had a good origin. Originally they wanted to protect these girls. But actually the girls just felt humiliated in a way and I noticed this only when, towards the end of the interview, aunts and uncles walked into the room and for a moment I noticed that really sad, embarrassed look when the uncle greeted her and immediately he knows that she's on her period because she’s sitting on the floor. And then I learned more that girls in India lose almost a week a month because they don't go to school in many cases. So that was the pain, seeing that pain, and I said to the agency, what can we do and she said, “Oh, we have these myths. We even believe that a woman on a period cannot touch pickles because she can make them go sour.” And I remember I couldn't sleep because this insight was driving me crazy, this pain. Why should the girl feel left behind just because she’s a woman? And the next morning I said to the agency, what can we do about it? I'm a foreigner and it’s customs. So we worked together for 10 months and in the end we came up with this campaign called ‘I Dared to Touch the Pickle’. And we decided to use humour as a way to bring to life these myths that don't make sense in the modern day. And I told you I'm proud of a lot of things with P&G and Run Like a Girl, etc, but that's probably the one I’m most proud of, because it's really about noticing pain and then saying, so what do you do about it? And that becomes your passion area and whether it's green energy or whether it's empowerment or whether it's just the smallest things that you can start making a difference. That's a long answer to your question.
Maribel:
23:05
Well, the stories bring it to life, so thank you for that. I'm particularly interested in human personality and the potential that each one of us has. And you gave us the example that the same person — you — when you were working at P&G you flourished and you were able to give even more than they were expecting, you said 200%. When you changed to the next company, it’s the same person with, from your perspective, a completely different result. So, as an organisational psychologist, what is the difference in corporate culture that can make someone amazing or not?
Dalia:
23:55
I think that really puzzled me because the second experience, the company was great, the CEO was great, the CMO, I really loved their vision, it seemed like a dream role. One month into the job I basically got a new line manager and everything that I believed to be my space before not only he didn't appreciate but he totally diminished. So, I was too good with my people, I was too passionate, I was even too positive. And to be honest, it was just a very strong feeling that I can't bring my strengths to work and suffocating. And then there were elements that I talk about in the TED, he basically humiliated me once for crying in the workplace. He gave me feedback and we used to call it tough love. There was no love that day. It was just tough, denigrating, humiliating. And I was holding it in but then I got so angry as he started humiliating my team and it was just so unfair. So a tear appeared in my eye. And he looked at me and he smiled and I noticed something weird about the smile, almost evil, and he offered me a box of tissues and then he turned the box around and on the other side of that box was a handmade sticker he’d prepared in advance which read: Dalia’s tissue box. So not only he basically knew he would make me cry, and he just made a joke of it. And I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is an HR assault” and he's like, “Oh, Dalia, stop being so emotional. It's just boy banter. I know you have a sense of humour.” And I can tell you the interesting thing, for me, I grew up quite audacious. One of my strengths was that I was always fearless, never afraid to challenge the norms. You close a door on me, I come in through the window, I don't take no for an answer. And I just wasn't able to bring my strengths to the workplace. And I'm not a quitter. I was a competitive gymnast. And I said, “I'm not going to leave. Why should I leave? He should.” So I stayed there for three years. And those learning during those three years were later reflected in the book because I said to myself, if this kind of experience I kept on saying I can change him. Fight is the first reaction, right? I can give feedback, I can change and I quickly learned you can't change someone that basically doesn't want to change. So the second year was more around flight and avoidance and we met our objectives, but I became totally sick that year because I realised that I left my heart at the doorway. And what happened in the third year is that I actually attended a P&G alumni event and I walked into the room, and I literally plonk myself down in the seat and I said, “Whoa, this is what culture should look like.” And that perspective helped me realise how toxic that work experience was, and that's when I decided I was going to leave but not before I win back my heart in the workplace and created a campaign. I wanted to bring back my strengths. Only when I was able to come back to my strengths I was able to perform. I almost said, “Even if he doesn't care about those things, people and creativity, this is who I am. So I'm going to bring that, no matter what he thinks.” And only then I was able to succeed, only then I was able to make an impact. So, I spent a lot of time when I left after that campaign was very successful, and I realised I found back my Mojo and I realised it was time to move on. And that pain over three years, it took me three years to qualify that as bullying. I remember I told it to my first boss, and he said, “Dalia, this is bullying.” And when he named it like that, I was like, oh my God, I was like a frog in boiling water because I kept on thinking I could change it. And I think that's a critical thing, and I did my thesis on that, can you coach yourself out of toxic environments? And my answer was, Yes, you can build resilience, but when it comes to really toxic environments, the answer is No, you can't coach yourself out of it. There really is only one strategy that works and that is zero tolerance. No sense of humour, not trying to coach. And I spoke with domestic violence, I knew the pattern where you're trying to change from within someone that doesn't want to change. So that became the pain that led me to write the book. The book is all about what I’ve learned from that experience, both for you, as an employee, but for companies. And for companies, zero tolerance is the most important element. You can create company values and paste them on the wall but if you don't live them every single day, and especially when they’re violated, you say, “We don't talk like this in our company.” No matter if it's the local CEO, if someone violates the code of values that you want in your company, you need to act on it immediately. And another thing that I would say to companies, so there's a lot of things. It's just the whole element, the whole five Ps. It's around how you help people find their Purpose by focusing on their strengths, because your strengths strengthen you, so when you have every person, you put the right people on the right seats on the bus. You put them where they're strong, you don't try to change them to what you think they need to be doing. That's the first P. The second is really about how you help them fail, how you help them understand it's not something to denigrate them for, you help them fail forward. You help them understand how they learn from their failure. And they grow. I love when I went to Google in 2016 and I saw the graveyard they have at the entrance to the company, the graveyard of projects. Every failed project, they requested the team to do a fail forward analysis, what did we learn and how will we make sure that doesn't happen again? It's okay. If we don't do, we don't fail, right? You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so we want to encourage our employees to dare, to be audacious and to try but we need to respect, when they didn't succeed, what have they learned? So that's the second P which is all around Perspective. The third P is all around Power up. And this is another important thing that employees need to take care of, which is all around the energy of their employees. It's not about managing time, it's really about managing energy. In P&G I worked like crazy, but I was on fire. I was pumped, I knew to take digital detox. My bosses would come, I remember we went rollerblading on the lunchtime and skiing in summer and some days, I remember I had one boss, we had a business review. And usually that’s a process of three months. And this boss said, “Okay, we're going to crunch it into one week. I just don't want you to drag out. One week we're going to work really hard. But then the week after you all get a week off. And for that one week, whatever you do, that's what you do. The insights that you don't find in the first week are probably not big enough for you to act on.” And that one week, we worked like crazy until four in the morning. He would come in at 1am with pizza. It was a little crazy. But we all put our hands up and said, “Yeah, let's do it in one week. It's never been done before.” And then the week after we all went skiing together. Stress is okay, stress is good for us, it puts us into a focus, it's proven, right? It puts us into a focus spot, it increases our mental capacity. Our issue is not stress, our issue is lack of recovery. And that's the Power Up. This is when you keep expecting your employees to be at 100% every single day and you don't let them recover, is when you don't do digital detox. I am now working with a company on an innovation that will close the inbox at 6pm. You cannot send emails, you can write them but they won't go anywhere, and you only get them at 9am. So if you want to do some work at night, that's your choice, but your employees will not get it or your peers will not get it until the working hours. So those things, the importance of sleep, the importance of food, all those kinds of things and I sometimes come to companies and they say, “Oh yeah, we do wellness at work. We teach yoga.” And I'm a yoga teacher as well. But it's not just that, it's really the holistic view. So that's the third P. The fourth P is people and that is the number one driver. This is research by Harvard, they did their longitudinal research of 75 years to discover the secret of happiness, what the number one driver of our happiness is the quality of our relationship. The quality of our life, the quality of our relationship. And then Gallup replicated in the workplace and they found what is the number one driver of your happiness at work? Do you have a best friend at work? And CEOs were like, “What is this stupid question? We're not a family, right?” And the reality is yes, number one driver, do you have a best friend at work? And number two is do you have friends at work? So what do you as a company do to foster those relationships? If it's taking your team out rollerblading on lunchtime and skiing on the weekend or getting to know your people as human beings, or asking them how you're doing really and caring to listen to their life holistically. So that's the fourth P and the last P is really around Positivity. This last boss used to laugh at me that I'm too positive. He actually nicknamed me Miss Kumbaya. And I kept on saying, “Oh, maybe it's not good to be so positive.” And then when I left, I actually met Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, who became my mentor. He basically heard me speaking in this conference and I was sharing some of my stories and he's like, “Oh, Dalia, you need to speak on TED, and you need to write a book.” And I remember saying to myself, “Me? I'm any girl next door.” And he said, “Well, that's why it's so relevant.” And he invited me and I started studying with him, the science of positive psychology. And I did in parallel my organisational psychology and positive psychology and when I studied with him, suddenly everything that I learned intuitively about leadership in P&G was grounded in research. Including positivity is good for us. It's good for our mental health. Our brain is 30% more productive in a positive state. But it's also good for not only employee engagement, productivity, creativity, every single measure of productivity goes up when we're in a positive state. And it's all five of these. There's not one thing, you can't do just one. The only definition of happiness is wholeness, said Helen Keller. So companies need to look at how they create holistic programmes. That's what I do today. I do a year-long programme where I work on all of them because it needs to start with understanding your employees’ passion areas and core and making sure not every employee is the same. So making sure they're all working. Each one has a passion project. It doesn't mean 100% of my time I only do what I love and I don't do any boring jobs. That's not realistic. But believe me, if you work five days a week and one day, you work on your passion project, you will have such a boost of energy that will compensate for those more mundane tasks that you do the other days. So as companies, how we work on the purpose, on the growth mindset that comes with failing or taking that as a stepping stone, the personal physical state of our employees, how we take care of them, the people, their sense of belonging to the company, that they feel cared for as human beings and finally, positivity which is not about being happy happy all the time. Some companies also I see that, that it's this chase of happiness, we will do all these fun events and parties and that's all they do. That's not the right definition of positivity either. It's really about being emotionally brave. It's about recognising all range of emotions. It's about giving ourselves the permission to be human. It's okay not to be okay. And what does it mean and how do we help employees grieve? How do we show real empathy, putting ourselves in the seats of others, seeing the world from their view? Empathy is very different from sympathy. And empathy is where the world is crashing today. And we see that in research. Research shows that university students finishing university today show 40% less empathy than university students 30 years ago. And when you think about it, it's really scary. Because this younger generation are Zoomers, everything is online and they break out with their girlfriends online and they don't need to have these tough conversations. And empathy is such an important trait and the good news, and why I do all I do, is that all of these can be taught. All of it. You can teach someone to be more value-based and focus on their strengths and we still know, even though we know that strength drives performance, we still know that only 30% of employees know their strengths. And only 17% of employees use their strengths every day. So if you asked me, What's the one thing I would focus on, would be strengths based leadership if there's one thing of all of this and that's why I always start with Find Your Purpose, always. Because that's the essence of it. And then comes the rest and we finish off with that sense of emotional, it's beyond emotional intelligence, it's beyond managing, it’s the emotional bravery. It's the gratitude. It's recognising employees. Who doesn't have negative emotions? Only psychopaths or dead people. So, recognise if you have negative emotions, it's great news. But then as a leader, how do you help them accept negative emotion? Don't try to hide them. Don't try to ignore them because they will just burst out somehow in some toxic behaviour or passive aggressiveness. I recognise this is a tough time, do you want to talk? What does help look like? It's also not deciding as an employee that you know the solution for grieving employees. “I can't imagine what you're going through. I'm here, do you want to talk about it? Why don't you take the day off? Let's understand what can help you currently.” And then slowly making sure that they don't drag into depression, that you help them, as a leader, see hope, see new possibilities, see growth. The whole notion of post traumatic growth is about understanding. Resilience is about bouncing back. But what I talk about in the book is post traumatic growth. We can all grow in our pains. And that’s what management needs to do. Zero tolerance, it starts with zero tolerance for any violation of values, and then focus in on those five P models.
Helen:
40:00
So, Dalia, the last P you talked about was Positivity and you mentioned negative emotions and it's okay not to be perfect and it's okay to have those down days, for example. I'd like to talk about the inner critic because you're coming across as a very positive person who's been very strong and audacious throughout your life. What have you done when you’ve had these moments of self-doubt, self-questioning, whatever? Have you had them and how do you deal with them?
Dalia:
40:30
Impostor syndrome, right? We all have it. 70% of people have experienced it. Impostor syndrome is this belief that your successes were external and your failures were internal. So if you failed, you’re not good at it or you personalise it, even though in most cases it had nothing to do with you or very little to do with you. And then on the flip side, you externalise success. “Oh, I was lucky. I had a great team.” And you keep on going about it afraid that you will be caught one day that you're not that amazing. And I remember every assignment I was like, “Wow, I was really lucky.” It took me a long time to realise it can't be that 17 years I was really lucky. So, even though I had those 17 years of really kickass success, I can tell you, I was on a roll. I mean, it's not that I didn't have bad bosses, I did have those as well, but I was able to manage through them because the overall culture was so people-oriented. I was able to find my passion areas. I was really on fire. And so, despite having all that positive experience when I came, I wasn't able to be myself, this imposter syndrome just blew, maybe I'm not that good. And my boss actually said, I think you're better than what you really are. So, not only did I have impostor syndrome, it was extenuated itself. You're too positive, I need to make you negative for you to be balanced. It was a very interesting kind of dynamic, because he specifically was a six sigma, really believed that everything is about learning from our mistakes. That was his operating system, he had great success in his career by working systems. And in his view, people were just a system. So let's analyse where you failed and we will focus on that. And he told me, “I'm not going to tell you what you're good at. I'm only going to focus on what you need to fix.” And it's a very interesting dynamic because when you only focus on what you need to fix, everyone has areas they’re weaker at, and if you just focus on that and you're not able to bring your strengths to life, that was a death dynamic in that experience. Because it's not that we ignore our weaknesses. Never. We can't ignore them. But, fixing our weaknesses will just help us not fail. It's like a sailing boat. I like to use the analogy. Our strengths are our sail, so if it's not up, we won't be able to move forward. Our weaknesses are the holes that we have in the sail. Should we close those holes? Yes. But if we close the holes and the sale is not up, will we move forward? No. So the idea is to put your sail up and to do whatever you need to neutralise those weaknesses, to close those holes. But really, most of our time focus on our strength because it's much harder to close a weakness to neutral than to move from neutral to strength. So neutralising our strengths is hiring people for your weaknesses or going on training programmes, but it's where your balance is. And I think that important element that I'm seeing more and more, I teach at Singapore Management University, and I asked my students what's more important, 99% of them said weaknesses, that's how we grow. So, educating the generation. It's proven when you focus on your strengths, you have two times more likelihood to succeed. So it's really about how can we work with our employees and ourselves? Courage is not the absence of fear. I'm full of fears. I have a fear of failure. I have this impostor syndrome like all of us. The weird thing is that I also have a fear of success because I have a fear of jealousy. Because when I was young, like all of us, our limiting beliefs are caused by traumatic experiences in childhood that our infantile brain tells us and creates this limiting belief. So I had a limiting belief that if you're too successful, it will hurt. I even had my mom said, “Don't straighten your teeth, because you always need something not perfect.” So that became a limiting belief. And it's only recently that I realised that I was in a Catch-22. I can't fail, but I can't be too successful. So I never brought my whole self to life. And reality is, we all have fears. So the first thing I do, after we go and we find what success looks like, what is your dream? We ask ourselves, “Well, why aren't you there? What is limiting you?” And by going back to your heritage and the stories, and tell me the first story of pain in your life. Think back on when you were five, and you will be shocked by you look back and say, “Wow, that limiting belief is still influencing how I am today. It's so stupid. Okay, I dropped my ice cream. And my mom bought my brother but she didn't buy me.” And I made this story, I'm not good enough. I hear all these crazy stories, but they become reality for us. So the next step is recognising those limiting beliefs. And I have a whole methodology, it's called CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Theory. It's years of research on how you bring up those limits and bring them up to the awareness and then you refute them, you realise how silly they are. And you replace them with more empowering beliefs. I am good enough. Being successful is important. Marianne Williamson's quote landed on me and she talks about dimming yourself is no service to others. Actually, when you're super successful, you're inspiring others to be their best. And I had to reframe success or jealousy. It's not painful. It's actually you're setting a bar, you've given people a roadmap of what success could look for them. So I had to do all these reframing. So I always say courage is not the absence of fear. It's about facing your fear and then going back to your superpowers and daring. That's what Dare to Lead is all about.
Helen:
47:10
Wonderful.
Maribel:
47:15
Shall we go for the last question?
Helen:
47:18
Yes, sure.
Maribel:
47:20
Dalia, our podcast is called AudaciousNess and audacious is being bold and taking this audacity and putting it in your life. And the ‘ness’ actually is an archaic word that means a spit of land. So the question is, while you're pursuing all these audacious goals that you've mentioned, how do you stay grounded in all the things that life is throwing at you?
Dalia:
47:50
I think it's first recognising that life will throw pain at you, that pain and suffering is very different. So it's your decision what you do with this pain. Do you turn it around and make it your driver for post traumatic growth? And the other element for me is, when I left that corporate I left a very lucrative salary and I opened my own business. It took me about three years to get to a quarter of what I was making before, which was my target, and my husband is like, “What's your business plan? Aren’t you feeling wasted?” And for me one of my fears is also feeling wasted. So you have all these voices, and you will always have these voices. So for me, I think the ‘ness’ is your strength. Are you able to bring your full self to the world in a way that helps others? And I guess that pain in the corporate experience, and then starting to teach at the university, I had one student lift his hand and said, “Thank you, Prof. I now know what my purpose is. But I know I need to be a corporate slave for a few years and then I'll do what I love.” And that became my wake up call to pivot my career, to decide I know it doesn't need to be that way. So I'm going to dedicate my second career to working with individuals and companies on showing them it doesn't need to be that way. Don't wait to do what you love, life is short, bring what you love into the here and now. And that takes courage. And I'll just end off with one of my ex bosses, Paul Polmanm who became the CEO of Unilever and one of the big activists, green energy and others. He told me recently that the word courage is probably the most misunderstood word. People think that it's about making decisions that others don't make, etc. But it really comes from the word cour, which in French means heart, because the real audaciousness, real courage is when we're aligned with our hearts. So that's when I go back and I say, “Am I aligned with my heart?” And if yes, that's my ‘ness’, to continue pursuing and know in your heart that you're making an impact. And it doesn't matter if that impact is one person. When I did my TED, I got a lot of calls from women and men standing up for bullying and men changing, and one guy called me to say, “I realise I'm an asshole. What do I do?” So whether it's one person or 100 people or 1000 people, we have a sentence: Anyone who saves a life saves the whole universe. So what is your ‘ness’, your heart, your strength, realising that yes, I have the fears, but courage is going ahead anyway. So that's my ness.
Helen:
51:10
What a lovely way to finish. Thank you so much, Dalia.
Maribel:
51:15
Absolutely!
Dalia:
51:17
It’s been a pleasure. I love the topic. And it's been just such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
Helen:
51:23
Thanks so much for your time.
Maribel:
51:25
Thank you.
