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event-icon Personal Excellence Programme

Seconds Away from Outstanding Leadership

event date November 07, 2018 event timing 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Lloyds Banking Group, 2 Brindley Place, B1 2AB, Birmingham Members: FREE Non-Members: £10

Event overview

We are delighted to invite you to join our virtual celebration of WIBF's 24th Annual Awards for Achievement on Thursday 17th November 2022, hosted by WIBF President, Anna Lane and TV broadcaster and journalist, Kate Thornton.

Bookings are closed for this event.

On Wednesday 7th November Molly Harvey gave a talk to WIBF titled “Seconds Away from Outstanding Leadership”. The event was generously hosted by Lloyds Banking Group. Her talk focussed on two main topic areas: habits and collaboration.

Molly started by giving the advice: “Be the CEO of your own job”. This means doing it to the best ability and leading where you can despite not being an actual CEO.

She spoke about what makes a good leader. In her eyes, a good leader is someone who “Shows up and allows everyone else to show up”. She feels that leadership now is held by people who are skilled in the art of self-awareness, questioning and simplicity. A great tip for being more productive is to have a “What can I stop doing list” as well as a “To Do” list.
Attendees engaged in a discussion with Molly around areas where they are being “wilfully blind”. Wilfully blind is where we purposely continue to ignore something instead of implementing change. A few examples discussed were: office politics; failure of the firm you work in; undue pressure.

One of the activities during the event was to get into groups and discuss three good habits that you have. The sharing of habits was extremely beneficial as hearing what other people do inspires ideas of what you can start doing yourself. One of the habits discussed in the event was what Molly called 30-30-30. In the morning she wakes up and spends: 30 minutes writing in her gratitude journal and reading a chapter of a book; 30 minutes planning her day ahead; and 30 minutes exercising.

Here are a few examples that came out of a discussion between Molly and the audience around what habits are holding women back:

o Apologising too much
o We don’t like talking about our achievements
o We expect other to recognise us for our achievements
o Building rather than leveraging relationships
o Asking to do certain things
o We over value others’ expertise but under value our own
o We don’t want to disappoint others
o We have the Disease to please

Molly encouraged the audience to rethink “Good to Great” and now aim to be Outstanding. In pairs, the audience encouraged each other’s confidence by saying “It’s possible”. In order to be an outstanding leader, you need to be a leader in all aspects of your life – whether this be at work or at home. This is because Leadership is a behaviour.

In order to create the “Atmosphere of Excellence” in your own team there are several things that are important. Trust and telling the truth are the first two. Knowing everyone in the team’s strengths is really important as well. Molly really emphasised that it is important to listen to your colleagues. She stresses that multi-tasking does not exist and when multi-tasking you are really just taking longer to do both tasks and probably to a worse standard.

Overall, the audience left the event with some really helpful tips. It was useful that Molly split out the new things that you can consider doing yourself in your own life as well as things that you can implement in your team.