News from Talent Peaks and speech highlights Barack Obama
Being at problaby the most innovative Salesforce event of the year, let me first share two amazing highlights with you about our own innovations at Talent Peaks.
Have we got news for you!
Next year on the Salesforce AppExchange, we’ll release Byner, our brand new app for the Staffing Industry. An innovative app that will make work easy and compliant from contract to invoice. Also, we will launch our own Basecamp, an initiative that provides remote admin services from the Talent Peaks community. Check out the announcement in this video:
Highlights Day 3
So much for our own dreams. As far as Dreamforce is concerned, one of the highlights on the third day of Dreamforce was Marc Benioff’s interview with Barack Obama. I never thought I would see Marc Benioff lost for words, but it happened as Obama took initiative at the start of the interview and posed the question, “So, how’ve you been?“.
Not the most intimidating words, but it was enough of a surprise to Mr. Benioff to throw him off his game, albeit for a slight moment. It was good to see that even the most successful leaders in the corporate world are not infallible or invincible. I think we’ve all had that experience in one form or another – at least I could relate to it.
Obama set the tone in the interview and he truly was the warm, well spoken, confident, funny and sincere speaker he is known to be. He spoke about current threats of the world and easily made it personal using analogies from family life, his children, wife and youth.
Current threats to our world in order of priority:
- Climate change
- Unequality and the growing gap between rich and poor within nations and in between nations
- Loss of cohesion amongst people, a growing fragmentation of people’s views and identities with decrease of common ground, partly fueled by technology
Great leadership
In order to address the problems of the world, great leadership is required. The world needs people standing up and taking action. People taking action in their own community, with passion and drive to make a difference. They are the leaders we need and luckily those people exist. We just need to make sure to nurture them, encourage them and scale them up.
Be kind and be useful
Obama’s personal compass in life boils down to one thing: ‘be kind and be useful’. If you are kind and useful in whatever profession you are working, you will become successful and people will want to work with you. Leadership is not about standing in the spotlights and telling others what to do. It is to recognize potential in others, and offering a platform for them to unlock their own potential, especially if they are smarter than you or have more drive.
Encourage diversity
Do not be limited by feelings of insecurity or feeling loss of status over others. Leadership requires diversity. Diversity is not charity or an act of kindness. It is a necessity if you want to avoid being blindsided. When finding solutions to a problem, you have to look at it from all possible angles. If all the same people, or all people with the same view look at one thing, they only see the one thing and they can only come up with a solution that addresses only the one angle of the problem they see. Looking at a problem with different people, with different positions, backgrounds, points of view, knowledge, experience, you will be able to have greater discussion about what the problem actually is. And then you have the potential to come to better solutions.
Be open minded
A leader should welcome people on the team who are smarter, better than him or herself and promote transparency. True leaders encourage others in the team to speak their mind, especially if they are speaking against current policy and systems. That is the only way to come to new insights and innovate and build better teams.
Don’t search, attract!
As a leader, you don’t go out and ‘find’ other leaders for your organization. Instead, be who you and communicate are who you are as clearly as possible to the outside world, what you value, what you stand for. Let people know that if they feel the same way they should join you. If you do that, talent and leadership will present itself. This is exactly what the Obama foundation is accomplishing in big and small communities across the world.
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Being a niche Salesforce consultant for the Professional Services, Staffing & Recruitment, and Media Services industry, we’d love to keep you inspired and update you on developments and new industry insights. Wanna stay in the loop? Follow our blogs and our LinkedIn Company page. Do you want to discuss how innovations on the Salesforce Platform can help you drive your business? Contact us now! We’d love to explore the possibilities with you.
