66 eminent technical leaders from industry and academia are gathered at Cisco in Silicon Valley for TechLeaders. The theme is Leading Across Cultures. The workshop is designed to expand particpants’ network of senior leaders, their own understanding of their leadership, and increase their collective impact as a group of senior leaders. Participants represent 20 companies and 10 universities, and more than 25 geographical affiliations. Companies represented include ABI industry partners Cisco, Juniper Networks, Intel, Symantec, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, as well as other leading technology companies such as SAP, PayPal, WebEx and Nortel. In addition, academics from universities such as Indiana University, Oregon State U, Holy Names University, Cal Poly, Mills and University of California Berkeley are in attendance.
Technical fields represented include computing, Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, and chemistry.
Keynote speakers for the workshop are Kathy Hill, Senior Vice President at Cisco Systems and Trustee of the Anita Borg Institute, and Fran Berman, Director of the San Diego SuperComputer Center and Professor in the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, and first holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in the Jacobs’ School of Engineering at UCSD. Berman is also an ABI Trustee.
On Day 1, Kathy Hill emphasized the importance of leading effectively across cultures both ethnic and professional. Hill has learned that one crucial component of leading across culture is awareness. Hill says that women as leaders are especially skilled at leading across cultures. She emphasized the different types of intelligence that permeate an organization: IQ, emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence - she says that the leaders that emerge in an organization are those that combine all three effectively.
Hill described key cultural dimensions which inform relationships. Some cultures define relationships based on ascribed attributes, while others base the relationships based on achievement. Other cultural dimensions are whether we have an individualistic or communal view, whether our environment is viewed as internal or as external and the degree to which we define relationships as hierarchical. Hill says that understanding the corporate culture in which one operates is crucial to effective leadership – Cisco’s culture includes, for example, includes values such as innovation, continuous improvement, quality, inclusion, team work, empowerment, and open communication. In particular, inclusion is seen as a business imperative. Hill emphasized key attributes of leadership: influence, vision-driven direction, passion, example, convition and character.
Hill identified the key barriers to leading across cultures:
- a poorly defined corporate culture
- a misaligned vision, mission, and culture
- leadership development which does not take culture into consideration
- the absence of a systemic approach to understand cultural differences.
The talk concluded with the following keys to success:
- Awareness
- Educating oneself
- Adaptibility
- Developing a full set of leadership traits
- Having a corporate culture that is defined, communicated, and explicitly values diversity.