Last week, senior leaders gathered to strengthen skills for the next-normal and celebrate seven who best exemplified Mehran’s model of leadership characteristics over the past year.
Back-to-Basics
The session started at the start…our teammates giving voice the 12 Servant Leadership Tenets, the basis of our culture. From there the Culture Fellows led the group through a back-to-basics deep dive into Leading with Heart and Inclusive Leadership.
Each block was structured around group discussions among teams named for each of the main characters of The Office — did you know Michael Scott is a model for leadership…in a sense?
The Leading with Heart discussion asked participants to identify barriers to and (then) solutions for more people-driven leadership. Ideas emerged around the fact that our busy-ness and the transactional nature of scheduled remote interactions make it difficult to be conscious about engaging our teammates on a personal level. Ways to move forward centered on making connection a priority, modeling vulnerability, and the most basic Basic: Be Human.
The conversation about Inclusive Leadership started with clarifications of the terms Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and evolved to show how important they are: Diversity is WHAT we embrace in order to accomplish the WHY of Equity, or fair treatment that respects differences. HOW we do it: Inclusion and valuing each person.
The segment ended with a video many of us had seen before, “Inclusion Starts with I” which features different people holding signs expressing their deepest concerns about inclusion. While the video ran the Fellows, executive team members and some other volunteers brought the message to life holding their own messages around the room for a powerful close.
The CEO’s 7 Cs
Mehran then continued his tradition of recognizing seven individual leaders using the context of his weekly ritual. Every Sunday mornin for decades, he has reflected how he had shown up the previous week by rating himself on seven criteria. He awarded glass trophies to people, based on feedback through the year, who best exemplified each “C”:
Comprehension — Cathy Shires
Competency — John Saad
Confidence — Michael Morey
Conviction — Frank Lucia
Courage — Erika George
Communication — Meghan Meyer
Character — Ata Azarshahi
Mehran closed the event emphasizing how “we have built something special together,” and that the next 10 years will be even more special — “it’s an exciting time to be part of this company.”
