Global Leadership Summit inspires staff to realise their inner leader

“Voice your Vision” was the key message shared with New Zealand Tertiary College (NZTC) staff at this year’s virtual Global Leadership Summit (GLS).

The GLS is a long running, wide reaching professional development event, spanning across 110 plus nations in 60 different languages, bringing together inspirational speakers and leaders from a wide range of sectors.

NZTC staff across all college departments had the opportunity to gather virtually, gaining key leadership learnings to impact themselves, their teams and the students they serve.

Craig Groeschel – founder of Life.Church and an advocate for building leaders in all sectors of society, discussed the qualities found in value-driven, people-centred leaders.

Groeschel shared how “greatness is found in the extremes”, and expanded on three key contradictory leadership qualities; confident and humble, driven and healthy, and focused and flexible, that together create a synergy of leadership impact.

“There are qualities found in leaders who have the “it” factor—extreme, contradictory, and even opposing qualities. The greatest leaders are confident and humble and one without the other is not effective, so work on growing in both. Leaders who focus only on health but not drive may never get it. Leaders who are only driven but not healthy may get it but won’t be able to keep it. If we aren’t ruthlessly focused, we’ll never get it, and if we aren’t flexible, we won’t keep it,” says Groeschel.

Ancestry.com President and CEO, Deb Liu, shared a powerful message of “finding the you shaped hole in the world”, through seeking out allies, learning to forgive and finding your voice.

Vanessa Van Edwards, Founder & Lead Behavioural Investigator for Science of People, unpacked science-based communication strategies to help form deeper connections with others.

“Leaders can sometimes get trapped in logistics, metrics and small talk. It’s impossible to connect on small talk autopilot. Instead of simply asking “How are you?” try “What’s the highlight of your day?”. As leaders, we must both ask deep questions and listen with compassion to people’s answers.”

The final speaker of the session, Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker and New York Times Best-Selling Author, Jon Acuff, discussed how the best leaders turn overthinking from a super problem to a super power and the importance of what soundtracks you let play in your mind.

Team members came away from the virtual summit with personal takeaways for their own leadership journey, along with key learnings for NZTC’s shared soundtrack of serving others with Vision, Heart, Competence and Spirit.

“A leader is not someone who just leads an organisation. You need to lead yourself before considering leading those around you – including your family and the people you work with. Hold your personal leadership journey first, and then we get to move together as a team, remembering that what we each do matters,” shares Chief Executive, Selena Fox.