Tereza Iofciu Data Leadership Coaching

Getting feedback will take your leadership skills to the next level! In order to get more feedback we need to receive it graciously. Do any of these still happen to you? 1. Getting flustered when receiving feedback. 2. Your first reaction is defense 3. You give feedback back right after receiving Getting feedback is hard. Nobody likes to hear that they are not awesome. Also, not everybody is good at giving feedback. We cannot control how someone gives us feedback. We can control how we react to it. One of the tricks I like to use is thinking of feedback as being the message inside of a container ( the form that it is given in ). I try to separate how I react to them: 1. The message: ↳ I try to accept it, saying thank you or how I will take it into consideration or do better next time ↳I store it in my feedback box to work on it 2. The container: ↳If feedback was given in a constructive way, that's great. ↳If feedback was given in an aggressive way, this might hurt more than the message. It is though not the topic. ↳This I take it into my next chat or 1on1, where I give feedback on it. The better we are at receiving feedback, the more people will feel safe to give us feedback. If you show through practice you apply the feedback, people will trust their feedback is not for nothing. You will start getting more feedback. We need to make peace that we will never get comfortable receiving feedback. More feedback -> more growth 🪴 So, let's get comfortable with being uncomfortable. How often do you receive feedback at the moment? P.S. The ultimate practice is asking a member of your family to give you feedback and react with grace 😅

One thing that changed the way I thought of leadership was stop seeing it like a step up the ladder, and rather see it is as a career change. This is not always how the tech industry sees it. Why should that change? The one ladder career path model is creating several problems: ⭕ People being promoted to lead roles just because they are the most senior in the room. ⭕ People in lead roles wanting to go back to individual contributor, but worrying that it is a step back. ⭕ The work culture tends to become hierarchical, where people influence with authority instead of without. ⭕ Many managers have no to little leadership training. When I started seeing it as a career change, I realized that the skills I have learned as an individual contributor were not enough to be an effective leader. Until then I had acquired evidence that I could say yes to a project that I didn't fully know how to realize yet, and with work and research I could get it done. Stepping into leadership is not just another project. I switched from assuming I know and I got this (as experience has shown me), to a new learner mindset. When you learn something new vs improving, there are several things happening: 💡 you want and appreciate feedback. 💡 you reflect on where you need to improve. 💡 you approach learning with curiosity and interest. 💡 you become intentional about learning. Incidentally, these practices are crucial in leadership and personal development. Another bonus of looking at leadership as a new career is that you stop evaluating yourself from an engineering perspective. Have you already done this shift? How has it impacted you? ♻️ Please repost if you found this useful #steppingintoleadership #leadership #leadershipcoahcing

Is leadership nature or nurture? What is more important is what do you believe? And what does your manager believe? I believe we can all grow and become inspiring leaders. As any other growth this needs the right environment, support and of course the desire to grow and do the work. Some of these are in your control and some are not. You can change yourself. You can try to change someone's mind. And if that doesn't work you can change your work environment. Nature or Nurture? As a data person, I know I personally do not have enough data to be definite about this. I cannot say about my self when my unintentional growth towards leadership started. I can only know when I started being intentional about it. Worried about not having "it", did people tell you that you are not "the right personality"? Ask yourself, how do they know? What is the right personality anyway? The word of the year 2023 was rizz, short for charisma, which is considered an important trait in leadership. It's also a surface trait and first and easy to be judged. I've seen charismatic people who were terrible managers as they leaned on this and didn't grow in other mindsets, like reflective, or be inclusive. Likewise, I've seen people without the rizz who were excellent leaders, as they were mindful and practiced all other aspects of leadership. And then the rizz came slower, once you got to know them better. However you are now, be intentional about your growth and practice the behaviors you want to have. What are some behaviors you've observed in leaders and peers that helped you succeed?

Leadership is not about me or how good I am at it! While still a Senior Data Scientist, I attended a leadership event in Berlin that completely changed my perspective on leadership and pivoted my career. The event was the We Rise Leadership Summit organized by Women Who Code in 2018. Natasha Hendrick presented Leadership as "a person's ability to use their knowledge to inspire and create brilliance in others", moving away from the standard competency model to a practice model. The leadership practice model is not about skills to have but about mindsets and behaviors to practice. What was really game changer for me were the labels on the evaluation scale. 5 marked how good you are at it and 10 how good you are at making others good at it. This exercise completely changed my perspective on leadership, as if my internal KPIs shifted: 💡 Instead of competition I found joy in the success of my colleagues. 💡 Instead of taking all opportunities thrown my way, I started sponsoring others. 💡 Instead of hoarding know how, I became a big fan of pair programming for almost everything. 💡 Instead of cherishing being needed, I started valuing delegating. 💡 And my personal success became.. being obsolete. Since then I've thought of this more in terms of growth framework. Try the exercise and let me know in comments what does it inspire you to practice more? Do you have other leadership mindsets you find important?

Here are 3 of the challenges I faced when becoming a manager: how to get the role officially, how to improve my skills and finding my new peer network. Knowing 💡 that they existed sooner would have helped with finding solutions faster. 👉🏻 Lack of transparency on how to become a leader at work. 🫥 I've noticed how there is clarity in how to progress from junior to senior, but not so much on how to become a leader. Steeping into leadership seems to be a combination of opportunity and networking and having potential rather than qualification. 👉🏻 There's no Gym for Leadership. 💪🏻 We learn programming, we code and then it's quite obvious that when we want to get better at coding we need to code more. The same goes for leadership skills. But where is that leadership gym, where you can practice things without hurting your team. 👉🏻 The desert island of leadership. 🏝️ When we become managers of a team we stop being part of the team in the same way as we were. We become part of a smaller team of peers. We need to find new people we trust to discuss or help us with problems at work. This is crucial to our success and our well being. Have you noticed these problems too? What is a challenge you faced that slowed down your leadership growth? #leadership #techleadership #dataleadership #leadershipcoaching

What does Inclusive Leadership have to do with Christmas? ✨Last week I had the pleasure to give a short talk on Inclusive Leadership at the shades&contrast Christmas Event 🎄 Thank you Zamina Ahmad and Gerhard Kühne for having me! 🎁 One of the things that I've noticed more since I started coaching Inclusive Leadership is how often we take our own world view and assume everybody sees the world the same way. 🎄Take Christmas as an example, living and growing up in Christian countries makes it hard to notice that there are many people who do not grow up with Christmas. As not all children get nice presents in December, without us noticing.. are there other people not getting nice *things leaders give at work* without *us leaders* noticing? 🧘♀️I invite you all to an exercise of imagining you are Santa 🤶 and your only presents to give are: 🎁 your attention 🎁 your support 🎁 an opportunity and take a moment to reflect how have you been giving those in the past .. and be intentional about changing and practicing change on how you will give those in the future. 💪 This is something you will need to practice a lot in order to get better at it.. just like picking up another sports and learning the rules and working out. 🎩The example I gave in my talk was "lunch with the CEO or a VP of something" .. who gets invited to those? who doesn't? If you have been invited to those start reflecting on the impact it had on your career and growth. ✨We all get inspired by someone! When Zamina Ahmad asked me to prepare this short talk all I could think of was how to make "How to give away your Legos" by Molly Graham about Inclusivity and Xmas 🤶 This is a really cool article that was recommended by my coach Mary Bajorek https://lnkd.in/eaTQyHBV 🧘♀️If you are interested in practicing the skills of inclusive leadership and you are wondering what those are, how to practice them, how to find the people that need our support but are invisible to you.. do reach out at Tereza Iofciu Data Leadership Coaching Or if you want Inclusive Leadership trainings for your team reach out at shades&contrast #ShadesAndContrast #ChristmasEvent #InclusiveLeadership #InclusiveLeadershipCoaching