Business leaders need to have certain skills: empathy, perseverance and resourcefulness. Chad Sanders, author of Black Magic: What Black Leaders Learned from Trauma and Triumph, said in a March 2 podcast published in Harvard Business Review that Black business leaders can learn from adverse experiences and take advantage of it.
Mr. Sanders began his career in corporate roles at Google and YouTube before leading a technology startup and eventually becoming a published author. In his book, he spoke to 15 Black leaders from different fields about their experiences to show others how they rose to the top. He saw common trends among those leaders.
Three tips for business leaders:
1. Embrace yourself
When Mr. Sanders started at Google, the work he put into fitting in was almost a second job. He suggests being authentic in your persona, even calling colleagues out who may be objectifying you.
"I became a little bit more polarizing as a colleague, but the people who liked me and who vouched for me and who wanted to put their energies behind me really felt strongly that way, and they helped me get new opportunities," he said.
2. Faith has gotten you this far
Mr. Sanders compares having faith in your decisions to the feeling that faith has gotten you this far. He said it comes from the realization "that you've already beat the odds just by being alive, well, having a little bit of money in your bank account, being free as a Black person of a certain age because the statistics will make it seem daunting for you."
3. The power of being the only one
Mr. Sanders said Black business leaders can take advantage of the attention being different brings.
"People are going to remember your name, they're going to be watching you, there's going to be pressure on you. If you take advantage of that sort of notoriety, if you use it to build influence, if you use it to act boldly, if you use it to speak up at a company all-hands and know that everybody's going to remember who said that thing because they looked different than everyone else, that is empowering," Mr. Sanders said.
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