Learning to lead at AIESEC International

Last night I arrived to Costa Rica after facing the regular migration challenges of a Latin American crossing the world.

But I have to say that I really enjoyed the flight because I decided to use it to reflect in the past 7 months and the experiences that I have lived. So I bought three magazines on topics like leadership, entreprenuership and global reality to facilitate the process and sat in the airplane for over 15 hours and free coffee.

In February 2008 I was elected President of AIESEC International, which means that I have to select 22 people and create an international team to support the operations of AIESEC around the world.

In May we started with the Transtion, in June the 22 members of the team arrived from 16 different countries, by the first week of July we had our plan created - Connecting to deliver -, in August we met in Brazil with more than 1000 members, partners, Alumni, guests and friends to focus the deliverables of our year. In September we deployed the team to support operations, do sales and deliver partnerhsips. We have been constantly present in 6 regions of the world. By October, we started the review of all our activites as we diagnosticated that our organization needed to get fit to succesful overcome the global financial crisis. And today, we have grown 20% over the last year and reached an absolute delivery higher than the past 15 years.

All of this has helped me to become more selfware and to realize some key aspects that I need to pay more attention to play the role that the job requires.

I feel confident when it comes to build focus and direction with the team, also I have noticed that I give a good level of trust to the capabilities of the each individual and that I enjoyed jumping from the detail of the execution to the scope of strategy.

The aspect that I will commit to improve in the next months is empathy. I am a little bit impatient and not always recognize that others are not aware of the context and they don't own the level of information that I have access to. So, when the need to make decisions faster increases I have the tendency to put too much pressure on the individuals without considering the factors affecting them.

So far, this aspect hasn't generated big issues mostly because I have built a strong safety net around me through the support of key individuals in my team that I constantly invite to give me feedback on my behaviours and the reactions of others.

I have learned a lot these months and I am very very impressed with the level of people I worked with everyday. These are guys that understand what is commitment and that have given everything they have to support our countries delivering great experiences.

At this point in time, this team of 22 people represent what I care about and value the most in my life and I am very happy that I decided to live this experience.