Andy Rogers and Frances Armes are very pleased to share the first episode of Season Four of our podcast Unlocking Aliveness in Leadership.
In today’s episode we are in conversation with Zarina Ward, a Chief People Officer. Zarina spent the early part of her career in recruiting before moving into HR. Most of her career has been in professional.
Zarina candidly talks about being a commercial HR leader, understanding what the organisation needs to achieve commercially and managing the workforce to achieve those goals. She shares her experience of linking commerciality with empathy and humanity, which she openly admits is a tough line to walk.
When talking about what leadership means to Zarina, her answer of shaping the conversation and create followship, felt a very natural follow on from the discussion around being a commercial leader and Zarina shared a great quote from John C Maxwell “he who thinks he leads but has no followers, is only taking a walk”.
When talking about her leadership purpose, Zarina was very clear, to leave everyone she works with better off, with some more skills, or something more than when she met them and some of her proudest moments came from developing great successors ‘making life a little bit easier for the people that are walking in your shadows and behind you’.
As far as regrets, Zarina recalled a point in her life when she considered retraining as a life coach, and after discussion with those around her, decided to continue on the more traditional people focused career path and her reflection was she shouldn’t have listened to the naysayers.
Zarina’s aliveness comes from seeing the tangible impact of her work, she also sees this in the pro-bono work as a trustee for an organisation that supports people who have experienced homelessness and how that real work impact makes her feel energised and engaged in something really worth while.
One of the issues top of mind for Zarina at the moment is how being human at work is at odds with the commerciality piece and she sees people being treated as disposable assets rather than people who can be nurtured and developed. In today’s world she sees opportunities for velocity vs redundancy, but in practice people tend to focus on redundancy rather than velocity.
Zarina’s top tips for leaders are:
· Hone your feedback skills, both delivering and receiving
· Adopt the mindset that you are never finished as a leader and keep learning from your experiences
· Make leadership a real one to one experience
Many thanks to Zarina for sharing her leadership thoughts with such candor and aliveness.