Sharon Gai

How to build resilience in chaos

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Antifragile, he spoke of three mythological creatures. The Roman myth of Damocles describes a fragile situation: a single horse hair suspends a sword over Damocles’ head – shocks will have catastrophic results. The legend of the Phoenix describes a mythical bird that rises from the ashes after its destruction. The phoenix is robust because it returns to its original state after a shock. Finally, the myth of the Hydra describes a multi-headed serpent with a special power: each time a head is cut off, two grow back in its place. The Hydra is antifragile because shocks make it stronger.

Resilience is the ability to withstand, recover, and bounce back in the midst of stress, chaos, and ever-changing situations. Being resilient is especially important in today’s VUCA world. (VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity), where everyone is worn down, uncertain about the future, reactive, and short tempered. The good news is that resiliency is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice. In fact, to be an effective leader today, this is an essential skill for career success. This workshop is filled with specific, practical frameworks and tools to boost your mental toughness when facing fast-paced, difficult, ever-changing, and ambiguous situations.

Session takeaways:

• Be equipped with tools used to cope with ongoing stress so it doesn’t affect your personal life or health
• Keeping yourself and your team motivated for the long road of change initiatives and shifting priorities
• Instead of fearing change, learning how to embrace change
• Remaining poised under pressure: how to instantly calm yourself and others from frustration or anger

Culture Fluid, How to be a bridge in a divided world

So there is EQ and IQ, but ever heard of CQ? CQ stands for cultural intelligence and is the ability for someone to navigate different cultures, whether at work, at home or generally in society. If you’ve moved countries, been an expat, been on an exchange, learned a new language or just travelled abroad, most likely you’ve been met with some sort of cultural shake-up. Being culture fluid enables us to traverse between cultures more easily by being more empathetic to those from another culture, a skill that is more and more needed in an increasingly globalized world. In this workshop, Sharon will take the audience through her journey of growing up as an immigrant, and then returning to her birth country to work for the largest local internet company. She shares stories of work place micro aggressions she has experienced in both places and what she did in each instance. Open discussions will follow where participants can also share their stories and the group is given the chance to assess what are the best courses of action to take in the future. She ends the presentation by showcasing how she answers the question of – where are you from.

Session takeaways:

• Learn how to be the bridge in a team with different cultures
• Cultural intelligence and its importance in the workplace
• How to take advantage of diverse cultures in teams

How to optimize globally distributed teams

We love the days where we wear PJs as work outfits. We also miss the days of the bustling office. How is the new persisted way of work affecting our workforce, productivity and our relationship with our coworkers? In the future, more jobs will be outsourced to either cities with cheaper labor or sometimes to other countries. Companies will need to learn to function with more distributed teams. Before, there were happy hours and in person team bonding activities to keep up employee engagement. In the WFH and hybrid age, how can remote teams still feel connected with their colleagues? How can satellite offices in other time zones stay connected and sustain motivation? In this workshop, Sharon showcases knowledge management frameworks from organizational behavior that answer how best to manage WFH and hybrid environments as leaders, managers and employees. This workshop will teach HR practitioners, company owners and employees how to stay connected in an increasing WFH or hybrid environment.

• How to create the same sense of “togetherness” as an in-person team as leaders and managers
• Knowledge management frameworks for distributed teams – what is the best communication mechanism, text, email, call, in person and for what situations
• Learn how to communicate effectively in hybrid work, decode digital signals that build or erode trust and how to unlock value from hybrid teams.