My name is Henna Inam. I left the C- Suite after a 20 year career to follow my passion to create an organization that helps women leaders to be successful, deeply engaged, fulfilled, and out of that create organizations that drive breakthroughs in innovation, engagement, growth and meaning in the world. Here are some ways we can work together:
1) 1-on-1 Coaching for women leaders,
2) Seminars and speaking,
3) CEO mastermind groups called PowerCircles,
4) Consulting on how to build female talent pipelines
I invite you to Engage (join our Facebook community), Empower (view videos on Mentor TV, listen to transformational women on our Radio Show, subscribe to our YouTube Channel), and Energize (sign up for the RSS feed to get tools to build your leadership).
Here’s to you igniting your own fire & keeping it burning!
Have you ever experienced an intimate conversation with 300 people? This week, I was fortunate to be part of Spelman College’s leadership conference entitled “Leading With Purpose”, led by my good friend Jane Smith. The premise of the conference was to engage in a dialogue and ask questions about the importance of purpose in our leadership. You see, purpose feeds our souls. It is what keeps us energized, powerful, and resilient in the face of failure. It is what we need if we are to deeply engage in the work we are doing, as if it was our calling in life.
The conversations left me intrigued, inspired and a bit restless. [continue reading]
In my executive coaching practice, I come across strong and smart women leaders whose success has come from always being prepared, being “on”, proving that they are smarter and more competent than those they compete with for the next opportunity. In their effort to be perceived as strong they often have a hard time being vulnerable. This can now be the one thing that holds them back from their true leadership potential. How can vulnerability be your biggest strength?
The recent viral (over four million views and counting) TedTalk by author Brene Brown talks about the importance of vulnerability. It got me thinking about how important vulnerability is as a leadership practice, particularly for transformational leaders. As transformational leaders our greatest source of impact is through connecting with others. Transformational leaders impact through personal influence of who they are rather than their positional power. There can only be limited impact in leadership if we have no way to connect with others beyond our transactional hierarchical positions. According to Brene Brown our ability to be vulnerable requires courage and forms the basis for our connection with others, a connection that is critical if we are to inspire others. [continue reading]
The Joy of Office Politics. Oxymoron? Almost every leader I talk to hates office politics. Secretly we all dream of workplaces that are free of office politics. What if we discovered five steps that would actually help make office politics joyful? Would you try them?
Here’s a recent Client situation that inspired me to write this blog post. Client is a senior leader in a new role in Supply Chain in a manufacturing company. She is responsible for major transformation of the Supply Chain function. [continue reading]
Journaling is a powerful leadership practice that I recommend to all my Executive Coaching clients if they want transformative change in their leadership.
When I first started journaling, it was something I had to force myself to sit down and do. I am the kind of person who likes to be incredibly productive and efficient and I saw journaling as a waste of time. After all, there were many more productive things I could be doing – folding the laundry, catching up with friends on Facebook, flossing … you get the picture. And then I read data that suggests that all kinds of successful people, including U.S. Presidents, had a daily practice of journaling. Well, that got my attention!
Journaling allows us to get greater insights and knowledge into ourselves and others, which is a core foundation of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is one of the greatest drivers of our success and wellbeing as leaders. Research also suggests that journaling can improve our stress levels, our health, and feelings of wellbeing.
So, here are 10 steps to a successful journaling practice: [continue reading]
Steve Jobs’ said, “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.” Albert Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.” Two people with a clear sense of purpose who made great impact. I am personally convinced that purpose is what separates leaders from managers. Yet in our 24/7 work lives how many times do we stop to think about the one factor that makes all the difference in our leadership? Here are five reasons why our purpose is core to our leadership and some leadership practices to help you discover your purpose. [continue reading]
I came up with a crazy idea this morning. For the next seven days I will do a slightly extreme experiment and do only what I love to do. Anything that I feel like I must do out of a spirit of “obligation”, I will refrain from doing. My going-in hypothesis is that it will make me more productive, more creative, and more fulfilled. I am also hoping I’ll be more fun to be around. My goal with this experiment is to come up with some useful principles that can help us get more fully engaged in the work that we do.
My fears are I might have some disgruntled relatives and friends whose expectations I will not have met, and lots of laundry piled up. Another fear is I might get lazy, fat and happy. And yes, I do have a fear that this “Seven-day pass to do exactly what I love” may extend beyond seven days if I’m enjoying it too much.
The idea for the experiment germinated in some of the work I have been doing on employee engagement and transformational leadership. The idea is simple. When we love what we do and the people that we work with, it creates great engagement for ourselves and others. Transformational leaders lead from a place of loving the mission, loving the people who are involved in the work, and loving the work to be done. When we work from this spirit of love rather than a place of indifference, great transformation, creativity and innovation can happen. The “doing” or action may be the same, but the spirit that it comes from makes all the difference in the outcomes.
Key Findings
Wow, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the wishes of good luck on this experiment. Who knew you guys were actually reading my blog posts? So read on for findings of the first few days: [continue reading]
True story. It was 6AM. There were about 12 of us who had been meditating for an hour when I had an epiphany. It’s really hard to empty your mind when your stomach is completely empty and loudly declaring its discontent! This was about five years ago when, on a dare by my best friend, I decided to go to India to spend ten days at an ashram to learn how to meditate.
The actual course was 21 days but as a self-proclaimed over-achiever I figured I could nail it in ten. Like anything else up to this point in my highly productive, efficient, and fast-paced life, I had specific goals in mind for the ten days at the ashram. First, learn how to empty my mind. Second, attain a permanent stress-free state. Third (and this was my Big Hairy Audacious Goal) was to achieve enlightenment. So, you can imagine my frustration on Day Nine as my stomach was growling with hunger and I had still not learned how to empty my mind.
Fast forward five years, and I find myself fascinated by what neuroscience is discovering about the benefits of meditation… something discovered thousands of years ago by the Buddhists. My goal here is to share the benefits of mindfulness I have personally experienced – more as a student and practitioner of the topic, rather than an expert. Here are ten ways mindfulness can help us be better leaders of ourselves and others. [continue reading]
You’re an achiever. You can put in long hours without burning out. You have a great ability to get started on new tasks and take on new challenges. You set new goals and levels of productivity for your group or work team. This has made you successful throughout your career. Keep doing what you’re doing because it’s all good, right? Wrong. Our achievement drive applied in the wrong situations can cause us to be blind to the needs of others and drive our teams to exhaustion. Many of the strengths we have can also be sources of derailers in our career. Does this mean we abandon our strengths? How do we truly leverage our strengths AND prevent them from becoming derailers? The following are three leadership practices that can help.
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You wish your boss would give you more space to make decisions. You think your co-worker is sabotaging you behind your back. You need to talk with an employee about their bad attitude. Many of these situations call for conversations to be had, conversations that often don’t happen, because they are difficult and frankly we’d rather go get a root canal. My goal is for us to all have the personal power to have difficult conversations. So here is a step-by-step checklist for making these difficult conversations easier so that they actually happen.
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