José Manuel (Pepe) del Río Zamacona’s motto is “Empower my clients” and in our conversation it was evident that he lives and breathes that. Pepe sees people in terms of their “enormous potential” and works with them on that basis. A master coach and President of the International Association of Coaching (IAC), Pepe specialises in executive and career coaching, communication and outplacement. He is a master trainer of public speaking, persuasion, media training and assertiveness. He gives workshops and conferences every day in Mexico and in different countries, on a range of topics including communication, coaching, transition, human development, and sales.

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We discussed:

Pepe’s work with executives, especially of late with corporate leaders going through a rough time, for example losing their job, and also top executives employing executive coaching when they want to engage more with their people and communicate with them more effectively.

The loss of a sense of worth and self-esteem when executives lose their job, especially those who have come to think of themselves as the position, not just playing that role for a time.

In these times, executives needing to train themselves like professional athletes, fit and ready to play for another team.

Story of the top executive who lost his job and could not tell his wife, and how with Pepe’s coaching he was able to make a very successful transition.

Importance of connecting with one’s values and vision.

Role of leader to develop leaders – everyone should be a leader.

Know that you can be a leader, even while working for somebody else.

Leadership as a process and as being about serving others.

Pepe quoted Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s words as a guide to good leadership:

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and help them become what they are capable of.

Pepe said this:

You need to bring the best out of people. It’s very easy to bring the worst out of people. That’s an easy task – anybody can do it. But bring the best out of people. Let them connect with their values, with themselves. To know that they are special: and they will do a fantastic job.

Pepe shared a fascinating tip on how to keep people engaged, even when the job might appear repetitious and boring, and helping them see that their job, however lowly or menial, matters.

More about Pepe and Contact Details

Pepe’s clients are high performance people who want to take their results to the highest level of personal performance. Executives in transition process between one job and another. People and companies that want to communicate better and persuade.

Pepe can be contacted via social media, via Twitter – @coachpepedelrio or Facebook His company is Del Río Training.

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Nigel Cumberland is a leadership coach & facilitator, author, and Co-Founder of the Silk Road Partnership, a leading global provider of executive coaching and leadership training solutions. He coaches and trains leaders with organizations such as the World Bank, United Nations, Google, Dell, LVMH and the Dubai Government. Previously, Nigel held multinational Managing Director and Finance Director positions with various UK and European multinationals. In addition, he co-created an award-winning recruitment firm based in Hong Kong and China, which he later sold to a listed UK group.

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We discussed:

Ethics in leadership:

Current phenomenon – in business, government, sport – of no admitting of having done wrong: “I made a mistake”, “There was an error of judgement”. Big issue of accountability and honesty.

“If we coaches fail to be pillars of ethical standards, what hope is there for everyone else?”

Accepting the consequences of our actions.

“Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” Robert Louis Stevenson

“Integrity and honesty are core to leadership. The basis is self-leadership – being honest to ourselves.”

Forgiveness is important and that is harder to achieve, given in particular the “brutality” of the media and the “fear of life being over” if error or culpability is admitted.

Boards recruiting CEOs should require evidence of past ethical behaviour – including a clear indication of acceptance of personal responsibility for being wrong at some time and what the person did about that. Ethical behaviour should be a minimum requirement for a CEO position.

Technological Change

“The rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above our ability, as humans, to adapt to, and absorb, all the changes happening around us.”  Eric Teller

Leaders need to think about getting ahead of change, not just playing catchup.

Sense-making and asking questions – see the Harvard Business Review article of April 2018: Better Brainstorming – Why Questions Matter More Than Answers

Values – and understanding the value of values

Story of a workshop with bank staff and looking at the correlation (or not) of personal values and bank’s statement of values.

More about Nigel and Contact Details

Educated at Cambridge University, Nigel is a Fellow of the UK’s Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. He is also an extensively qualified executive coach and leadership training professional holding the prestigious Master Practitioner title with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (“EMCC”). In addition he is a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Certified Coach and in 2011 was a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching Professional Association, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. In 2016 he was made a Freeman of the City of London in the UK.

Nigel can be contacted via social media, via Google search (not many of the same name), or his LinkedIn account or The Silk Road Partnership website.

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My friend Scott Allen invited me to make my own contribution to his topic, as in the title above, “How Social Media Has Changed Me (for the Better)”. The idea was that I would do this around Social Media Day – June 30 – but although that slipped by I was tantalised enough by the topic to want to do it anyway.

Scott and I became friends on social media before it was called that, back in 2002 or thereabouts, on the business networking group Ryze.com. Ryze was a place of great, and often extended, conversations, and is still there when other platforms have come and gone.

Around that time I started blogging and in December 2004 joined the then very new LinkedIn community.

I get as saddened, frustrated, annoyed as the next person by the negative side of social media, those horror stories the mainstream media love to run, although the irony is that journalists worldwide rely so much on social media for their stories of the day!

But for me social media has been beneficial in many ways and – as I reflect on it now – has definitely been a place of change for me, and that for the better.

To start with my LinkedIn journey, I became a best-selling, published author, in collaboration with my great friend Bill Vick: our book, the first book about LinkedIn to have been published, went to two editions. I’d self-published previously, a book about business blogging, but in commercial terms that was a flop. So the LinkedIn book’s success gave me a much-needed boost as a writer – as well as being a nice little earner!

More importantly for me, social media has expanded my world of friends. Someone said to me once that you know you have a true friend when you see you are a better person for having that person as a friend. So I have certainly been blessed in that way. I now have many friends around the world, friends I would never otherwise have been likely to have met, let alone build relationships of friendship with, in some cases very close and mutually supportive relationships. 

Every course, every expert on social media stresses the need for authenticity and integrity. And then, human nature being what it is, some of those experts develop strategies and applications to mimic those qualities. But my experience over time has been that we get smarter at figuring out who has real integrity and who is faking it. And because I want to be and continue to be one of those genuine ones, social media gives me a personal barometer of my integrity, and thus an incentive to be of good character and “walk my talk”.

I have learned a lot about leadership and in various other ways benefitted greatly from stints in establishing and leading online groups. From the LinkedIn Bloggers group, established first on Yahoo! Groups (LinkedIn Groups were not interactive in those days), through other groups on LinkedIn and more recently a Facebook group I established, I became a better leader and indeed a better person. I believe managing an online group is an excellent school of servant leadership.

As I became more familiar with various platforms and a very active blogger, I was invited to participate in an expert capacity in conferences and other events and attracted clients who wanted to be coached in how best to integrate social media in their business. That helped me grow as a presenter, trainer and coach, and as a person.

Most recently, in a wholly unanticipated confluence of events, I have been blessed to have now plugged into an online marketing platform, where the business model is focused on attraction marketing via social media, and puts a high value on the necessity of sustained work on personal growth and development.

So I am reminded on a daily basis that the journey of personal growth, in character, in competence, in confidence, in leadership, in humility, is a journey that never ends this side of eternity. Long may the world and the people of social media provoke, encourage, and sustain me and others in that journey.