Jim Bagnola, one of the most important motivational speakers in the world, has returned to Romania, a country he characterizes as the homeland of atypical managers and beautiful women, and has offered a lecture on Wednesday titled “Fifty Shades of Resilience.”
The idea of the event started off from a phenomenon noticed by human resource market experts: the representatives of many companies take part in training programs only in order to add a course in their CVs, not in order to gain new skills. “In recent years I have noticed a market trend: for many companies training programs are a “trend” or “nice to have.” Often the employees are not consulted about the training they are about to follow and the real reason they go to it is that “this is what the manager wanted.” However, most times the participants do not know whether they are sent there because they are good and an investment is made in them or because they are weak and the training is an alarm signal,” Petru Pacuraru, HPDI Managing Partner and Trainer, explained. HPDI is a consultancy company in the human resources domain.
“All managers have to understand that they work for their employees”
On the occasion of his new visit to Romania, Jim Bagnola talked on Wednesday about who is really to blame for the failure of development programs, about those who prevent company employees to put into practice what they learned in relevant training programs and about the difference between Romania and the US in what concerns the process of learning/change in a company.
The expert praised Romanian managers, seeing them as having a lot of potential. “Romanian managers, on the whole, are more open to learning than those in more developed countries who have training for years and years. And that will have a long term benefit for this country. The problem is losing good managers to places like United States,” Bagnola said. “The Government and private sectors have to realise we have to support them to stay here, we have to train them, so more incubators for start-ups have to exist, more access to money has to exist for start-ups here, more mentoring for young people here who want to start businesses. Most of our economy in the United States consists of small business, not of big business. Small business will be the backbone of this economy and we want to keep our talents here. To build that economy we have to train them,” the expert, who after 15 years of visits to our country already talks like a Romanian citizen, said.
Nevertheless, Bagnola believes Romanians lack the capacity for team work. The reason, he says, comes from our history. In contrast, the expert gave the example of the Japanese who naturally work as a team because of their culture. “In order to be resilient to stress, resilient to change, you have to have a team. You have to focus like a team, to work hand in hand to be successful. Without teams Romania is not going to move forward,” the expert advises.
“Romanian managers are good relationship builders, are smart and they are more open to learning than American managers, they try different things out. But because they are good communicators they like to talk but not listen. So, one of the main problems is communication. The other main problem is “I want tell you something once and I think you got it.” You need to tell somebody many times the same thing over and over before anyone gets it. The other problem is that they think they have to know everything. You don’t. And all managers have to understand that they work for their employees and the employees don’t work for you, they work for the customers,” Bagnola added.
The secret of good leadership: shared leadership
Jim Bagnola pointed out at the conference that he believes women are better managers than men because they are better at multitasking, their ego is not as pronounced and they know very well how to build relations. Moreover, the American expert says that very young employees do not exhibit resistance to learning as significant as the one exhibited by a middle-aged persons and more emphasis should be put on them. Likewise, Bagnola emphasized that “a good leader is a good follower when appropriate” and that the secret of good leadership is “shared leadership” because “the best companies have the least amount of ego.”
Jim Bagnola is seen as one of the best leadership trainers in the world, having 30 years of experience and clients in over 80 countries. Jim is a member of the National Speakers Association and was designated as Certified Speaking Professional. NASA, NATO and the UN are among the institutions he has worked with. In Romania he has organized training programs for the Romanian Government but also for internationally-renowned companies.
