We had the good fortune of connecting with Eleni Pallas and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Eleni, can you share the most important lesson you’ve learned over the course of your career?
The most important lesson that I’ve learned throughout my life and career is to own my thoughts, feelings and behaviors. That means that I decide how to think, feel and act in any given situation. I decide how to interpret mistakes, failures, successes, uncertainty and the behaviors of others. I decide whether or not I stay neutral or become angry when other people criticize, judge and/or blame me and the like. Owning my thoughts, feelings and actions helps me respond deliberately to people and situations instead of react habitually. At the same time, I also pay attention to the ways that the people around me and the environments that I’m in affect me. If they affect me in positive ways, I enjoy it. If they affect me in negative ways, I do what I can to counter that negative effect by the ways I interpret them or find more inspiring people to be with and places to be. I’m always at choice as to how to think, feel and respond.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?

I co-lead a boutique leadership development and team culture design firm named, Leaders for Good with my collaborator, Shadi Abouzeid. We’re both in our second careers and now, we’re taking a stand for humanity in the workplace. We provide executive coaching and strategy consulting services to facilitate team and/or organizational culture transformation. The goal is to create engaging and enriching workplaces where people are respected and can tackle challenges such as workforce changes, global turbulence, market disruptors with innovation and flair. When we humans feel respected in our work environment, we also tend to take better care of Nature, too.
During the first 20 years of my career, I worked for large organizations such as the World Bank, Deloitte, Booz Allen and Orange (a telecoms company based in Paris, France) spending much of my time in strategy and business development groups. I’ve lived in 3 countries and worked in over 20, leading partnerships and other project initiatives. During that time, I wondered why there were similar team-related problems in vastly different places such as Tokyo, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai and Moscow.
One day I was in a car accident in Siberia en route to a business meeting, which changed my life’s trajectory. After 3 months in the hospital, 3 more months at home and 5 months working part-time, I realized that I’d been engaged in my career, but not inspired or fulfilled. I also realized that teamwork CAN be enjoyable and effective; work doesn’t need to be tense or lead to burnout or chronic illness. Soon thereafter, I quit my job, finished my coaching education, moved to San Francisco and started coaching leaders and teams.
Upon arriving in San Francisco, I hadn’t known a soul so I started talking around and was soon coaching and teaching leadership at UC Berkeley Extension. When working with clients ensnared in tension and conflict, I realized that they were seeing each other as titles and job functions, not humans. Their workplaces were centered around tasks, processes and success metrics and the people there were like replaceable cogs in a wheel. That made people feel unimportant and compelled them to protect themselves by being defensive, which created more tension, conflict and resistance to change.  Those were the same things I saw in the various countries that I’d worked in. To counter the negative consequences of such workplaces, I developed Human-Centric Leading. It’s an antidote to the problems that block high-quality creativity, innovation, communication and collaboration. It’s a mindset and toolset that puts people at the center of decisions to amplify each person’s effectiveness and impact. It’s a way to lead teams and organizations in ways that are good for people and Nature.
The differentiating factors of our firm Leaders for Good are twofold: our use of Human-Centric Leading + the fact that we work at the mindset level before we launch into the structural aspects of team/organizational cultural transformation — and that changes everything. Doing the mindset work first creates a new starting point that activates each person to deliberately bring their best selves to work and deliberately own the ways they show up at work — instead of acting habitually. From there, they can better collaborate and innovate to meet the team or organization mission.
To make such transformation simple, structured and doable, we’ve developed a 4-step journey. There’s no need for a large, top-down approach; small pods of activity that attract other internal players to get involved are more effective. First, we use an assessment to name the value each person brings and the ways to communicate with people across differing perspectives that prevent conflict or miscommunication. Second, we facilitate deeper  self-awareness, so that clients get to know their default mindsets — the structure of their thoughts, feelings and behaviors/actions. With such self-awareness, clients can then choose the mindsets that best reflect their smarts and their impact soars. Third, we teach people how to apply Human-Centric Leading to solve existing workplace problems such as tension, conflict and resistance to change and create open, trusting and enriching work environments. In doing that, people can better respond to increasing uncertainty that’s inevitable. Fourth, we support clients to develop strategic plans, as well as design customized team rules of engagement, success metrics and/or employee/customer journeys that optimize the team’s or organization’s mission.
To promote deeper learning, we’ve published a set of 5 Human-Centric Leading Toolkits available on amazon.com. Further, we’re finalizing a book named “Reclaiming Our Humanity in the Workplace” (forthcoming later this year) that showcases the mindset and team culture differences across a variety of existing organizations and illustrates how to cultivate creative and adaptive workplaces using Human-Centric Leading.
If you know of anyone who wants an executive coach, to solve team-related problems or learn about Human-Centric Leading, please connect us. For anyone who wants to join the Human-Centric Leading movement, please visit the our website or send me an email with anything you’d like to ask or share!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Definitely to Paris, France. That’s my favorite city of all the places I’ve been so far. We’d fly there in style and stay at a hotel on the Champs Elysee. We’d wake up to a long walk along that street and end up at the Louvre for a museum visit. We’d then walk to Ile Saint-Louis for lunch and a nap after that. In the evening, we’d either go to a night show in a museum or a cafe for drinks before dinner. Then head out to dinner in the 4th arrondissement and make sure to visit my favorite jewelry shops, which are hopefully still in that area. A variation of this every day with spontaneous side trips to Amsterdam and London would make the week very fun.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
There are so many people I can mention and I’ll start with my sister, Sophia Pallas. She always encourages me to shine and challenges me if I’m not living up to my values. I’d add a close set of friends such as Elise Boivin, Anne Preston and Deb Maes who are like sisters who support me without judgment. I’m also thankful for the work of Brené Brown who is normalizing emotions so that we come to understand that we can feel and by feeling our emotions, we can respond to things that happen with deliberation instead of habit.

Website: https://leadersforgood.net

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humancentricleading/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenipallas/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeadingHuman

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS9X2A3dPCXLsG-xRvI-NQg

Other: Human-Centric Leading Toolkits: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=eleni+pallas&crid=1KUHIMJEU6OH7&sprefix=eleni+pallas%2Caps%2C56&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

Image Credits
I have the rights to those photos.

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