What's your leadership language? | Rosita Najmi (re-release)

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
If you've been in the working world for a while, you probably have some sense of your own leadership style, or at least the leadership styles of the people around you. Collaborative, decisive, hands off. But global development economist Rosita Najmi says, leadership styles might not be the thing to focus on.

**Rosita Najmi** (0:31)
Many leaders obsess over leadership style when really, they just need to get over themselves.
Sorry, leader, it's not about you. What's more useful is to adapt and personalize your leadership to be the leader, the situation, and the people involved need.

**Elise Hu** (0:53)
Rosita, an Iranian refugee who grew up in rural Tennessee, has lived and worked across more than 30 countries. So she thought she knew how to move between cultures and languages. But she was in business school when she realized that leadership has its own set of languages across corporations, nonprofits, philanthropy, the public sector, and more. In this talk from 2023, she shares why being a multilingual leader is key because good leadership isn't about having one fixed style. It's about learning how to translate for different audiences. That's coming up right after a short break.
And now our TED Talk of the day.

**Rosita Najmi** (1:42)
As an Iranian refugee who grew up in rural East Tennessee, and someone who studied, lived and worked in over 30 countries, I thought I knew how to navigate across cultures and languages. I was wrong. There I was, day one of business school, getting my bearings and hearing an alien language. It wasn't English, French, or my native Persian. It was a bullion base of languages, jargon from across the organizational multiverse. The corporate world, the non-profit sphere, international development, and the public sector. It was weird. In business school, I thought I'd learn about leadership styles. What I found were leadership languages. And I learned that by becoming conversant in these languages, that I could communicate with and contribute to all of these worlds. So how does one become multilingual? Here's my story. In college, I went to West Africa to study microfinance and economic empowerment. Seeing a large public health need, I co-founded and led a non-profit, collecting medical supplies and money. We saw what collective action could yield, and we were creative with our advocacy and our fundraising, with campaigns like Band-Aids for Benin.
Along the way, I studied different leadership styles, autocratic, democratic, laissez faire, servant, collaborative, transformational, and more. I read books, attended trainings, and I even had the privilege to study with some of the greats and to work with General Colin Powell and Dr. Maya Angelou.
After all of this, I became convinced that there's no best type of leadership. So many of us just default to one style or another, similar to how we're born with our native tongue. But this default style doesn't work in every situation. Many leaders obsess over leadership style when really, they just need to get over themselves.
Sorry, leader, it's not about you.
What's more useful is to adapt and personalize your leadership, to be the leader, the situation and the people involved need. It's not so much style as language, the living vernacular of each discreet community and culture. The successful leader will aspire to be multilingual, to speak fluently with all groups and to translate among them.
In 2012, while working at the Omidyar Network, I was one of the sponsors of a two-year study of 12 Impact Investing Funds. One of the ahas of this project was that the most successful funds were those led by multilingual leaders, people that could communicate across the corporate, non-profit, philanthropic and public policy perspectives. These leaders also made sure that others on their team were multilingual.
This came to me as a bit of a surprise. I expected the secret sauce to be in sophisticated financial modeling or some other type of complex analysis. According to this study, the multilingual leader will describe their work as being unremittingly financially driven, business speak, moving the needle on social and environmental challenges, non-profit and philanthropic speak, while addressing systemic market failures. Public policy speak. The study further found the need to be conversant into four industry languages. There's a finance, non-profit, government and international development. The multilingual leader was something that seemed very familiar to me. This really rang true based on my own experience of patchworks across these sectors. And it took me back to that first weird day in business school.
Now that we've described the how, let us turn to the what. Where should leaders focus? I will modestly propose three topics that cut across issues, and together we'll double click on one of them. Data. Climate. Power. How each of these sectors measure the impact, and even the timing, the tempo, and the tools that they use for each could not be more different. Say, you're the private sector at one end. You have accounting on a daily, a weekly, a monthly, and quarterly increments. The public sector, you're working on multi-year election cycles. The non-profit and philanthropic sector, well, you may give yourself 15 years or even a generation to reach a goal. Yet all of these sectors must come together to reach these outcomes. To make it real, let's look together about how these sectors can come together to address power with the focus on gender equality.