Simonetta Lureti: alchemy of a leader
17 November 2021
Listening, having confidence, not only in oneself and in one’s abilities but also in one’s work team, having the predisposition and above all the courage to innovate. This is how those who aspire to be good leaders should behave – we won’t say perfect because we know well that this canon is neither achievable nor advisable: without any room for improvement, how do you keep the incentive to learn and progress? This is how Lucio Furlani and Simonetta Lureti portray it, co-authors of the English-language manual Fast Forward Your Career: A Personal Playbook to Boost Leadership, published at the end of last summer and which promises to inspire and give tools to those looking for a change in their own career.
We are in the digital age. Human is at the core, the business has adapted, and organizations are more open, flat, and fluid. The concept of leadership evolves. Business acumen and execution continue to be pivotal. But alone, they are not enough to achieve success.
Simonetta opens with these words. She’s Marketing Director for Gartner Consulting Global Practice as a full time job, and also coach recognized by the International Coach Federation and NLP master practitioner in the remaining time of her life – without forgetting The Brave Club, an online community born in 2020 to support female empowerment (which, she says, many men are also part of) and her studies in the Sciences of Happiness. Like the model of leader she talks about, embodied in the book by a woman inspired by the authors’ experiences on the field and told through different challenges to be overcome in the business environment, Simonetta also manages to be herself many things at the same time. Each area of study, supported by curiosity and constant questions, serves to nourish and enrich the others.
Reading the book one will wonder, how do you do everything? The question arises spontaneously: how is it possible to succeed in all these areas? In these pages, a great sum of knowledge learned through study and experience, the authors help us to get closer to something that seems difficult to achieve. They come to our aid by alternating knowledge, techniques and elements of theory, a map within which to move to better juggle in this area, to a compelling storytelling that introduces each topic, making it easier to understand. The result is an interdisciplinary path where the leader is a person with multiform ingenuity, to quote Homer (who defined Ulysses polytropos in his Odyssey), capable not only of excelling in his own field, but also of making the best of people he works with and to provide them with a goal to give their best, showing himself open, flexible, ready, and indeed always one step ahead, and all this no longer seems so far from a human being.
You don’t win alone. A good leader must also have the humility and the courage to seek advice not only from a superior or a professional you trust, but also from the resources of their team who often come from different and complementary backgrounds, more specialized or with a lateral vision which is always useful to draw on and open up. The leader can also be a “multipotential”, an adjective in recent years abused and used to summarize in one word the ability to succeed in several things at the same time. “However, we should do some clarity: for me multipotentiality is the ability to achieve excellence in several areas. For many, however, it is an excuse to never carry something to the end, or to be mediocre in several fields. “
The secret ingredient, for Simonetta, is passion. Her story, even before that of Katherine, the leading character of Fast Forward Your Career: A Personal Playbook to Boost Leadership, shows that there are things that can really make a difference, and that they do not depend on fortunate hereditary or internalized predispositions, but from the flame that each of us has the task of feeding, every day, between ups and downs, more or less fortunate moments, choices, crossroads and obstacles. Without that, the alchemy disappears.
You can listen to the interview with Simonetta Lureti here and on Spotify .
