How To Change Yourself To Change Your Company

The new book, Reinventing the Leader, is an inspiring account of the magic that can happen when a leader realizes they must undergo their own transformation in order to transform their organization.

This candid and practical book by Guilherme (Gui) Loureiro, Regional CEO overseeing Walmex, Walmart Canada, and Walmart Chile (now Chairman of the Board for Walmex and Regional CEO for Canada, Chile, Central America, and Mexico), and his executive leadership coach Carlos Marin shows how even the most successful leaders must be open to personal change in order to transform their company. The book details how the pair pioneered a data-driven, customer-centric business transformation at Walmex—Walmart’s biggest division outside of the United States.

“This book is a blueprint for transformational success for leaders in any business who find themselves facing the need to retool their own company’s systems and operations and energize and inspire an entire corporate culture in order to compete in an ever-shifting digital economy. It’s about sustaining a cherished brand while disrupting the very essence of how it has done business in the past. And perhaps most important of all, it’s about learning to learn—becoming aware of how to better leverage your strengths, limit your weaknesses, and listen more effectively to your associates and customers to find out what they really want and need during a time of major transition,” says Gui.

The blueprint for transformational success includes these steps:

Start by questioning and challenging the organization’s underlying assumptions and beliefs about the sustainability of its success.
Revitalize or discover the purpose that will give deeper meaning to why the organization does what it does—the compelling motive for its existence.
Engage the hearts and minds of the people of your organization by reinforcing that vital purpose.
As a leader, you must define on a personal level why your life matters, what you stand for, and what you want your legacy to be.
Establish clear goals that are in alignment with the higher purpose.
Set specific objectives and targets to be reached to provide benchmarks during each aspect of the transformation.
Communicate a plan that consists of clear tactics and action steps, outlining what, how, who, and when for each objective.
Actively promote and practice learning on an ongoing basis. As the process advances, your new experiences and insights will lead to adjustments and adaptations that will improve the final results. As a leader, encourage your team to work cooperatively to learn and grow in order to make the transformation successful.
Learn to tell a compelling story about what happened and how it was done.

Gui Loureiro (Photo by: Roberto Rubio Macaria Cinco)

Carlos Marin (Photo by: Shadi Ameri)

Some of my favorite lessons from the book, in the authors' words, include:

Humility: Doing the hard, personal work it takes to get to know yourself better is fundamental to growing and maturing as a leader. It requires having the humbleness and curiosity of a novice, which will allow you to have new insights and flourish free of the sanctions of your own self-perceptions.

Curiosity: As a leader you’ll want to cultivate a desire for learning and to see opportunities and possibilities where others see only difficulties and impossibilities. A sense of curiosity and wonder will allow you to reframe challenges as potential solutions.

Mentors: Wise leaders recognize the benefits of having someone with more experience to advise and support them throughout their career. Try to find a mentor who will help you learn and find the strengths that may be hidden within you as you move forward on your journey.

Comfort Zone: Expand your comfort zone. Be willing to part with old and familiar ways to jump into new possibilities, despite how scary that can be.

Listening: One of the best ways for you to value and show others the respect they need and deserve is to genuinely listen to them.

Coaching: The journey toward transformative self-awareness can be made more effective by working with an experienced coach. A professional coach can help you understand your strengths and opportunities better and faster as well as to help you change and improve. Using your strengths can be a very powerful tool to help you correct what needs to be fixed.

Self-Reinvention: A key ingredient of self-reinvention is identifying those you can learn from and humbly drink from their fountains of knowledge and experience.

Underperformers: Don’t confuse caring for people with tolerance for underperformance. Being a leader requires the appropriate and timely recognition that despite your efforts to help, someone may not want to change, adapt, or evolve…and that’s when you must act swiftly.

Vision: It’s vital for you to provide clarity of vision so that everyone is on board and aligned with it. Communicate, communicate, and communicate the vision. It is never too much.

Talent: Value the leadership talent of your team and invest in the continued growth and development of those who are able and willing to cope with change as the company evolves.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

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