6 - What Savoir-Relier really is?

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From the course by HEC Paris

Building Your Leadership Skills

913 ratings

HEC Paris

Building Your Leadership Skills

913 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense

When taking this course, you will raise your own self-awareness and gain self-confidence for a better leadership. You will discover a new approach to leadership based on trust and sense. The “Savoir-Relier” leadership, a new approach of leadership, taught to HEC MBA’s student and top executives, enables better team leadership and encourages relationships between people in spite of their differences of opinion. You will develop relational skills, self-knowledge and self-awareness on the way to unfold your own leadership style. You’ll learn the skills of The Savoir-Relier (SR) methodology for better connecting with yourself or others by going through the following 4 steps for successful leadership: Introspection, Conversation, Resilience and Responsibility toward Value Creation. In this first MOOC of the "Inspirational Leadership" specialization, you will practice the first two steps of the method for successful leadership: Introspection and Conversation. You will get to know yourself better during the Introspection part and get a chance to improve your communication skills in order to better interact with others. You will meet people like you who will share their stories and their experience with Savoir-Relier and why it is so inspiring for them in their life. Together, you’ll develop greater self-awareness by developing a leadership self-portrait and going through fun activities to increase your empathy and communication. Leaders from different organizations and participants of the HEC Paris Leadership Certificate, the program from which this course and specialization are inspired, will share with you their insights about what it takes to become a great leader and what they are able to achieve now that they apply The Savoir-Relier methodology. This course is part of the specialization “Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense”. In the next courses, you'll go through the second two steps of leadership: Resilience and Responsibility toward Value Creation.

From the lesson

Your inspirational leadership journey

In this module, you will discover a new approach to leadership, the savoir-relier, which is based on the capacity to build quality and trustworthy relationships. You will hear and watch people who have embarked on the same journey as you who will share their stories and their experience with Savoir-Relier. You will see why it is so inspiring for them in their life and find your own motivation to participate. You will reflect on your inspiration to lead and your personal leadership references to give an orientation to your personal leadership journey. You will capture the value of the step by step process which will help you define your leadership style. So get started and enjoy the journey with us!

6 - What Savoir-Relier really is?8:35

7 - Sense and Sensibility5:34

Meet the Instructors

Valérie Gauthier
Associate Professor, HEC Paris

[MUSIC]

So what is really savoir relier?

As you probably remember, savoir in French, means both knowledge and to know.

And relier is a verb that means to connect.

And by extension, to rely on as we will now see with the key word, reliance.

Savoir relier is an expression that I came up with 1994 as part of a project

to define new methodologies to educate 21st century leaders and managers.

The actual definition of savoir relier is based on the notion of reliance.

But before I explain what savoir relier really entails, let us hear what those who

have experienced and practiced the savoir releir approach have to say about it.

>> Savoir relier for me is self reflection, introspection.

Savoir relier is the black box in between which is a process converting the inputs

into outputs, and it gives you exactly the process of how to do it the right way.

>> The relationship to the person I was talking to developed very quickly, and

there was a lot of trust, a lot of mutual acceptance.

So I think that I learned a lot about myself.

>> Savoir relier really helps you engage with other people and

empowers you to become a more effective leader.

>> With the savoir relier, we learned about listening to other and

also speaking our mind in a free, no judgment group.

>> Savoir relier is a new management philosophy.

>> It's a continuous improvement process

that will help you to thrive as a leader in society.

>> Learn a lot about myself, about opening up to other people.

>> Hello, my name is Oriane,

like [FOREIGN] the jack at the beginning of the MOOC.

And sure, I have engaged in the inspirational leadership journey

called savior relier.

I have not only gained self confidence and self awareness from this experience.

But I have also been able to run a major project with many complex issues and

challenges on the way thanks to this approach.

I will tell you all about it later in the MOOC.

So stay tuned and focused on all the learning that this episode has to bring.

>> Well, because we live in a world of complex, fast, and dynamic change,

a world of uncertainties.

We need to prepare ourselves to face the challenges of unknown futures and

shape our own destinies like this sculpture.

Remember that image?

To carve your own way forward.

But for now, just think about the unpredictable events that affect our

society and people, from climate change catastrophes to the erratic and

irrational markets that govern our economies.

Think about the importance of the chain of events and

all the relations involved that make them happen.

Usually, we post-rationalize to make sense of complex problems,

like terrorist attacks, tsunamis, or earthquakes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on problems of randomness and probability.

His 2007 book, The Black Swan,

was described as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

In it, he criticizes risk management methods used by the finance industry and

warns about financial crises.

He advocates what he calls a black swan robust society,

meaning a society that can withstand difficult to predict events.

He denounces three key factors of failure in the way we approach uncertainty.

The first one, the disproportionate role of high impact,

hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectation.

This means some rare events that don't

that we don't anticipate affect our lives dramatically.

The second, the non-computability of the probability of

the consequential rare events using scientific methods.

This means the traditional scientific methods

cannot measure the impact of such events.

Third, the psychological biases that make people individually and

collectively blind to uncertainty and

unaware of the massive role of the rare events in historical affairs.

Which means that we are blind to these event and their impact.

To illustrate the black swan for people and

not for events, let me share with you one of my black swans.

Unexpectedly, when I was a child living the happiest family life,

my father decided to leave us.

And that was the most disruptive element in my childhood moving forward.

This is one of my early black swans.

Now I'm sure you have your own black swans too.

Why don't you share in your SR journal your black swan and write the story?

This is where savior relier plays a critical role.

We have to learn to deal with uncertainty.

The unknown and are in capacity to predict,

in spite of all the math, theories, algorithms.

So we have to create, invent new approaches, and develop new mindsets.

Complexity itself comes from the Latin complexus,

which means that which is woven together.

Relationships are the key to building sense for ourselves.

This is what reliance means.

In the Oxford Dictionary, reliance means dependence on or

trust in someone or something.

The sociologist Marcel Bolle de Bal defines it as [FOREIGN].

And Edgar Morin describes it as [FOREIGN].

Don't worry I'm going to translate.

This is the act of relying, self-relying, and its end result.

And for the other definition, the sharing of accepted solitudes and

the exchange of respected differences.

So the relation itself becomes the engine,

the key player in the relationships that govern our lives.

Like the synapses, which are the key to the way our brain functions,

not the neurons themselves.

In a world that tends to divide,

we need more than ever to rebuild the connections to create sense.

But let me not lose you here and get back to our leadership track.

So, if you want to dig in these aspects of leadership and

complexity, use the references attached to this course and

read further Agamova and other authors on complexity and reliance.

Savoir-relier is a way to work from tensions by taking critical

dimensions of leadership such as trust,

resilience, agility, intuition, courage, and complexity.

And leveraging them to enhance our capacity to navigate the increasingly

complex and highly relational world we live in.

It is a type of leadership that is marked by humility and intuition.

Recognizing the importance of human relationships and

the value of diversity as a means to dive to drive innovation and performance.

It is a tool for approaching and managing complex problems at individual,

interpersonal, and organizational level.

Savoir-relier is an act,

the act of generating sensible and sustainable relations between different or

divergent entities to build sense for individuals and organizations alike.

But I will let Oriane speak about it from her experience.

>> I decided to launch a great project while doing my masters in law and

international management at HEC Paris,

to pilot the musical Chicago from Broadway with a group of 37 volunteer students.

I actually used Valerie Gauthier's book, Leading with Sense,

and found in the savior relier method the resources to build confidence in myself.

And to create an atmosphere of trust between the students involved,

this trust that was so important when we had difficult moments.

And we had many.

Believe me, you need to persevere and

focus on all the steps of this protocol as you move forward in your MOOC.

And you'll find great benefits.

I'll tell you more about my projects as you carry on.

You can read further about it in the book, Leading with Sense, if you want to know

more about the background and theories that support this notion.

So, see you later.

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