 When I became a manager and the leader, I realized that the truth is The job is easy The people are not right. If somebody wants to be better at this and you have to get smart about it Instead of soft, we call them smart instead of hard. We call them Professor Laura Dana, good morning. How are you? I'm very good Hassabri. How are you? I'm good You're looking very sharp and smart today. Thank you very much Now tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Eclipse and ESB So I was born in Romania But I lived in many countries. I lived in Switzerland In India in US in Italy and I've been with ASB since day one. I'm very proud to say that I'm the associate dean and faculty director for Action Learning and I teach in the Eclipse Executive Education Center I was told at the the Eclipse Executive Education Center You are teaching a program called the smart executive toolkit program. Can you tell us about this program? What is it about? Yeah, I'm very passionate about this this subject It's a program that is part of the leadership and management track And it's a program that is trying to help managers leaders leaders in training To improve on what we call smart skills. This is a very unique program designed only for ASB and Eclipse So you're not going to find it anywhere else and in this program I'm trying to address the the challenges that we have in Working with people if you want The truth is that the more you advance in your career The more time you spend managing people or dealing with people or working with people So if somebody wants to be better at this and you have to get smart about it I can see you're very enthusiastic and very energetic in talking about the program You must have spent a lot of time researching on the subject matter Explain to us a little bit. Why is this area so important to you professor? So you see as a professor of management, I have to teach management. I don't have to do management But when I became a manager and the leader I realized that the truth is The job is easy The people are not right, but you can't really go around and say well You know the people are not easy therefore. I can't deal with this You have to learn how to be better at managing yourself at managing others And you have to be better at understanding the true complex nature of the human being. I don't know if you know about this, but The concept of soft and hard skills was I think it came up in 1970s in the US Army and Soft skills were the skills that that I just mentioned the skills necessary to manage people Well, let me ask you this summary. What is soft about managing others dealing with your board? dealing with complexity of Diversity right understanding how to to manage others how to manage up how to manage down There's nothing soft about it. So at ASB we call them smart skills because if you don't have them You're not very smart, right? And same thing with with sharp skills, which a lot of other colleagues teach We used to call these skills hard skills, right? It's hard To learn accounting. It's hard to learn a new Software language. The truth is is not hard and also once you learn them. It doesn't mean that you're done You constantly have to sharpen this skill. So that's why we call them sharp skills at ASB So instead of soft, we call them smart instead of hard. We call them sharp. I like this program already What specific organizational issues do you hope to address by conducting this program and tell us who should attend this program? So The answer is is very simple. Let me ask you this. Are you working with people? Does your organization have people always? Are you people? I hope so Therefore you should take this program because the truth is Like I said before the more you advance in your career or the more potential you have To take a manager role a leadership role. You really have to learn how to manage people how to manage yourself in this context So I can see Emerging leaders. I can see leaders in training. I can see managers with high potential Pretty much anybody who needs to sharpen their sparse skills Mm-hmm if you allow that but also what I've learned is a lot of companies approach us If they have a lot of engineers or people with the technical background that now become Managers right you have the sharp skills, but now you have to get smart as well That's right. So tell me what impact do you think this program will have on the participants? So one of the things that I've learned by teaching this program is that a lot of people leave the program and say I feel like I have a lot higher empathy for my colleagues. I understand now the importance of emotional maturity I understand the importance of being cognitive ready. I understand the importance of Followership not just leadership and I think they they leave feeling more equipped to Manage people to deal with people and it turns out that the job is easy when people are easy It sounds really great Any final words professor Lorena for people who might be interested to sign up for the smart toolkit program? Well, it's very simple. What are you waiting for? Let's get smart and sharp at ASB