Ian Sandler discusses the future of leadership, and it's about to get international

"Kindness and empathy are critical leadership skills, and are clearly now more important than ever."  Ian Sandler of Riley's Way foundation shared his thoughts on empowering the next generation of youth leaders as well as how Riley's Way has adjusted their work around COVID-19. Read on for his answers, and don't miss our next guest, President of the Lenovo Foundation, author, engineer and Vice President of HR Operations and Chief Diversity Officer at Lenovo Yolanda Lee Conyers.

Victoria: "A recent Harris Poll underscored that the American public want companies to make a positive difference on social issues. Do you see this movement towards positive impact increasing the demand for organizations like yours who are helping to support the next generation of leaders?"

Ian: "Absolutely. Kindness and empathy are critical leadership skills, and are clearly now more important than ever.

"Our goal is to foster these qualities, and really help enhance them in the next generation of leaders, by giving them the scaffolding and support they need to make a difference in the world. What we’re trying to do with our local and national programs is to provide tools and resources for young people to not just envision change, but achieve it. These young people will be running companies and nonprofits someday."

And it’s so powerful to create a cohort network, to connect people at a local and national level. We’re seeing this, given COVID-19, given social justice movements, in our teens, but I’m also seeing it in my day job at Insight. These are topics being brought up within our organization by employees. So we’re seeing this not just at Riley’s Way, but also at Insight, where there’s dramatic change happening, and huge support for that from our partners. What’s exciting for me is when I joined Insight, I told them 'Listen, I’ve had this wonderful career, and I’m working for charity at this point. My goal is to work at Insight and funnel that into everything I’m trying to accomplish at Riley’s Way.' And rather than just tolerate it, Insight encouraged me - so I’ve been incredibly free to take my non-profit work and incorporate it into everything I do on a daily basis at Insight. So that’s been really amazing, to see those two worlds connect. For example, two of the young people we work with at Riley's Way, Nicole and Amber, were Call for Kindness winners in 2019 and started a book called RPRSNTD focused on promoting work by underrepresented authors of color, really trying to highlight that history is not necessarily what you read in history books but that you need to understand different vantage points. And I have those teens in Riley’s Way working with Insight Impact (our nonprofit within the firm), helping highlight and educate investment professionals to help them understand these concerns. For as difficult and challenging a time as it’s been, it’s a time of true change, and I think that’s happening not just with for-profits supporting these organizations but also trying to live these values. My team is working with our investment professionals to help everyone learn more."

Victoria: "How are you adjusting your programming around COVID-19, and what advice would you have for young people looking to engage with their communities?

Ian: "We reached out to our community of teen leaders and teachers in March, when COVID-19 was first hitting. I’d been leading our business continuity efforts at Insight, studying what had happened, and given my background of when my family’s life was upended, losing Riley, I felt it was important to highlight to our teens how quickly things can change. So that was the initial discussion: 'Listen, everybody wants to look backwards to what life was like in January, but the sooner you’re able to recognize everything has changed, yet there is so much that can be done' was really the message. And what we got back from our teens was “We want to lean in, we want to put ourselves to work right away.” So we went to our board, and immediately released funding to these young people.

One of the programs that came out of this was our Buddy Reading program, partnering teens with kindergartners from an elementary school in Harlem that was hit really hard by the pandemic. And it’s one of those things we put funding behind, but it’s driven by the youth. And in one of the stories we captured, one of the teens realized that the kindergartner she was reading to needed more time with her. She realized that she wanted to spend more time reading to and talking to her buddy. For one hour per day per week, she’s looking out for this kindergartener as one way to help.

In Seattle, we have a penpal program with seniors in a nursing home that’s going to be virtual. It’s not just around coronavirus but social justice. Our teens want to showcase that support.

"My advice for young people is to not let perfect be the enemy of very good. If you want to do something, don’t wait until you have every detail worked out. A big part of what we’ve done is show teens how to put their ideas into action. With crisis comes opportunity. We’ve told these teens that we’re here to support them. Today the news can be so negative, and to be able to focus on positive ways of making an impact, has been so inspiring to see what our teens are doing. And it gives us hope that we’ll come out of this situation with real change and with solutions to issues that have been plaguing us for much longer than the past several months."

Victoria: "The Riley's Way Foundation has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to young people since its founding six years ago through projects like the nationwide Call for Kindness campaign. What have been some of your favorite stories of impact over the years?"

Ian: "I’ll give a couple of examples. The first is one of our teens, Ashley, who’s based out of Seattle, Washington. She’s someone who attended our first Youth Leadership Retreat in September 2019, at Timberlake, where Riley was when she passed. It was a very meaningful and special weekend where we had both our teens from local councils as well as teens we’d met as we’d pushed forward with Call for Kindness, so a mix of young people from NYC, Florida, Seattle, and more. And Ashley is an amazing young woman who came to the retreat, on her laptop, and every time there was a break she was going to do her schoolwork. But over the next few days - and Ashley wrote about this on our blog, so you can read what she had to say - she was able to take a yoga class, put down her computer, and start painting. And she was able to go through the weekend and realize that being kind is really about creating effective and sustainable change. It’s about understanding how to exhibit kindness, listening to others. And Ashley picked this up by working with her team cohorts, and it changed her worldview of what kind leadership means. So in just a weekend, we were able to create an impactful change for these teens on understanding what kindness and empathy means to them.

Another story that really resonated happened in June. We had our “Conversations in Solidarity,” our teens leading a workshop with an organization called Circles for Support. This is a discussion around mass incarceration and its impact on families, how it ravages communities. This is the third year in a row that our teen council has done this event. And you would have thought this was amazing, that we pivoted to capture what’s going on with today’s movements, but our councils are teen-led social justice organizations. We challenge them to figure out what breaks their heart, to address these issues. And it was so incredibly poignant, so timely, to see the leadership these young teens can exhibit. So those are just two of those stories, out of countless moments where we see we’re making an impact. To me, what I think is so powerful and why we’re leaning into the work we’re doing is that everything happening in the world is requiring a new paradigm, voice, and lens. It's our young people who are going to change all the things that are currently not working well, and the fact that they’re not coming up with this because it’s in the moment but because it’s what they’ve picked is extraordinary. The feedback we get from adults is how impressed they are with the work of these young people - the work THEY chose. We’re infusing youth leadership into everything we’re doing. We’re hiring now, and our teens are driving the initial interviews. We’re teaching life skills to these young people, so they can be even more effective change-agents in the future."

Follow Ian on LinkedIn.

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Next week's guest: Yolanda Lee Conyers

I'm thrilled to share that our next guest on You've Got This is Yolanda Lee Conyers. As Chief Diversity Officer, President of the Lenovo Foundation, and Vice President of Global Human Resources at Lenovo, Yolanda leads diversity and inclusion strategy for an international workforce of 63,000 employees. With that in mind, here's what I'll be asking Yolanda:

• In your 2014 bestselling book "The Lenovo Way" you and co-author Gina Qiao outline key learnings - from bridging cultural divides to the importance of diverse leadership - that have helped drive Lenovo's success. As the book continues to resonate with readers, what are some ideas you discussed that have become more timely now than ever?
• As the Lenovo Foundation approaches its second anniversary this October, what milestones will your team be celebrating, and how do you see the work you do evolving into the future?
• In a 2018 interview with Austin Woman Magazine, you shared this amazing quote: "Different candidates will bring different skills. Employers have to embrace hiring different. Our Lenovo position: #DifferentIsBetter." How have you continued to embrace this philosophy in your role as Vice President of Global Human Resources governing Human Resources strategy for eight organizations across Lenovo? And how would you encourage other HR professionals and businesses to adopt these principles and put them into practice?

I invite you to ask your questions for Yolanda in the comments below, and as always, thank you for reading and being a part of the conversation.