Cross-Cultural Leadership With Gretchen Villegas
Tom speaks with Gretchen Villegas about her extensive experience in leading global nonprofit organizations across diverse cultural contexts. They discuss her insights into cultural challenges and her visual diagram tool for understanding organizational intersections and value exchange. Additionally, they emphasize the importance of being present, offering support, active listening, and thought partnership to drive progress.
A Bit About Gretchen:
Gretchen Villegas is a seasoned executive leader with over 25 years of experience specializing in mission-driven, innovative program designs through partnership development, impact scaling, and revenue growth. She has managed international country programs in vulnerable communities, with a portfolio totaling over $320 million funded by both public and private donors.
Gretchen's early experience includes serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South America and a 15-year career managing USG-funded programs in Latin America and Africa. She has worked in partnership with communities, local and international private sector partners, philanthropists, impact investors, and governments to find sustainable solutions to poverty, enabling marginalized households to achieve a resilient, dignified life.
Her expertise encompasses executive-level leadership of global program portfolio effectiveness through evidence and data, intentional program design to optimize impacts for vulnerable children and their families, rigorous research to learn and adapt in program implementation, and revenue strategies to scale and enhance the reach of programmatic initiatives.
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Cross-Cultural Leadership With Gretchen Villegas
It's my great pleasure and honor to welcome Gretchen Villegas to the show. Gretchen has a fantastic resume and experience in leading global organizations as it relates to nonprofits, helping communities take advantage of resources across the continents of Africa and South America. You'll find in our conversation that these things are very disparate.
She has worked with a lot of different kinds of cultures and paradigms. She had knit-together teams with a strong diversity of paradigms. Her experience is extremely valuable. We had a great conversation as to what that looked like and some of the principles around it. It's my great pleasure to welcome Gretchen Villegas to the show.
You have a lot of experience working around the world, South America and Africa. I imagine a wide variety of people and situations. I'm looking forward to hearing your perspective on building teams' shared missions and how you get different points of view to row in the same direction. That's what I'd like to talk to you about. First of all, welcome to the show. Do you want to talk about yourself, how you got to those positions of leadership, and what it was that drove you?
Thank you for this opportunity to be here and talk with you. It's been a journey. I don't think I would be able to be in the position where I am now with the learning that I have had. As a leader, I would not have been able to have all of those experiences because that's where my learning came from. As I was learning how to become a leader, I was able to learn from different cultures and people who had different perspectives on how they viewed what success was, what was the best way forward, and how to build mentorship and support as they were moving forward.
At an early age, I was able to open up my eyes to two different perspectives by being abroad. I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I spent fifteen years abroad in Latin America and East and Southern Africa. I worked completely with global teams. I was the only expatriate with the global teams. We're talking about going from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Central America to Colombia, South America, Malawi, Southern Africa, East Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.
When you go from country to country, it's like starting over again and again. You start by asking all the questions. Where do I start? How do I register the company? How do we greet people as we walk out into the villages? How do I ask for permission to have a meeting? How do I hire staff? How do I train staff? How do I make an enabling environment so people feel comfortable asking questions and educating me on how we should move forward? It was all about asking questions, and I was the student.
If I may, Gretchen, it seems to me like it's a new set of rules and presuppositions that require you to wipe the slate clean and leave whatever your thoughts are, maybe park that agenda and be open to whatever is true and happening in that new setting. I guess that it is a healthy habit to acquire.
It's not common for us in the United States to do that because we're taught when you're a leader, you're in the leadership role, and you are accountable, you come in, you set the pace, you provide people the direction, and you make sure it happens. I made various mistakes, but I had to learn early on that the only way to succeed was to ask for help and to be educated by those who knew how to be successful in the environment.
Balancing Accountability And Cultural Respect
One of the things that seems to me typical in America that might not be in those places and elsewhere is the pace of our lives. We're in an awful hurry compared to most people. Did you find that to be common among everything? Was there a range in terms of the pace or the expectation of how things would unfold?
Everybody says the same thing. They all ask me that question. They say, “It should have been great. You were working there. You could take it easy. Everything was a slower pace.” I'd say, “I was exhausted all the time. I was running.” We're managing US government contracts. We have the US government's accountability for getting things done. This is US taxpayer money.
There are milestones in place in which we have to spend money, get things done, have impacts, and complete reports. You're in a culture in which they work slower. They're more relationship-driven, which is important for meeting most cultures outside the United States in a different way, but we still had to reach those milestones. That was my balancing act.
That seems like quite a challenge where you have imposed upon this cultural reality a set of objectives that perhaps aren't tethered to that reality as well as it could be. You were the person who had to make those two things match.
Here was the key. You don't force it so you can invite people in. You have the team, and I can tell you over and over again where you sit at the table and you say, “Everyone, this is what we must do. If we want to keep this funding and help the communities in this way, this is what we must report on.” You're transparent and clear. You don't tell people what to do. You ask and say, “How do you think we can get this done? How can we do what we need to do so that we are respectful and do what the communities both find respectful and will respond well to so that we can move forward with an impact that makes sense and is sustainable?”
It’s not just saying we check the box, we're done, and we can get paid for it, but it's sustainable for them within the culture and whatnot. How can we also do this accountability task that we need to turn in so that we did what we said we would do, what we're being paid to do, and what the money was for? When you do that, you have everybody sit down at the table. You have Ugandans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans. When you open that up and give people that opportunity, you come up with ways to do it. You have to be open to not doing it the logical North American way.
Is it a thing where you have the objective? We know we're going from place A to place B. What you're saying is, “What path are we going to take?” The path can be variable, but the destination is the thing that is the deliverable.
No one will argue about the deliverable and where you have to get to it.
They know the reality is we're doing this or we're not.
It's a project. This is their North Star. Look at some work I've done after I came back to the United States within change management and how I parallel some of those learnings when I came back. This was project work where you had a North Star. You had to reach 60,000 farmers in Uganda who are using conservation farming techniques to care for the soil, but they increased income at the same time. We had to track that. We had to have a percentage increase in income. We had to prove they were using conservation farming techniques.
I knew what the end goal was. I had in my head how I thought we should get there. I brought that forward. The minute we started moving forward, we started having issues with it. Had I not pulled in the team to say, “How do we move this forward?” We never would've been successful because I didn't have the cultural understanding of how to do that. That's where intercultural intelligence came along. I didn't learn it out of a book. I didn't even know what that term meant until recently. What I knew was that I knew the North Star and the reports we had to get in. Everyone around me who I hired knew how to get there, and I had to trust him.
Respect And Adaptation
It seems to me like what you're pointing to here, the word that comes to mind, is respect. You're respecting the fact that people are doing a certain thing for a reason. They have their reasons that we on the outside do not understand or know. We don't use the same metrics. We are respective. “What are your metrics? What are the reasons that we do it this way?” You're taking them into account rather than building the road over the existing paradigm.
That’s true. It's being open to it and not controlling it. We like to control things. We're in charge. We're the leader. We need to control that this is going to happen to be successful. One thing you need to learn when you are working with multicultural teams is that you have to be okay with getting there in different ways. You have to be open to allowing others to take the lead.
When you see things are not going well, you say, “Let's come back to the table and talk about this to see if we need to pivot.” If we do need to pivot because numbers aren't coming, I would put my hands up and many times would say, “We're not making this happen. I went to the field. I did talk to the women and the children. It's not happening the way we were thinking. Do we need to pivot?”
We have those deep conversations. I had to change my mindset and perception of what an action plan was and what plans A, B, C, and D were because it wasn't what was in my head. That was every single project I did. If there was one thing I learned and I was pushed outside my comfort zone, it was to know that each country I went into is different. Africa is not Africa. Latinos are not Latinos. Every single country is different. You have to have faith in people. People understand their people.
There's a balancing act. It's funny because this has come up in some other recent conversations I've had, where it's the discernment between those things that are universal among human beings and those things that are unique to the individual. In this case, it might be the individual person, or you're also pointing toward an individual culture. It's the discernment of that set of perceptions that connect and differentiate us. As a leader, I'm assuming what you're trying to do is look at those differentiations and say, “What can we learn from this? How can we best put this particular person's unique basket of goodies to work in this situation?” Am I reading the tea leaves right there?
Yeah. This was the US government mainly funding, but also corporations. I would have a diversified basket of funding when I was in the field for the first fifteen years I was abroad. It would be Cargill Animal Nutrition or General Mills. There was a Norwegian government, the European Union, World Bank, and different funders. They all have different rules and regulations. The idea was that I was empowering others because the hope was that others who were there would take on the responsibilities as I was moving on and opening up other projects in other countries and sites.
The service you're providing is that you’re helping them adhere to the rules and regulations so that they can advantage themselves of the resources available through those various means. Am I getting that right?
My job was to work for US contractors for US government projects. I was in charge of the programming and the operations. I was the representative on the ground for that company. I was like the CEO of the company, but I was running project work until the project work was finished. What I would do was to run the project. It's like the foreign aid money for humanitarian assistance. I mainly worked on stability and growth. It was mainly around income livelihoods to build up communities. When they were past the humanitarian crisis, it was mainly building up communities.
What I would do is when I was about a year out from leaving, I would look for other funding to write proposals when proposals and leave them for that team while I moved on because I felt that they had worked hard to learn, and I empowered them to understand how to manage the funding and do the work.
It wasn't only that. Do you know how hard it is to create a team that works together? You put all your time and effort into getting a multicultural team. I've got people in the United States watching that our reports are good and we're doing our due diligence. I've got the team here in Uganda and Kenya. They are working well with the United States. They've never worked with Americans before. They've never worked with Canadians, Norwegians, or the EU. They're doing a great job. I don't want them to lose that confidence that was built.
I'd find something to write a proposal for them always because we do the work from the field together. What I needed to do was to use the time I had to build up their skillset. I spent my time teaching them the rules and regulations of the US government. How do you decide when you use your local perception of time and the perception that the headquarters office has where this is due at this time, and you have to have it in by this time, or you're not going to be able to keep your job?
I would find 3 or 4 people in each office who had enough of that within them. They could learn that and become compliance officers and finance officers. That became a part of them. They were able to grow within that. Still to this day, I will find them in large nonprofits doing extremely well. It was both a teach me about what I need to know, but I'm going to find a few of you and help you get the skillset that you need to manage these projects. If not, they're going to keep sending ex-pats here to manage this.
I want to explore a little bit of the differences. I have not had the experience of being immersed in any of these types of cultures. My perception is an amalgam of media, news, and movies. I imagine that picture is far away from what the actual reality is because of that. I have some perceptions, such as that we try to throw a lot of money in these places, but we don't get that much traction. It seems like a battle uphill.
It's different in different places. In Africa, specifically from country to country, the political stability aspect of it is where you get something going. Somebody else comes in. Now it's completely wasted because they've decided to do something different or they acquired the resources, fired or killed everybody. Somehow, you get this sense of hopelessness and futility, or at least inefficiency. I'm not getting the sense that that was your experience and feeling. I want to get those two pictures in more of a line if I can. What are you thinking as I lay all that out from a layman's perspective?
Challenges In Emerging Markets
The concerns are understandable because they are happening in many of these emerging market economies in many of these unstable countries. Some countries are in place that need humanitarian assistance. They need food, water, and shelter. Those countries you're looking at are in a refugee status. You are looking at countries that cannot be building up livelihoods and businesses. They can't be putting their children in school because there is war and corruption. You can't build anything when there is no stability.
There are places where it does not make sense to invest in stability. The only thing you can invest in is humanitarian assistance to try to help so that people are not dying. It's terrible to say, but that's the truth. There are the countries that have put in place the policies and safeguarding policies and have agreed with the United Nations, World Bank, and others that fund bilaterally and multilaterally. They're getting loans and whatnot.
In place of that, they have to agree that they will have spot checks and they will have low corruption. We can never say there's no corruption, but they will have low corruption. There will be due diligence done on where the funding will go and the impact of that funding, where there is enough stability, which is where I have worked. That's why you're hearing a difference.
I have worked where there is enough stability where you can have an impact. However, there is a big difference between having a program where you are simply checking the boxes, doing the work, and not doing it with the lens of an exit strategy. You're doing the work, and you are not thinking about how the farmers, the school system, the healthcare facility, or the government should be taking this on.
This is important and why you have the local private sector, local government, local community-based organization, and local staff. They must be in the mix when you're writing a proposal and the program because you have to have a way for this investment to continue when you remove the project. There is still happening at times when funding goes out that hasn't been thought through. When that happens, you hurt the people more than if you didn't come. Some of that is happening.
Sustainable development is about creating lasting change, not just checking boxes. Engage local communities from the start for true impact.
It's the handout versus the hand-up and giving fish versus teaching to fish.
There's the humanitarian versus stability. There's a time and a place for both. Stability and livelihoods are what I believe in. Think about now the circular economy. There is a way we can go into countries that are willing to put. There are private sectors in some of these countries that have money. There is a government that has loans that are ready to put money in. We can go in now and try to take the biomass and all of these byproducts and create jobs, reduce hunger, and mitigate climate change by doing some projects around biomass byproducts.
These are great opportunities, but let's get the private sector, government, multinationals, and US aid money. Let's put it together and tackle this in a big way, but do it in a way that those governments and the local private sector have skin in the game. That's the right way to do it. Many people are getting behind that. It's not a handout or a giveaway, but it's development and the right type of development. That's all there. There is good development, but it gets a bad name sometimes. There is some bad development out there that needs to be curved.
The area you are making me think of is disparate teams working together. Let's explore that place because you were talking on the global, making sure different people had skin in the game. There were stakes. There were pig committed versus chicken committed things, where we are going to do this. We can think about almost any human endeavor. The level of commitment determines the chance of success for anything.
People have been to wedding ceremonies. You can tell if they mean wedding or they're trying marriage on for size. It's not the same thing. What I'm hearing you talk about is real marriages where it's like, “We're doing this. Failure is not an option. We're completely committed.” It's getting that willpower, leadership, and accord among various players. It's getting that ingredient right to start with that'll lead to a successful project. If you don't have that, then your chance of success starts eroding quickly.
We are at a very critical time in the world now. You don't even have to work globally for this, but look at our climate issues. It's affecting everyone. We need to mitigate our climate change. Everyone is being affected and will be more affected. That is going to affect our food security. That is for everyone as we go forward.
The other is conflict issues and having more refugees with not having places to live. We've got more deserts now. All of that is coming together. We can get behind some of the biggest challenges that we have as a world and think about how we can align innovations. I'm talking about the private sector, governments worldwide, and foundations.
Rockefeller has been pushing this with their big bet ideas. MasterCard Foundation has already moved all the way to Africa to try to get African governments to start aligning behind these challenges. You've got some of the big foundations taking leaps and bounds to already trying to get this alignment that you're talking about. If we don't start aligning behind some of our biggest challenges, we're at a tipping point in a big way. We don't have the private sector, governments, or people on their own. No one can make a dent in this if we don't do it together and all get behind it with resources and ideas. The question is how to do that.
A lot of this is happening. My youngest brother is a scientist who happens to work for the USDA. I get to see some of the things coming down the pike and what he's looking at. He is optimistic about these things. I'm hopeful that we can navigate these waters successfully. We're going to have problems as we have these rapid changes right across the world, including big things like AI and remote work.
AI for good can help us. If we're all willing to say that we can all get behind the North Star. If we can all get our innovations and resources behind it, it'll work.
From my perspective, it seems like those who want to shut down the older technologies because of their emissions, it seems to me like that's going to put the entire continent of Africa and any of the societies that aren't as developed behind the eight ball unless we've got something else at the ready that can be deployed at the same cost. We're on that trajectory. We always have problems and issues. We're going to have issues with AI, but it can be harnessed for insights. I'm optimistic because I think being smarter is better than not being smarter.
We need everyone behind it. We need everybody focused on the challenges of working together. Africa and Latin America are so far behind. They may be behind, but you have intelligent youth who are ready to step up. If we have accelerators, innovators, and opportunities, they're ready.
They're people. They're going to behave like people do. We tend to think reductionistically rather than dynamically. Why? It’s because these are public discussions. Unfortunately, public discussions only get sophisticated. It's a bumper sticker to a bumper sticker. People aren't drilling down below that. One of the things I like about what we're doing is having conversations. People can hear and think about things in a new way. This thing is happening more in the world and being seen more. I see that as a course in the right direction.
I want to pivot from the macro to the micro and go towards the dynamics among an individual team. If we're talking to a leader of an organization, you're going to have a certain amount of diversity no matter what that organization is. Some are super diverse. Others would like to be more diverse. When I say diverse, I mean diverse in the fullest word aspect of the word. Different perspectives, rules of engagement, goals, or what they think is right, and values.
The challenge of leadership is if we're doing something together, that means we have a shared mission. We have to spell out and make clear what that shared mission is. We have to tether that to what is valuable to each person on the team so that they can put themselves into that mission in the way that only they can. That seems to be the basic challenge of leadership. Do you see it that way? Can you comment one way or the other on that particular framework?
First of all, for a team to be productive towards an end goal or a change that needs to happen organizationally, everyone has to be aligned and has to understand fully what it is. That is the North Star. I call it the North Star. That needs to happen. If the time is not taken to do that, you won't be successful. That's something I've learned.
You’re pulling in different directions.
I've led change management various times and have led two large change management in the last two organizations that I've been part of. You have to get that right because if you don't, it'll be a false start over and over again. Second, as you said, if people don't understand what role they play and how it's important to their role and their future with the organization, they're not going to put their all into it.
One of the things that's worked for me that I've done on the front end of these change management processes is to do a diagramming exercise. It hasn't been with my team but with an extended team of other teams that we're linked to within the organization. Who are you linked to, not just within our team but everybody outside the team?
If we're the change management unit within an organization and we're managing and bringing in an impact analytics unit we've never had before, we're bringing in a restricted business development unit, which was one of the last ones I did. I did a restricted business development unit, an impact analytics unit, and a program effectiveness.
Three components were new to the organization. I was brought in to develop and streamline it throughout a 1,500-person organization that was both US-based and in 22 other countries, as well as an organization that had staff for over 30 years sitting on the executive team. I was starting out two steps back.
We had our core team. We were clear on where we were going, but bringing and peeling those layers around us slowly and integrating with who is the influencer from our team, working with each one of those people on those different layers was key from the beginning. It gave everybody a real sense of the value of being the linchpin and the person who was going to make a difference by opening up all those doors for us to make things happen. As doors opened, they were so proud. We made sure to let people know that they were the reason that we were able to get things done.
Effective Leadership In Diverse Teams
It seems to me, describing it the way you did, that another effect of that approach would be that each department or each person in various positions would have a clearer view of the value and function of the other ones. We're connected in this way. I'm serving. I'm doing this transactional thing, but I also have a greater appreciation for the overall function and contribution of that other department. I’m empowered to make my daily minute-by-minute decisions in more harmony with what their expectations and needs would be. Am I getting that right?
I also think it helped us not make mistakes. There were certain things we didn't understand. We didn't understand why some of the things worked in this organization that were old. We just didn't get it. As we were opening doors, we otherwise wouldn't get feedback. If we walked into a big group of people, they weren't going to say, “It works because of this.” When it was one-on-one, it was feeding back, and we're like, “We can't ask for that to change because that would create a structural issue here.” We have to do this before we can do that. We didn't understand it. It helped us with potential issues.
It seems like what you're pointing to there is that you can ask somebody a question. A lot of times, this knowledge is not at the top of mind awareness. It requires high-quality, active listening and conversation to reveal that knowledge through conversation. We know a lot more than what we can say right off the bat.
If we have a conversation about, “You said something that inspired me. I forgot about that. You reminded me.” We can discover insights together. Otherwise, if I were sending you a questionnaire, and you filled it out the best you could, and that's the end of it, we're going to have a far less refined view of what reality is for the dynamics within and without each of the various functioning units.
Also, trust. When you're working on major change management within an organization, you have to lean on trust. If you haven't gotten to that trust factor, don't even start trying to make a change.
Building trust is fundamental in change management. Without trust, you can't make meaningful changes.
The whole thing seems analogous to where we started with your experience, beginning with fifteen years working with the Peace Corps. You're going in with a clean slate of discovery and respect for what's going on with them. It's the same thing as what you're pointing to with this approach, where you're going in saying, “What's going on here?” Not with this prescription that says, “We're doing it this way.” It seems like the same principle holds no matter where we apply it.
We have different dynamics within the US, and an organization's culture has been around for 70 years, has had people there for 30-some years, and hasn't left. However, if you're in a startup nonprofit, it's been here for five years, and you have a much younger CEO and new people on your executive team. It is a different environment that you're working in. No matter what, that process is going to be important because change is hard and different. No matter what, change will be based on a trust system. I don't think anybody can say different from that. Until people feel valued and have a sense of security, people aren't going to move forward with certain changes.
I always think of the Stephen Covey term emotional bank account deposits, which is the idea of sitting there, listening, wanting to know somebody's perspective, and saying, “That feels good.” People want to be seen, heard, and valued for their opinions. When we give people that gift, it creates a dynamic that leads towards what you laid out there where it's like, “This person respects and values me. They care.” They don't know and care how much you know until you know how much they care. You have to have that caring.
We don't know each other well, but my guess is what attracted you to this line of work that you've spent your whole career on is that you have an innate pairing about people that has served you in the ways that we've been shining the light on here. That is fantastic. There are a lot of leaders that don't have that naturally. It can be learned or at least developed.
What would be your coaching along those lines where let's talk to somebody who's in leadership that feels like, “I care about my people, but I could do a better job showing it, or I care about my people, but if I'm honest, I've been focused more on myself lately?” What would you say to people who would have those thoughts to move them in a direction that would lead to these better chances of higher-level outcomes?
Aligning behind common challenges with innovation and resources is crucial for global progress. We need everyone focused and working together.
You have to build in reflection. We're all different. We all have to work on different things. I have always been good at stopping to reflect on how I can build up my team. How can I empower them? How can I give them some good feedback on where they're at? How can I provide them with support? What I haven't been good at is the me. What can I work on? I need to ask for some feedback from my team so that I can work on me. That's what I've had to work on, but both are important.
Anything that we're good at has a downside too. That's how things are.
Humanitarian Vs. Stability Efforts
They're both very important. One thing that's come to me, and I've thought about it hard, and this is something that's going to help quite a lot going forward, is that it is important that you make time to be present. When you're present, you give yourself time to think about how you are and how you're feeling, as well as what's happening around you and with your team. If you can give yourself time to be present, not to be in the past or future, but to be present, you can celebrate what's going well.
You can give yourself space to think about what might not be going well and what you might be able to do about it, but also just to be present there. There's one thing that as leaders and busy people like parents, we don't realize that sometimes being present for people means a lot. I've gotten feedback like, “It means a lot that you put a comment on my post or that you took twenty minutes to talk to me today.” Sometimes, that means a lot to somebody. Be present.
The alternative to that is being on the hamster wheel to chase your to-do list. Sometimes, I say it's being an automaton. We function as if we're playing out the patterns of habits we had both genetically or learned or both. We're just playing it out. I always think of the movie. It’s not a great movie, but I think about it a lot. It's the movie Click. Do you know that movie?
Yes.
It’s an Adam Sandler movie where it's like, “I'm going to click by the things that bother me.” He ends up clicking by his whole life. It's a good metaphor. The thing is it was done to him by an elusive character. The story rings true to me because there's a seductive force. We can feel good in the short term by feeling productive like doing my to-do list. No one can criticize me. You find yourself ten days, weeks, months, or years down the road. It's like, “Why was I doing all that stuff?”
I am guilty of being a high performer who thought that getting stuff done all the time was what I needed to be doing. I wasn't listening to the feedback to slow down and be present. Relationships and learning from others are important. I've had that opportunity. I'm taking it.
Let's talk about you, what's in front of you now, and what you're looking forward to, and then we can land this plane through that lens. What are you looking forward to? What are your aspirations in the coming time ahead of you?
Gretchen's Future Aspirations
I'm not currently with an organization, but I'm looking to join an organization that is seeking major impact. It’s either for-profit, most likely a B Corp that wants to look for social impact, US and global, or a nonprofit, the same, either US and global, looking to create a lot of impact. That's what's most important to me. My whole career has been 25 years of doing that and empowering others.
At this point in time, the most important to me is to make sure that I am able to help, especially with the program design, business development, and partnership and relationship development work that I've done. I enjoy putting deals together, and everybody laughs. It's a nonprofit. How do you put deals together? You do put deals together between for-profit, nonprofit, and the community. It is all about bringing what we were talking about before, bringing everybody to the table, saying what we can accomplish together, and ensuring that the communities can take this on their own.
Much of what's being done right now is locally-led development, which is how much we can pass on to the local teams. They take on on their own. If there are organizations that want support or an advisor on how to do more of that, and they want to transfer much of that capacity and the power shifting down to the local level going forward, I can support that. I am here. I'm waiting to see what is going to come ahead. I’m trying not to control anything and have faith that whatever is going to come is going to come.
For anybody tuning in to this, that sounds like a conversation you want to have. We'll make sure to have your contact information and the links. If anybody happens to tune in to this conversation and wants to get more, please reach out to Gretchen. I enjoyed this conversation. Your area of expertise is quite different and foreign from my experience.
That makes it fun for me because I get to see a little bit of the world through your eyes that I haven't had a chance to see yet. I'm grateful to you for that so much, Gretchen. Your insights make me think about things. It's the same principles, but when you see it applied in different ways, it expands your view of how it can work and look. For that, thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I always learn more when people are asking me questions and delving deeper.
It’s my pleasure. Gretchen, thank you again for being my guest. I appreciated our conversation. I knew it'd be a good one, looking at your background. I appreciate a lot of the perspectives and wisdom that you shared with us. Specifically, to underscore a couple of things, the idea is that there are a lot of cultures that might not be transactional but are relationship-driven.
They may have a different sense of what time and productivity looks like. To take advantage of US resources that are available to them, they have to come within certain rules and regulations, not just in the US, but you shared about whether it be Norwegian, EU, or whatever the organization might be, each with different guidelines that you gotta hit them. Otherwise, the money doesn't flow.
The task of getting different people of different cultures not only set up to cooperate over the short term but, as you pointed out, is not just a handout but a hand-up where you're building infrastructure that sustains. People have livelihoods that can perhaps grow and something that can be built around. Communities can not survive but move towards thriving. What great work that is and the experience you had around that.
You also shared what can go wrong. If you have a misalignment or a lack of alignment in those expectations, that might not work out well. How can that happen? It’s the idea of needing to control. If one or more people at the party feel like they have to call the shots, they have to control everything, and they're talking more than they're listening, that's not good for business for a positive outcome.
One of the strongest takeaways is respect, openness, and being in the conversation, as well as the question of learning and understanding what the world looks like from this person's perspective. What are they seeing that I'm not? What are they seeing that we need to take into account and see not only the universals but the granular piece of it and putting those things together? That's been a theme in a few of our episodes. I appreciate that.
I liked your idea, Gretchen, about diagramming links with and without an organization. You can see the intersections and how we give value and gain value from one another. That's a great exercise in any sizable organization. You have to be at a certain size beyond being able to talk to the person right next to you. When you get to a certain scale, you might never know the people in this other department. It's good to be aware of what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how that contributes to the whole. Diagramming all those relationships helps shed light on those ways. I thought all that was fantastic.
The other thing that Gretchen shared that I thought was worth underscoring here is the time for reflection. We all get busy. We all sometimes feel like there's too much to-do list and not enough time in the day to do it all. We can get on that treadmill and lose track of things. You're going and that time to reflect and be present. The time for that is all the time.
If we're spending time worrying about the future and brooding about the past, it's not the best use of our energy. We want to be fully engaged, but that reflection is to understand what is present. A lot of times, what that presents is being there for another person, what's going on with them, and being there as an active listening and thought partner to help them move forward, see something they might not otherwise, or clarify a thought process or at least maybe be seen and valued, like catching people doing things right. There’s a lot of wisdom there. Thanks again, Gretchen, for a fantastic conversation. Thank you for tuning in to the show.
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About Gretchen Villegas
Gretchen Villegas is a powerful public speaker, leader, facilitator and global development executive with a passion for transformation. She strives to disrupt poverty and empower vulnerable populations internationally. She has a proven track record of unifying stakeholders (including the private sector) to achieve common goals. Her professional portfolio totals more than $320 million.
Gretchen is an established thought leader, global executive and lead consultant. She uses public speaking to educate, fundraise, connect and inspire audiences. Through active listening and evidence-based solutions, she supports impoverished communities create sustainable change.
Gretchen shares the stories of those communities with those in the private and public sectors who have the resources and power to help. Using data, analytics and storytelling, Gretchen harnesses her voice and the power of social impact to catalyze positive change.
Gretchen started her career volunteering with the Peace Corps. There, she experienced firsthand the challenges of living in poverty without access to basic resources or education. This experience inspired her to work in global development, partnering with local communities to break generational cycles of poverty.