Revista Líder asked Maria da Glória Ribeiro “Can a leader be vulnerable and sensitive?”

“Our consulting discipline requires us to always have fresh thinking, staying attentive to external signals, and thus being informed and disruptive.
While the issue of age discrimination was still unfamiliar in southern Europe, we had already removed any reference to birthdates, for instance.
This is what drives us. To be able to support companies with the best solutions, free from biases and preconceived, often absurd, determinations.

Today's everyday circumstances are ambiguous. Nothing can be predicted in the long term. Any leader must be able to manage each person who reports to them individually, helping them to feel fulfilled in their mission and inspiring them through their knowledge and example.
However, the path to leadership no longer resembles a staircase with more or less symmetrical steps. It is much more winding and irregular. Any leader may be evaluated very positively in one circumstance and, by their own decision or due to random occurrences, become vulnerable in the meantime.

Or perhaps not even that; they may simply, with greater or lesser self-awareness, want to live another phase of life. They might even lose the motivation to lead and decide to learn something new, this time under someone else's leadership. Everything must be possible for our lives.
All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, awaken to the need to fulfill ourselves. Always with the conviction that what has the greatest value is life. A life that does not have to follow a more or less narrow and predefined path. Everyone, including leaders.”

Published in Revista Líder, Spring edition.
Available here: https://lidermagazine.sapo.pt/maria-da-gloria-ribeiro-amrop-a-ascensao-da-lideranca-e-muito-mais-sinuosa-e-irregular/