“Leadership” has undoubtedly become the keyword that has been mostly mentioned in my life over the past three years — from my MBA application, to all the business-related classes, and to my current job. No one has ever given a clear definition of “leadership”, making it difficult to be “taught” and “learned”.
I have been discussing this topic with one of my closest friends recently. When I looked back and tried to collect some examples from my experience at OurCrowd and Plug and Play, I suddenly realized that leadership was all about “empathy” — putting yourself into your team member’s shoes first and then trying to find an alignment between the individuals and the team.
The first example was from my job with OurCrowd, a renowned Israeli VC firm. I was starting as an intern last summer and arrived at Jerusalem just one day before my starting date after flying 10 hours from Hong Kong. When I went to the firm for the first day, my manager Josh Liggett showed me to all the people at the office (two floors of people from different teams). This was something new to me since I was usually only introduced to the people working on the same team during my previous jobs. Josh’s introductions helped me a lot since it made me feel much easier to start conversations with the entire team.
