Michelle Sisto: "As a leader, especially during challenging times, if your words don’t match your behavior, you’re not inspiring anyone"

• To read the full original version of this interview (June 21, 2024 - Medium), follow this link

Thank you so much for your time! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I grew up just outside Washington DC. and went to Georgetown University to study math and computer science. I’ve always been very interested in quantitative subjects. My third year at Georgetown, I studied abroad at the University of Nice, and that’s how I ended up in Europe. It was fantastic as a fully immersive experience. I became fluent in French and in Italian because I met my husband while I was there. I went back to Nice after graduating to do my Master’s and have stayed in Europe ever since.

That young exposure to international life has played a big role in my life and contributes to my engagement with QTEM. I am a strong believer in the capacity of exchanges and living abroad to transform individuals and enhance international understanding. I continued studying math and computer science for my masters, and after many years of teaching these to business school students, in 2008, I decided to shift a little bit and did a PhD in finance at EDHEC.

I found finance to be and an interesting field to which I could apply math and computer science and have remained working at business schools since then. I directed the MBA at EDHEC Business School for a few years, and then for six years I was the Associate Dean of our graduate programs, which involves three campuses and about 5000 students. QTEM is an option for our master’s programs and this is how I first got involved with QTEM. QTEMs mission is naturally aligned with my interests — intercultural and multicultural experience around quantitative subjects involving statistics, analytics and data science.

This year, I’m on sabbatical because I am ready to shift again. I have the good fortune of spending the year looking into AI and generative AI, getting back to my first love of computer science and focusing on how we can and should further integrate this technology into the strategy of EDHEC and, of course, working with QTEM along those lines as well. I have learnt a lot and it is quite fun to be a student again.

Where did you get the motivation to continue through your challenges? What sustains your drive?

I love problem solving, so I look at challenging times as an opportunity to try something different or to pivot a bit and change perspectives. I’m also very much a people person, so I would say my motivation is to work together with whatever teams I’m working with at the time and keep all the members on board and motivated to get through the challenges together.

All of my career has been oriented toward academia and teaching and learning, so I always look at the challenges as something we need to get through for the good of our students. If you’re really focused on what is good and the right thing for the students, that tends to bring the tension down and to grow solution building opportunities.

Books have the power to change lives. Do you have a book in your life that impacted you and inspired you to be an effective leader? Can you share a story?

That’s a really hard one because I am an avid reader. At any time, I’ll have on my nightstand a variety of books and depending on my humour, I’ll choose one.

From the non-fiction books that have really had a strong influence, there’s a few that tend to be about cognitive science; Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely or Freakonomics or Think Like a Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I find this style of books really helps me look at problems from diverse perspectives and helps me understand, when I’m working with other people; what biases we may all be bringing to the table and to address them. If we can shift our mindsets to look at a problem from a slightly different angle, that often opens possible other solutions. I find that understanding of how people think and reason really fascinating.

I also read a lot of fiction which, for me, really gets to our humanity and allows us to get outside ourselves and see things from another’s perspective. I tend to really enjoy fiction books that are based within cultures I don’t know as well. Kite Runner I absolutely loved. I just read A Passage North, and Life of Pi is one of my all-time favourites. It’s an incredibly clever book and the protagonist often steps back and sees himself and his problems as pretty finite and small in the big scheme of nature and the world, and then focuses instead on gratitude. I also enjoyed how it leaves you at the end with that question of what is real and what isn’t which, I think, is very pertinent to trying to understand humanity. We all experience different realities and that’s getting worse now with AI. But even before that, we could leave the same conversation and come away with two very different perspectives on that reality.

When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team?

Uncertainty has always been here and will always be here. Perhaps teaching statistics leaves me with a certain comfort level is accepting uncertainty. There are times where it might be more acute or times where it might be more global. The pandemic was a time that was absolutely global and acute. The growth of AI in our daily lives and work is becoming global, although not evenly across the world.

I would say the same things that you use in times of difficulty are those you use when things are going well, which is being authentic, listening to your teams, and trying to put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders to really understand their needs and concerns. Give ample opportunity to learn about their perspectives so that your vision becomes wider.

When you’re communicating on what the next step forward is going to be, ensure the different stakeholders know they’ve been heard. Even if you’re not going to go with the direction that some would prefer, acknowledge their perspective while giving voice to the reasons for the chosen direction.

Keep optimistic and reiterate, “Okay, it’s a challenging time but we’ll get through this and this will generate opportunities that we might not even see right now.” Regular check-in and optimism, even in the face of adversity, really helps to keep myself and others motivated.

How can a leader make plans when the future is so unpredictable?

It used to be standard to have a 5, 10 or 15-year strategic plan. Everybody now is much more aware of the fact that they’re going to need to be agile and be able to shift and adapt to changing circumstances. However, you have to have a plan from which to adapt.

Part of human psychology is a need to have a vision of where we are going. That vision may change over time, but if you don’t make a decision and don’t set a vision going forward, people feel lost and lose motivation very quickly...

To read the full original version of this interview (Jun 2024): visit medium.com