I thought I had a pretty good handle on the challenges of Diversity... But that was before I met Celia Young. Celia's presentation was nothing short of stunning. Her passion, insight and delivery had an impact on the audience unlike any I'd seen. One could literally see 'the lights coming on' in the individuals who publicly responded to her series of observations and questions. Afterwards, everyone I spoke with said Celia's presentation was one of the most eye-opening, meaningful and practical they had experienced.
Reri MacLean
National President
The Professional Coaches
and Mentors Association
Through Celia Young & Associates consulting and coaching services, Ms. Young helped P&G's Asian Community develop a vision and strategy for retention and advancement of Asian Professionals at P&G. She not only helped improve the attrition rate among our Asian leaders significantly, she and her colleagues also coached 100 leaders including Asian professionals and 'two-up' managers to understand, participate in and own the development of Asian talent - consistent with Company principles and objectives. She helped unleash the leadership potential among promising Asian leaders. She enhanced senior management's awareness and competencies in their ability to manage and utilize Asian talent.
Anthony Y. Tsai
Vice President
Procter & Gamble Company
(1981-2007)
Executive Vice President &
Chief Innovation Officer
The Beijing Hualian Group
Speaking Services
Click on the videos below to view a complete library of clips of Celia Young speaking live:
Learn More About Celia Young as a Dynamic Speaker and Workshop Facilitator:
A leader does not just rely on his or her skills; it is who they are that will truly supports them in becoming great leaders. In order to use your “whole self,” you need to know yourself, from the “doing” part of you to the “being” part of you.In this session, we work with leaders
To integrate who they truly are into their leadership role
To reconnect their core value to their behaviors
To expand their influence from what they are trained to do into what they are called to do
To use their whole-person leadership to help their businesses make profit by doing well and being most effective in their role.
Regardless the size of its organization, every business is connected to the global economy. As a leader in today’s business, the organization and its people depend on the business leader’s passion and capability to demonstrate his or her global competence and multicultural versatility, and ability to help the company navigate through the diverse and challenging waters globally.
To be a successful global leader, one must have a global vision, strategic mindset and capacity to tolerate multicultural ambiguity. Leaders: Are you prepared to lead in this increasingly complex and diverse world?
In the workshop, I help leaders:
Connect their business to the global business reality
Organizations have operated in a matrix system for years. This means that people may be members of several cross-functional teams for a specific project purpose. But the majority of the team members don’t have the standard reporting relationship. Working together without authority over each other creates a different challenge for team leaders. When you belong to too many teams, some days all you may do is attend meetings and not have time to give any in-depth consideration for the missions. Yet you still must rely on your primary reporting relationship outside the matrix for your advancement and your first line of accountability goes back to your functional area. These functional silos often stifle the matrix’s performance.
The objective of this workshop is to:
Increase understanding of the specific mission of each functional area represented in the team
Increase awareness of the functional culture and values
Building High-Performing Global and Multicultural Team
Working with people who have different styles or personalities is challenging. Working across multicultural and multinational boundaries just adds another level of challenges, including:
Time and physical distance
Cross-cultural misunderstanding
Cross-functional and cross-region conflict of interests
Dangers or Opportunities: From Business Survival to Reinvention
In this economically challenging time, have you been too busy just to survive? Would cutting back and downsizing be enough to save your business?
In good times, everyone can succeed in business. It is during desperate times when true business geniuses emerge.
For every story of business bankruptcy, closure and job loss, there is a story of business reinvention.
The questions are:
Are you so worried about the danger of going under that you just want to maintain what you have?
Do you thrash around to get any business just so you can survive?
Are your people so scared of losing their job that they stop doing their job?
Do you have what it takes to rise out of the ashes like a phoenix?
During adversity, true warriors find the strength to regroup by thinking big and wide and by turning defense to offense. Most importantly, they reconnect with their core purpose. Winners rely on their strengths. Likewise, businesses succeed by refocusing on their core vision and competency. Reinvention only comes after we are aligned with the essence of our business.
In this session, the participants will learn to:
Reconnect with who they really are as individuals and as a business
Reclaim their core business strengths
Practice listening to the creative ideas that normally are silent
Gather their courage that is needed to turn danger into opportunity
Organizations have been conducting business around the world for thousands of years. No one will argue that the world is increasingly diverse and the global village is at everyone’s front door. However, success and failure of an international business depends on more than just technology, product, pricing and delivery. Think about this:
Is your organization truly global or just everywhere?
Is your idea of globalization actually Americanization?
Just because everyone speaks English in business, does it mean the same rules apply everywhere?
To become truly global, change is a must, including an organization’s behaviors and mindsets.
At the end of this workshop, participants gain:
A clearer definition of global organization
A better understanding of how their current organization culture and power dynamics helps or impedes their ability to globalize their business
Heightened awareness of the level of multicultural fluency a global business needs to succeed
A truly global enterprise must be able to share and utilize resources on a global basis to access the best market with the highest-quality product at the lowest cost. To become more borderless, a global business structure must be nimble and flexible. Further, it needs to be closer to its customers and suppliers continuously. Change is needed in the organization’s power structure in order to support a spontaneous and sustainable global business strategy.
In this workshop, I help participants:
Explore choices to transform their organization from a “headquarter-centric” structure to a “world-centric” structure
Explore the usage of power sharing and collaboration in order to support a truly global enterprise
Better manage the need for global efficiency and local responsiveness
In Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, he discussed the emerging multiple centers of power around the world in this new century. The recent economic crisis has shown that while the western world continues to suffer market downturns, countries in Asia and some parts of the Middle East have fared better. Some of the complex reasons can be attributed to culture and consumer value, and to economic policies.
China and India continue to grow in the population. They dominate in specific and growing markets and talent pools. Technological and economic powers have pushed these two countries to the leadership forefront and helped forge the Asia Century.
The questions are:
Are we in the west ready to follow their leadership or at least share leadership in the world?
Are China and India ready to take the leadership role?
In our workshop, participants:
Explore east and west cultural differences and their economic impact
Examine the dynamics between the long held image of US supremacy and the emerging powers of Asia
Understand the heightened need for a realistic business strategy to prepare for the Asia Century
Executive Development and Leadership Succession:How to Deal with the Leadership Vacuum
To build a sustainable business, we need leaders now AND for the future. However, many organizations find a huge gap between generations of leaders. When there is no apparent successor to a leadership position, continuing to hire from outside will not eliminate the organization’s risk of losing its longevity. One of the reasons for the leadership gap is that the organization is full of managers, but few are qualified to be leaders. The other reason is the incompatibility of expectation and cultural values between generations.
In this workshop, I help participants:
Distinguish between being a manager and a leader
Analyze the leadership gap and the organization cultural reality
Explore and reconcile the generational differences
Formulate succession planning and executive development strategy
Doing business between developed and developing countries, often involves technology transfer not only to gain access to the emerging markets but also to save costs to maintain competitive advantage in the domestic market. At the beginning, we only transfer labor-intensive work and low-level technology to those developing countries that can get them done cheaper. Today, more countries have formed an unbreakable supply chain to make various products. While we have become increasingly interdependent with our business partners around the globe, the top-dog/under-dog power inequity issues that result from outsourcing continue to exist and expand.
At the end of this workshop, participants will have:
Explored the interdependent relationship with their global partners
Examined the power inequity issues in the technology transfer process
Gained an enhanced cross-cultural understanding
An increased awareness of the need for open channels of communication for a true partnership
The ability to formulate a truly global center-of-excellence business strategy
In today’s fast-paced world, we spend our most energetic hours in a day working, because we want to make a difference.Our success often depends on our ability to impact and influence our environment effectively. The German word Gestalt means “a complete pattern or configuration.” A gestalt is a perceived whole. We believe that a system whether an individual, a group or an organization has the potential and desire to become whole and balanced. A change leader’s job is to help systems see the entire picture and become whole by raising awareness, staying in the present moment, engaging in experiences, gaining access to a full range of choices and reaching for growth.
We believe that we as change leaders are much more than the tools and techniques we carry. The first and foremost teaching from Gestalt is the “use of self”. We believe that if we do not know ourselves or integrate all the fragmented parts of ourselves, we can’t help our clients gain deeper insights about themselves, get unstuck from unhealthy patterns and move toward new choices. Our clients are individuals, groups or whole organizations.
In this session, participants gain:
Increased awareness of self and their relationship with their environment
An understanding of the choices they have made and the new choices they can make
The skill set to stop getting in the way of their natural process of work by trusting their experiences, their own and those of their clients
Human Resources: Are You a Change Leader or a Change Follower?
Though seldom spelled out on a formal organization chart, many businesses organize themselves around profit centers and cost centers. While an organization may believe and claim that it takes everyone to work together and interdependently to help the business succeed, there continues to be a power inequity between profit centers and cost centers, with the latter being viewed as under dogs. Often this power difference impedes true cooperation and jeopardizes the morale in the workforce.
HR function normally is seen a cost center, since it does not directly generate any revenue for the company. Questions for HR professionals become:
What roles are you playing in the field of change?
Are you a true business partner or an order taker for your clients?
Do you have enough power to influence?
Do you have enough courage to initiate change, not just implement change?
In this workshop, participants can:
Increase self-awareness
Refocus on what they are “called” to do as an HR professional
Examine the organization power dynamics and the implications on their mission
Formulate their unique leadership strategy for change
What is HR? What is OD? How are these two fields different? How do they intersect? In some parts of the industry, it might be easier to define HR than it is to define OD. As a function, OD, (organization development) used to report directly to the CEO or the president of the organization. Today, it is part of Human Resources Department for most businesses. This merging of the two functions did not always proceed seamlessly, and it is wrong to assume that the staff in these two distinct areas can be interchangeable.
This objective of this workshop is to help HR professionals:
Examine their overarching organization strategy designed to support their business strategy
Clarify the work for HR and OD based on this organization strategy
Explore challenges in shuttling between HR and OD work
Engage in a learning experiment to try out their OD skills
Research shows that people often don’t quit the company. They quit their boss. They leave because they don’t feel valued. Questions for these “bosses” are:
Are you a leader? Or are you a manager reluctantly occupying a leadership position?
How does your diverse workforce think of your leadership?
Do you truly appreciate the direct and positive correlation between a truly empowered diverse workforce and business success
A manager’s competencies in leading and managing a diverse workforce are improved through awareness raising, skills enhancement and capacity building so that they can fully utilize their people’s unique contributions.
In our workshop, participants:
Gain an increased understanding of the need to develop people according to their diverse needs
Examine and assess their effectiveness as a leader vs. a manager
Enhance their awareness and ability to value the diverse talents in their organization
Formulate a strategy for them to effect change for business success
Often, change does not happen, (and if it does, it does not sustain itself,) if the people at the top of the organizational hierarchy do not support and champion the change. If a change initiative is not embodied by the leaders in the middle of the organization, no transformation can take root. It is at the middle of the organization where “the rubber meets the road” and significant success and failure can be seen. The questions for the managers in the middle become:
Are you constantly caught between carrying out the organization’s espoused vision and accomplishing the tasks at hand?
After watching too many change initiatives come and go, have you decided that the most productive thing to do is to be a good soldier?
How much courage do you have to fully utilize your power in the middle to lead change?
In this session, participants:
Gain an opportunity to engage in self-reflection and realign their purpose with that of the organization
Empower themselves to lead the change instead of waiting for the marching order
Since the women’s movement in the 60s, women have made a lot of progress gaining equality in the workplace and entry into the boardroom. While the gender gap has narrowed, the challenges that women face continues. On the one hand, the cultural rhetoric promotes the “be all you can be” superwoman model. On the other hand, success comes with a price. Questions for the women are:
Have you adapted to a male-dominant model so well that you have sacrificed the essence of being a woman?
What kind of role model do you want to be for your daughters?
What lessons do you want to teach for your sons?
In this workshop, participants will:
Increase awareness of their organization’s culture and power dynamics
Explore how the organization’s power dynamics enhance or impede the chances to succeed for women
Establish support for the community of women
Heighten the unique cultural strengths and contributions for women
Explore their success strategy between assimilation and differentiation
Navigate the fluidity of gender roles at work and in life
Mastering Cross-cultural Competency: Key to Global Business Success
We are more than just individual human beings on this planet. We have organized ourselves in groups for thousands of years. Culture is a collective way for a specific group of people to solve their problems. Culture is also an accumulation of characteristics, values and behaviors that have survived through generations within a group.
A group can be a family, a tribe and a country. Every country has evolved from its own history. Therefore, each country’s culture is more than its arts and artifacts. To succeed in doing business internationally, we need to know more than when to shake hands or bow and to experience different foods and music. We need to understand and capitalize on the cultural differences of the countries that we do business with. To globalize our business, we need to successfully manage the dilemma between acting borderless and embracing our national identities.
The objective of this session is to help participants:
Examine their own culture and national identity
Heighten knowledge of other’s culture and national identity
Expand the understanding of cross-cultural impact on global relationship and business
Develop a keener detector when cross-cultural issues are at play in any business situation
Practice applying their new found cross-cultural knowledge into global situation and create better results
Maximizing your Influence from the Basis of Your True Self
In the natural universe, things evolve around a holistic principle. All living organisms strive to have balance and become whole. Every human being arrived on this planet as whole beings, vulnerable, energetic and curious. Somewhere along the way, we learned to spin off fragments of ourselves to survive and succeed in this world. The Western culture actually encourages and rewards people to compartmentalize themselves so that some parts of themselves go to work and other parts stay home. While we may believe this compartmentalization is very efficient, it goes against nature. When a system, whether an individual, a group or an organization, is compartmentalized and out-of-balance for a long time, its negative impact will manifest in individual’s poor health, team’s poor performance and business organization’s losing its sustainability.
To make a difference in our work and our lives, we need to first help ourselves and then others become whole by raising awareness, staying in the present moment, engaging in experiences, gaining access to a full range of choices and reaching for growth.
The objective of this session is to help the participants:
Gain a keener awareness of themselves and their environment and see the choices they have
Increase their self-discovery and enhance their self-expression
Reclaim the alienated parts of themselves
Increase their ability to use their full self in the work they do
Become bigger than the tools and techniques they carry
When a business grows beyond using foreign distributors, the quickest way to go global is to merge or acquire a foreign enterprise to expand and to service its markets. That does not mean it is the easiest way to achieve business success. Historically, the majority of merger/acquisitions fail … and within a short time. This is one of the biggest diversity issues that businesses must address. Crossing national boundaries add even more layers of challenge. When we don’t pay enough attention to the fair and equal merging of the two business cultures, a merger often turns into an acquisition where there is a power inequity issue, which will impact the merged enterprises’ ability to retain and capitalize on the value contributions each party brings to the table. Additionally, in such a case for a true acquisition, we surely need to minimize the negative impact of an acquirer and an acquired relationship.
In this workshop, I help participants:
Clarify the ultimate vision and purpose of the merger/acquisition
Explore the power structure
Devise methods of inquiry for the specific business operations of the two parties
Increase cross-cultural understanding and its implication to the business cooperation
Clarify expectation and responsibilities
Begin to formulate a successful global merger and acquisition strategy
Minority Leadership: Succeed without Selling out Your Culture
In the last 30 years of our organization’s work, we noticed the “cream did not rise to the top,” which means that hard work alone does not guarantee success! To retain and capture minority talent for the good of the business, organizations need to cultivate their leadership potential. However, to help them assimilate to the existing leadership standard of the organization may not be the best way to maximize their contributions. How do we get beyond this stumbling block?
In this workshop, I help participants:
Increase awareness of their organization culture and power dynamics
Explore how organization power dynamics enhance or impede the chances to succeed for people of color
Heighten the unique cultural strengths and contributions for the people of color
Explore their success strategy between assimilation and differentiation
Recognizing Asian Leadership, a Unique Brand of Contribution
Census data shows that Asian Americans often have higher than average educational background, professional expertise, and income level on the national basis. But our experience shows that Asian Americans often have not gone as far as they can go in their career in Corporate America. While the U.S. organizations often tend to view Asian employees as lacking "soft skills” or “people skills” necessary for them to navigate and succeed in the workplace, we believe the more crucial issue is that Corporate America does not recognize or value Asian style of leadership. There is a pervasive clash between Asian culture and the typical US Corporate culture. How do we harvest the unique contribution made by Asian employees without forcing them to sacrifice the essence of their cultural identities?
At the end of the session, the participants will have:
increased self and cultural awareness
increased understanding of group and power dynamics
raised awareness of Asian’s unique leadership qualities
gained insights in the need to build more inclusive organization culture
In this turbulent economy, can you afford to continue to maintain the mindset of “if it ain’t broken, why fix it?” Many of us know that in a rapidly flowing river, standing still is actually going backward. Unless your business is one of the very lucky few that its market has not changed for a long time and will not change in the foreseeable future, you need to worry about continuous innovation.
But, do you often wonder where the new and different ideas are? Why haven’t you gotten any from your employees?
Here are a few typical reasons for your creativity block:
Too much “group think” that stifles “out of the box” thoughts
Leaders’ behaviors help silence the “unique and different” voices
Organization culture does not encourage experiments
General low tolerance for “mistakes”
In this workshop, the participants will learn how to instill and establish an innovative culture by:
Recruiting and promoting different-minded thinkers and talents for the key assignments
Holding leaders accountable for eliminating fear of punishment in order to build an innovative culture that will learn from its experiment and mistakes
Building an inclusive culture that will value the diverse ideas and contributions of your people.
