On March 5 and 6, Emory University Goizueta Business School will host an exclusive Center for Hispanic Leadership (CHL) workshop featuring the center’s flagship curriculum, Discover Your Hispanic Leadership Impact and Influence, which has successfully helped thousands of Latino students and professionals to accelerate their advancement in the workplace. “At Verizon Wireless, we believe future leaders are skilled, talented people who represent the global and culturally-diverse society in which we live and do business,” says Sheryl Sellaway, Executive Director– Public Relations for South Area at Verizon Wireless. “Our proud support of the Center for Hispanic Leadership workshop aligns with that belief.”
Although there has long been a lack of culturally relevant educational platforms for Hispanic professionals, CHL research indicates that corporations like Verizon Wireless have begun to take note of this issue. According to CHL research, U.S. Hispanic professionals are seeking to discover their full potential in the workplace, but they are not moving up the corporate ladder and into leadership roles fast enough. Often, this is due to the fact that Hispanics, under corporate culture and peer pressure, choose to downplay their cultural roots and assimilate – believing this to be the right path to career advancement. For decades, Hispanics have battled the gulf between assimilation and authenticity and therefore, have not fully enabled their true workplace performance capabilities, skillsets, and aptitude for advancement.
Now, as Latinos become the fastest growing workforce community in the country, it is even more critical for both universities and corporations to equip their Hispanic students and employees with culturally-relevant education & training, and provide support from mentors in order to cultivate a larger talent pool of high-potential Hispanic employees. “Companies now realize that if they do not create a workplace environment that encourages cross-cultural pollination and culturally relevant training to accelerate the performance of Hispanic employees,” explains Glenn Llopis, CHL Founder, business consultant, and author, who will also be leading the Verizon Wireless-sponsored workshop in March, “their company’s creativity, R&D and new Hispanic market expansion and supplier diversity efforts will weaken and increasingly make them irrelevant in the fiercely competitive marketplace.”
Whether in academia or in corporate America, Hispanics are eager to embrace their cultural values as a means to unveil their full potential. Additionally, they are extremely interested in learning how to educate their non-Hispanic colleagues about the Hispanic culture and how it shapes the identity of Latinos. In the quest for achieving their career goals and success, it is this common disconnect and lack of cultural exchange that contributes to the barriers Latino students and professionals face every day as they attempt to cultivate loyal and trustworthy relationships.
“It’s now time for Hispanic professionals to be discovered as leaders while elevating their performance capabilities and enabling their unique talents more rapidly,” adds Llopis. “CHL has shown through its proven ‘Hispanic cultural-characteristics framework’ that when Hispanics fully leverage their cultural values as sources of strength, they ultimately become more successful because they enable the natural ways they think, act, and innovate to lead more effectively and authentically.”
To ensure the momentum from the CHL workshop continues, upon completion, participants will be given exclusive access to CHL’s online Hispanic Leadership Academy (HLA). HLA will support their continuing education and proficiency of CHL’s cultural characteristics framework with the opportunity to receive CHL Level-1 Certification that will further equip them with the tools to tap into their inherent cultural values and ultimately become more effective leaders both professionally and personally. “No other leadership workshop, seminar, or executive program available today speaks more to the power of our Hispanic heritage,” says CHL Atlanta Chapter President, Marisa Salcines, “and leveraging our cultural values as a competitive advantage,”