Our latest executive webinar in the Leading from the Living Room series featured Natsumi Akita, Vice President of Marketing at Adobe Japan. In this session, Natsumi shared her personal experiences in balancing her executive role at Adobe Japan with home life as a mother of three during the coronavirus crisis.
A few key highlights were:
- Leaders should actively find ways to convert crises into opportunities. At Adobe, they transformed their Adobe Summit into an online experience, expanding their global reach and resulting in 250,000 attendees, from 20,000+ originally invited.
- Adobe is passionate about supporting their employee’s wellbeing and enhancing productivity while working from home. Along with flexible work schedules encouraged, they have also introduced a WFH expense fund and a global Adobe day off.
- Leaders need to be thinking about how changes that have emerged through the coronavirus crisis will be sustained into the future, in order to best leverage these opportunities.
- Natsumi’s advice to her younger self would be not to be afraid of making mistakes: failure provides the greatest lessons and often can lead to discoveries of better ways of doing things.
- Natsumi believes that to best support the next generation of female leaders, casual and two-way mentoring will be instrumental. It is through the lessons that women who have come before them have learned, that they will be best equipped to succeed in their careers.
Our live polls from the session generated some fascinating insights, with questions focusing on flexible and working from home policies into the future. The key findings were:
- 54% of attendees felt that their company had only equipped leaders to lead remotely to an average standard, with 41% felt they equipped them very well.
- 67% think their company will be updating their flex/WFH policy post-COVID.
- 55% envisage the biggest challenge in transitioning back to working from the office to be managing flexible working arrangements.
Full polling results can be found in the insights document below.
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