FWD Feature: Mobolaji Akintunde | Author | Producer | VP of Sales & Marketing Success at Peoplevine
FWD Collective is excited to feature Mobolaji Akintunde one of our incredible speakers from our Chicago Summit in 2017!
We had the pleasure of connecting with Mo to ask a few questions!
What does diversity, equity, and professional inclusion mean to you?
On a basic side, diversity means there’s a mixed pool of things. People, having a mixture of mindsets, experiences, and education - and from an outward perspective, race, color, religion, social class. Diversity is having a mixture of all of these things in one place, then trying to accomplish one goal as a body - if a mixture of people is not engaging together then there’s still isolation. A mixture of people working together to accomplish a common goal is diversity.
Equity - seems like the world is imbalanced when it comes to social class, someone at top/someone at the bottom. Equity is trying to achieve a level of balance which is hard as there will always be levels of oscillation.
Professional inclusion is accepting people for the way that they are - today at brunch I was talking to brother and they knew a sister who had dreads and piercings and tattoos. When she interviewed she took all that off, when she got the job she started to bring those pieces back in, or to show them more. Then after a bit of time, the company sent someone in to talk with her from the HR department. As HR you accepted this person for their skill set, but then you don't accept them from a humanity standpoint, which is sad. People should be able to be who they are and represent themselves at the company as 100% of who they are.
How have you experienced and/or dealt with adversity in your professional and persona life?
I'm a little different than others, I first work on understanding what my adversary is actually saying—and listening for what they're not saying as well. My past has given me the guidance and ability to hear and focus what people aren't saying. Then my goal is to verify what they’re not saying...in essence, this is what you're saying "you don't agree with x" and I see that we disagree on this - and then really focus on having the conversation not being about ‘them’ or ‘about me’ personally, but rather about this disagreement, and working together to look at this ‘thing’ that we both can’t get our heads around or agree on.
We may not end up agreeing on this issue in the end, but we now understand each other from a humanistic standpoint - your heart or your core values are here and we share the same beliefs on ‘x’ but we don't have the same opinion on this particular topic.
What would be one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?
Document your wins and your losses. Manage your relationships even better, be more thoughtful in my relationships. Give myself, be more compassionate with myself, less judgement for the things I do and don't do - adding more compassion.
Name three things that you do every day to help lead you to success.
1) Communicate, over-communicate -- Thinking through other people's expectations, digging into the next thing that I need to do, and how I can be deliberate about our interaction to leave them with a great experience.
2) Focus, cutting out the noise, focusing on the things that are going to turn the needle, which generally equals money but doesn’t have to be money though, just really what’s important to me.
3) Eating, staying nourished, eating healthy to connect the neurons, and keep myself healthy.
EXTRA - paying attention to your, to life's statistics, knowing where your money is at, and understanding what it takes for you to get to where you want to go. So if you want to make 6 figures, if this is how much I make, this is how much I want to make, then working backward to think on how you can get there, knowing the numbers, what’s it going to take to actually experience success and what that means to you, knowing your statistics and being intentional about it (I look at my bank account every day, even though I looked yesterday, I look today to be aware of my numbers. My financial numbers, and my goal numbers, if I need to make 10 calls to get x return, did I? Everything is math.
Who inspires your professional ambition?
Damon John, Steve Stoute, Seth Godin, Chance the Rapper, Diddy, to name a few.
They inspire me, they have influence, some outward/external, others impact...influence the influencer - both sides, through thought leadership, actions, creating stuff in the world that people can experience.
What is your favorite book? Or the one(s) you recommend most?
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever
The War of Art
Idea Virus - Seth Godin
Connect with Mo: Instagram | #MoKnows Website
