So how does one become multilingual? Here's my story. In college, I went to West Africa to study microfinance and economic empowerment. Seeing a large public health need, I co-founded and led a nonprofit collecting medical supplies and money. We saw what collective action could yield and we were creative with our advocacy and our fundraising

with campaigns like Band-Aids for Benin.

Along the way, I studied different leadership styles. Autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, servant, collaborative, transformational, and more. I read books, attended trainings, and I even had the privilege to study with some of the greats and to work with General Colin Powell and Dr. Maya Angelou.

After all of this, I became convinced that there's

no best type of leadership.

So many of us just default to one style or another, similar

to how we're born with our native tongue.

But this default style doesn't work

in every situation. Many leaders obsess over leadership style when really they just need to get over themselves. Sorry, leader, it's not about you. What's more useful is to adapt and personalize your leadership

to be the leader,

the situation, and the people involved need.

It's not so much

style as language, the living vernacular of each discrete community and culture.

The successful leader will aspire to be multilingual, to speak fluently with all groups and to translate among them.

In 2012, while working at the Omidyar Network, I was one of the sponsors of a two-year study of 12 impact investing funds. One of the ahas of this project was that the most successful funds were those led by multilingual leaders, people that could communicate across the corporate, nonprofit, philanthropic, and public policy perspectives. These leaders also made sure that others on their team were

multilingual.

This came to me as a bit of a surprise. I expected the secret sauce to be in sophisticated financial modeling or some other type of complex analysis. According to the study,

the multilingual leader

will describe their work as being unremittingly financially-driven business-speak, moving the needle on social and environmental challenges, nonprofit and philanthropic speak, while addressing systemic market failures. Public policy speak.

The study further found the need to be conversant into four industry

languages. There's a finance, nonprofit, government, and international development.

The multilingual leader was something that seemed very familiar to me. It's really rang

true based on my own experience of patchwork across these sectors.

And it took me back

to that first, weird day in business school. Now that we've described the how, let us turn to the what? Where should leaders focus? I will modestly propose

three topics that cut across issues and

together we'll double-click on one of them. India, climate, power.

How each of these sectors measure the impact

and even the timing, the tempo, and the tools that they use for each could not be more different.

Say you're the

private sector at one end.

You have accounting on a daily, a weekly, a monthly, and quarterly increments.

The public sector, you're working on multi-year election cycles. The nonprofit and philanthropic sector, well, you may give yourself 15 years or even a generation to reach a goal. Yet all of these sectors must come together to reach these outcomes.

To make it real,

let's look together about how these sectors can come together to address power with the focus on gender equality. Say you're a public sector leader. You have the unique ability to create equity, a level playing field so everyone has a fair shot. You can create regulations and incentives to increase the use of gender data. You can set goals for women on boards and in public office. You can practice gender budgeting and you can mandate paid care. Say you're a leader in the business sector. You can design products and services that unleash the economic power of the female customer. You can fortify and diversify your supply chain with women owned businesses. You can invest in your female talent pipeline with paid equity and leadership opportunities so that your corporate decisions are more inclusive.