By: JEAN LOUIS FRECHETTE ALBERTO, NPH-HAITI. CLASS OF 2016.
I want to share with you a great experience we all had in Seattle. A few weeks ago we went to the Starbucks headquarters for a tour and to get a sense of what they do there, what kind of leaders work there, and of course – to have lunch!
It organized by Ed Holtgraves, my mentor in Seattle, who works there along with Chris and Mary who were both volunteers in Nicaragua, and Alana who was a volunteer in Honduras. We are grateful for their hard work on this day!
We started first by a brief tour of part of the building because we couldn’t walk into the whole building in only one or two hours. After that we went to a room for a coffee taste with Mary where we taste 5 different coffee flavor from five country where my fellow brothers and sisters from such as Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Unfortunately, they don’t have any coffee from Haiti however, I enjoyed the experience and so far I already have a favorite coffee but I won’t tell you which one.
After the coffee taste we went to another room where we had two guest speakers: Craig Russell and Jennie Bowen who work at Starbucks. At this moment Julio from El Salvador explained to them what is the Seattle Institute Program, what we are doing here and explained what is NPH in general.
Let’s see something we learned from each of these leaders.
Craig Russell: As a leader you should care about respect and dignity. When you work as a team one of the things you should have is “TRUST”. As a leader sometimes you will feel alone but no matter what you should not give up. One thing I personally liked in what he said is “OWN YOUR MISTAKES” – if not you will not overcome them and in this case you will fail as a leader. At the end he said “reset yourself and your goals every quarter or every month”. I like that and I think everybody must do that.
Jennie Bowen: As a leader the first thing you need to know is “what you need in your life?”, you should have a vision while you have this vision you should listen and while you are listening you should learn and be who you want to be not who people want you to be. She made a little difference between Boss and Leader… Boss tells you what to do while Leader works with you and you achieve together.
Finally, we end the day with a nice lunch on the 3rd floor of the building with Ed, Kara and Glory from the NPH USA office.
Thank you Ed, Chris, Mary, Alana, Craig, Jennie and Kara for that opportunity and I can tell you we really learned something. Thank you Glory for joined us we really enjoyed it.
