‘Great opportunity to learn about Fiji’
LAST week we heard about Leadership Fiji’s forming years and paid tribute to our founders. This week we hear from Virisila Buadromo, one of our inaugural Leadership Fiji 2002 program participants.
Virisila Buadromo is currently the board chair of Gender at Work and was recently appointed one of two co-leads of the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights Asia Pacific (UAF-AP). Her new role is focused on strategic partnerships and resource mobilisation. Before joining UAF-AP, Ms Buadromo freelanced as a feminist facilitator, trainer and gender adviser in the Pacific and Asia focusing on organisational strengthening and supporting feminist coalitions and movements in the two regions. Ms Buadromo’s feminist beginnings were nurtured at the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, a cutting edge feminist organisation that she led as its executive director for more than 13 years. (Source: www.genderatwork.org)
Ms Buadromo has won international and local awards, some of which were: 2008 International Women of Courage Award; 2012 Women Have Wings Award; and Westpac Women in Business Award 2013-2014 as Executive Woman of the Year.
I joined the Leadership Fiji program in the same year as I started my role as the executive director of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement. I was one of five women in the first Leadership Fiji program of 20 participants. My female peers included Eseta Nadakuitavuki, Marica Hallacy, Salote Uluinaceva and Vineeta Nand.
The experience was a great opportunity to learn about Fiji through a social, economic, cultural and political lens. It was also a learning space where different people means different views, some even at the ideological level. The program strengthened my capacity to hear and try to understand an opposing view but also hold mine. Sometimes my views changed because I saw or learnt something new that I had not considered.
My three favourite memories of being a participant of the Leadership Fiji 2002 program are: going underground to the Vatukoula Gold Mines, visiting a working sugarcane farm in Lautoka and having conversations with rugby legend, John Eales.
What I found through my leadership journey was great leaders have the following in common; hearing different perspectives to strengthen your own learning, being organised and being flexible because things don’t always go as you planned. Therefore, everything I picked was about changing my behaviour and mindset... having a growth mindset.
My experiences with Leadership Fiji and another regional leadership program, I completed 12 years ago, forced me to relook at my leadership vision. The regional program I attended in 2014 focused on creating strong containers of trust and we as participants were encouraged to show up and to be vulnerable when we feel most at risk.
It was the first time that I allowed myself to be seen, to be known. It was the first time I acknowledged the traumas I experienced at the hands of the military on Christmas Eve 2006. The experience challenged me to confront my trauma and the subsequent effect it had on my relationships with others and my world view.
The realisation made me break down publicly and while I was mortified by my physical and emotional response, the experience led to a breakthrough in the room that day. What I realise now, is that my very existence, who I am, contribute to those around me. It is my presence that affects all those around me, not what I do or what I produce.
Learning how to trust people, and encouraging them to trust you, is a far greater source of leverage than all the productivity tips, tricks, and hacks ever conceived.
In Fiji where dissent is discouraged and where forced agreement is the only way to remove roadblocks, trust is an issue.
My experience with Leadership Fiji, really helped me work through some of my trust issues. Spending time and getting to know each other beyond our titles and positions, and understanding each other’s desires and fears, cultivated a bond of trust with my fellows that I have been able to project in my work and personal interactions beyond the program.
Understanding that trust can be forged between people who do not always agree and have diverse views, is a lesson I carry with me every day.
Ms Buadromo was chief guest at this year’s Leadership Fiji program launch and the induction of the Leadership Fiji 2019 Fellows. In her speech, she shared one of her favourite quotes by Bruce Lee “Be like water”. She went on to share with guests “that this quote to her meant to invest in your capacity to adapt, expecting your work and your life to change, instead of trying to prevent them from changing”.
In addition, she mentioned that “like water, we need to be constantly adapting, creating, filling and emptying”.