Name: Jose Luis Hernandez

Title: Research Director

Organisation: Corteva Agriscience

JLH bio Jose Luis, a native from Chile, with over 30 years of professional experience, is a Research Director within the Seed Product Development Department at Corteva Agriscience, a global leading company dedicated to agriculture, with the purpose of enriching the lives of those who produce and those who consume, ensuring progress for generations to come.

Jose Luis holds an agronomy engineer degree from the Catholic University in Chile, with a major in Crop Science and Crop Production as well as an MBA from the same University. Jose Luis has played various roles within the Winter Nursery and Research Seed Production operations for Corteva.

First 7 years overseeing the soybean winter seed production in Chile, then moving into a Research Site Lead role within Chile, also being part of the Country Executive Committee for Semillas Pioneer Chile Ltda., implementing the first attempts to a centralized operations model at the winter nursery sites in the early 2000s.

Jose Luis has held numerous roles with increasing responsibilities including Site Manager for the Chile Research Centers and the Venado Tuerto Research Center in Argentina by mid 2000s. In 2012, Jose Luis relocated with his family from Chile to Iowa, United States, to start an additional role within the Summer Seed Production group supporting North America Research and the Power Plant© deployment project.

In 2022, Jose Luis transitioned roles to become the Research Seed Commercialization Lead within R&D, with the main purpose to strengthen partnerships between R&D and Seed Production, to solidify processes to deliver better seed products to farmers.

Jose Luis has managed various teams of close to 700 professionals, scientist and several thousand contractors, spread all over the globe, managed several million dollar budgets and capital projects, building research infrastructure in various countries. Jose Luis passion resides on Nature, Biosciences and the overall Well Being of People and Humanity, being this last one the most critical and fun for him.

Jose Luis is also interested on discovering and mastering how our mind works to excel in life and at work thru finding and executing a path to our greater purpose in their professional and personal life. He loves managing and engaging People and Teams thru Complex, Impactful and Fun Projects, always striving towards Operational Excellence.

Change Management is an area that is deeply rooted in his heart and soul, striving on bringing to reality financial and culture purposes for any team, function, and company, by energizing and having happy teams fulfilling their dreams.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Jose's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

Leadership is all about inspiring and engaging others to make a vision come true, to drive a change that will deliver something that others will find value and gratification. The common subject on this equation is People, somebody with a vision, a group that will make that vision happen, and people (consumers) who will take advantage (and pay) for the value of that vision.

The most challenging thing about leadership is to stay consistent on that vision, staying true to your values along the journey, aligning your messaging with your actions and behaviors, consistently, considering all the various factors that most certainly will play against you and will challenge the why and the how several times.

We tend to believe that most of our challenges to succeed on a project is technology and come up with the right innovations, but the major challenge is to successfully and respectfully overcome People’s resistance to change, especially when you have a diverse team, which by the way is how teams should be, as somehow each team member has different realities, needs, experiences, values and expectations out of any endeavor.

Brining all that needed diversity into a common purpose, and work as One Team, in the ups and downs, respecting each one’s individuality but also the collective needs, is an ever going tension a leader need to navigate wisely.

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

Somehow, since college, I have always been drawn into tasks and roles dealing with people and complex projects. I consider myself an introvert, who enjoy socializing and getting to know people, but I do recharge on my “me time”. During my senior college year, I was elected to lead the student’s council for the faculty, which was something totally unexpected and new for me, which I enjoyed very much, being that my first experience working though others, besides dealing with politics.

Then, my first job as a professional was leading a field crew, mostly women, where we spent 8-10 hours a day all together, chatting and getting the work done, under the sun, out in nature. Since that day, no matter my position in a company, I have tied to stay connected with all the different layers of people, organizationally speaking, as that is where the real business happens.

At some point in my career, I had the privilege to lead international teams, in several countries, and that was a great experience getting to know different people, cultures, professionals, top scientist, people way smarter than myself for sure. For almost 20 years, my career was all about delivering products and providing an internal service to research teams across the globe, using an widespread infrastructure of sites and teams, that we needed to put in place, with the leadership, assistance and help of many teams out there, and due to the market changes, I also needed to downsize and adjust to a new capacity.

Over those years I was fortunate enough to build teams of friends and colleagues, delivering excellence, and modernize systems and upgrade technology. I also needed to manage countless crisis, which made me realize that if you do not have a deep relationship of trust with your people, those crises would have last longer than needed.

I have managed teams of close to 700 professionals and several thousand contractors, spread all over the place, managed million dollar budgets and capital projects, I have been exposed to amazing new technologies that have come to reality over the years, but the most rewarding piece of my roles has been the relationships I have established with people and all I have learned from each one of them and the experiences we have had together, including all my mentors and supervisors over the years. At the end of the day, technology changes, crisis pass, but people will always be there for you.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

My daily rituals have changed over the years, depending on the roles, projects, and mindset maturity I have had over the years. Nowadays I start my day the night before, where I set a clear intention on what I need to accomplish the next day, I set a vision for one clear action or outcome and one feeling I want to make it happen, and I write those 2 actions down.

During that nighttime I also mentally close any loops and any unpleasant experiences, feelings, or unfinished tasks from the day. Next morning, I wake up at 5 am, first thing is to feel and express gratitude for being alive and healthy another day, then I meditate for 30 mins, reinforcing the purposes I established the night before. I then read or listen to something inspirational, a podcast or an inspirations TED talk, 20 mins minimum, grab my morning coffee, admiring the sunrise, and think/write about what I mediated, with good relaxing music in the background.

I then think on two specific actions for my day, one, who I will make respectfully uncomfortable through challenging their status quo and who I will send a note or have n motivational, appreciation or a thankful chat with. Then I am ready for my workday, which is usually a mix of prescheduled meetings, time set aside to think and plan and time to invest networking, either a lunch or a coffee meeting.

Throughout the day I am usually connected through the different social media platforms and email, where I reach out to friends and colleagues, with various topics, mixing work ideas with coaching and mentoring chats. As soon as I get home, I decompress either with a walk, watching a movie or contemplating nature at my backyard. I religiously go to bed at 9p, securing minimum 8 hours of sleep, after my night meditation. Depending on the time of the year, I secure time during the day, for a bike ride or a gym visit. 

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

Leadership is not about you, it’s about others. When we are in a roll of success, when you have leaders trusting you, backing you up, it is so easy to blind yourself from reality, that you start disconnecting from the essence of leadership, which is serving others, making other grow, and fulfilling somebody else’s goals and dreams.

Keeping our ego quiet in times of success and staying humble and true to our people, is a must happen for any leader out there. And if we deviate or fail from what we are supposed to do, which is fine and it will happen, recognizing that and re-routing our behaviors and actions will solve the problem.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

I will mention two books here, Sapiens: A brief History of Humanity and Team of Teams. Sapiens not because of the history facts mentioned there, true, or not, but because it triggered two basic but profound insights on me. One is that understanding context is important, where are we coming from, when and where our beliefs, reality and systems were somehow created and how they evolved to be what they are right now, somehow everything is connected and everything has a story, connected to something else, amazing.

Secondly, that book made me start questioning everything, and stop swallowing all I read the way it is. I have always worked on the science arena, so questioning is part of the process, but this book moved my questioning to the very next level, which has opened my mind and my desire to keep asking questions and learning something new each day. The other book, Team of Teams, brought to me the power of connecting the right people with the right skills, despite any organizational design we live in.

Yes, we need to respect the traditional way to structure a company, but by building a network of people, talent, and teams, empowered to deliver on a cross-functional project, brings agility and flexibility. At the end of the day, a structure like this, kind of officializes all the “informal” structures and power play that do exist out there anyway. In order to make this Team of Teams come true, learning how to influence without authority, and working through others is a key leadership trait which needs to be at its best excellence level.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Always stay true to yourself, be brave enough to practice authenticity, learn to be vulnerable, and set any fears of failing aside. I have learned more from my most embarrassing leadership moments than from my successes.

When we are young, we are eagerly looking for external approval and acceptance, we seek for role models, and we aspire to follow a well-known playbook to build our personal brand, deliver impact and move up through the ladder of an organization, usually with the right intention to be a team player, but most times, we get lost on our individual journey, our own race, fulfilling first our own desires and goals.

My advice is to invest time knowing yourself first, find your purpose and what triggers your passion, and use that as a guiding start on your journey and in every important decision you will make. As soon as you align to your true self, you will find you do need others to make things happen, and that you never grow alone, you grow through and with others.

If you devote all your energies to the people working with you, as soon as the start growing, you will grow with them, and even better, you will fulfill yourself simply by enjoying how they start leading others. A small piece of you will reside forever on that leadership thread.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

It is easy to be a leader when things are happening the way they were planned, and when you have all the resources needed to make things happen. Real leadership is tested in times of crisis, confusion, and uncertainty. Few years back, before starting a field crop season in the tropics, all plans were in place, and suddenly, a major life-threatening weather event hit one of our locations, impacting employees and families, besides risking the business continuity, basically halting everything for a long period of time.

I learned a few lessons there. To reestablish the operation, we needed to bypass several pre-established processes and secondly, setting aside work priorities, delegating them on the right people, an focusing 100% on the human side of the situation, made us navigate though that situation the best we could.

I have never seen or felt such level of execution, alignment, and agility as in the time of that “crisis”, and if you think about, there was no plan in pace for it, other than playing and going with it day by day. Setting aside bureaucracy, focusing on the human side of the business, and driving operational excellence in times of crisis, made us reestablish the business in record time, besides gaining trust as leaders with our employees.