From Geek to Star #32 - Leadership facilitation with a hint of Tech

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🗓️ This Week – Episode 32: how to break your image of being just Tech

As part of my new venture “The Way Forward", I facilitated this week an offsite Executive Committee of a Hospitality company which had been formed recently with both veterans in the company and more recent joiners and which had just made a recent significant overhaul of their historical product and offerings. 

Although my career has always been in tech entities of companies, I’ve always been naturally a bridge between functions (tech with business, operations, commercial…), so when I was offered this opportunity to do this leadership facilitation, I did not hesitate. The objective of this offsite was to create stronger executive alignment at C-level, think about an evolved operating model to break silos, revisit the company's KPIs to ensure they run the business properly and think about the company's OKRs to allow the important changes to happen. The facilitation did super well and I engaged with conversations going well beyond my role of facilitation given my experience in travel and hospitality, the same industry as these leaders. 

“Former CIO Asia Pacific and Group Chief Technology Architect of Accor”: does this sound like a legitimate track record to be a leadership facilitator for an offsite with the objective cited above? Not necessarily, isn't it? Just reading at the title, most people would think that I would be too technical (assuming I have facilitation skills) to be able to handle full days of facilitation with a CEO, a CFO, a Chief Commercial Officer, a Chief Operations Officer, a Chief Human Resources Officer (and yes a Chief Information Officer along as well). 

But through my years of working experience, I’ve constantly engaged in discussions not only with tech teams and tech leaders, but also with all sorts of functions: commercial, marketing, products, operations, support, finance, procurement, HR… Out of interest of course, as the better you know the people and their activities, the better you are at imagining solutions which can bring value. But also out of genuine curiosity to have a better systemic and holistic understanding on how a company works and operates to achieve great or bad outcomes. In a certain way, these constant interactions as well as a progressive larger scope of responsibilities in my career, even “just in tech" have been a kind of “on the ground” MBA for me. 

How can you be perceived as more than “just the Tech person”?

First, let's remember this: you have an unfair advantage. You know Tech. And in many companies (especially traditional companies), it is always surprising to see the number of people, whether at a high position or not, who kind of “freeze” when they hear this is a tech topic if they don't have a tech background. 

Now, you don't want to be just perceived as a “Tech person”, but also as someone who may have a view on the strategy of the company, have interesting thoughts on how to make the whole organization work better, on how the products could bring more value to users, etc… Whatever it is, you want to plant a seed in your interlocutors’ mind that you are “the Tech person who also has great insights on…” 

What you can do:

1. As discussed in previous newsletters, develop your Industry knowledge, understanding of how your company operates: you can do this in multiple ways as I shared in “the business savvy engineer", “speaking CEO / CXO languages", “how much are you ready to pay for Industry knowledge”, “the value of learning journeys”

2. Doing this regularly and constantly will build up not only your knowledge but your convictions and ideas on a number of topics going well beyond tech - and you will see that you will connect the dots with your tech expertise

3. Whenever you have the opportunity (coffee breaks, lunch, town halls) and that you meet non tech colleagues or leaders, start to engage with them not talking about your tech topics, but about your understanding of how business is going, your ideas if any… That will start to show them that you can talk about something else than tech.

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

As of today, how do you think you are perceived by non tech colleagues? 

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From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward