How do you use the leadership term in these post new normal transition days? Has it changed or still in the transition?

Since my early career years, being a leader rather than manager was always important value for me.

I have always respected Servant leadership theory and practice those over the years.

I still work on listening step changes; I will mention this later. Change is endless.

Covid has introduced us a strong environment where the trust is much more important than the control the work. I was lucky enough as an organization across the globe we have been collaborating with colleagues and partners from various locations, time zones and cultures well before Covid era.

What is the biggest leadership challenge in regard to leading change in the IT industry?

Imo, biggest challenge is the balance between technical skills and soft skills.

What I observe is our best coders are not necessarily always our best teammates.

I do appreciate soft skill development as same as technical skills hence I measure performance in matrix as What and How each individual deliver.

Has covid impacted your organization and the team culture?

Frankly, remote working has significantly enhanced our experience but wasn’t the biggest challenge.  Surely, I learnt tons of new tools to adopt to be able to substitute missing whiteboard culture. J and missing team away days a lot. Still Team culture significantly made up with social times. There are sophisticated ways to explain this but I don’t want to go details now.

How would you describe the turbulence time leadership in especially IT industry?

In my own experience, I would briefly say that Turbulence times leadership requires much more ownership then usual times. Delegating whilst ensuring right engagement and ownership is exist is key.

Nature of environment, finger pointing would increase and below the line behavior may try to rise as much as possible. As IT has various expertise teams to work together, this will make collaboration challenging. It’s still possible to overcome those with right leadership approaches.

They say leading in IT industry differs to the other industries. How is it different to be a leader in IT?

Tbh, I have been engaged to Technology leadership within FMCG business as well as Partnerships, joint ventures like co-branded Mobile business.

I always have dual perspectives to the subject first what my business partners require then how we can define sustainable technology framework to make time to market as short as possible whilst be able to sustain for the long term.

Over the past 20 months what has changed in your personal leadership style?

Tolerance for slightly increased delivery times and letting team to find the right way rather then I would define the way.

How do you define agile leadership? Can any organization lead agile?

Briefly, organizations MUST follow fast changing customer behaviour.

Whatever is fancy/trendy way to describe Customer Centric (Design thinking) adaptations for organizations, organization should practice it.

Agile leadership in my opinion is allowing organizations to break classic hierarchies to bring subject matter experts together to design new product -demanded by customer/market to trial, modify and deliver to improve organization values for investors.

Who would like to buy 2022 model car with cassette player? Why?

What I always say, time to market must be short to you can trial and get early market feedback and it must be “Cheap to Fail”. In order to get the market feedback organization must be agile. Many organizations design partial agile teams where it usually and easily gets lost under company hierarchies. Truly agile organizations win!

Would you share with us the 3 most important leadership words that can change any under performing organization for better?

What’s your customer/market expectation vs what do you offer/plan to offer soon?

Are they really matching or your will be pioneering the market soon?

I hope your not offering Winter tyres in Dubai where it never snows.. If you do so, you must have strong reason why?

How frequently do you listen your customer and feedback for your offer in the market?

How do you design end to end Customer/brand experience. It’s not about just selling products today anymore. Customer would like to buy/hire experience these days. How many trials you make.

Starting with WHY? (Simon Sinek) has helped me to shape my leadership style recently at top of Servant leadership values. This helps me to focus right thing amongst big dust of other noices.

What would you recommend to the young people who are new to the leadership role or will be taking leadership challenge?

Simple starter pack recommendation from me would be Empathy and Listening (truly).

If I would recommend one single book to start reading would be “The 7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen Covey.

I have been working on small step change for my leadership style which is “Truly listening others”, I believe I made some progress since early career years however endless journey, I do recommend to think about this always to my developing talent team members.

Last word from me would be:

Empathy and trust to each other values within company culture must to welcomed by everyone.

Thanks

Good luck! Hope to see you soon.

Başar Şen
Head of Technology, Office of CTO- PMO and M&A at Tesco Central Europe