Latest news with #techleadership
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Talent Vs. Toil: Taking Care Of Business
Agur Jõgi, CTO of Pipedrive and expert in scaling technology and organizations. Experienced as an innovator, founder and C-level manager. getty One of the lenses through which tech leaders view their plans for success should be balancing talent and tedium. That is, the skills, attitudes and capabilities of your team versus the toil they must overcome in their day-to-day activities. One of the major keywords you've probably already flashed up is "burnout." Most of us can't maintain our best focus and output over either a long or acutely stressful period. The easy analogy is that of an athlete. A 100-meter sprinter trains for their event, and they may well be pretty good in a longer race. However, they haven't prepared for a marathon—mentally or physically. Tech workers are—either naturally or by career development and practice—primed for certain types of roles and responsibilities. If these are inconsistent, too onerous or often simply too tedious, then attention can slip, and the risk of burnout or disengagement rises. For teams with complex and mentally taxing tech roles that are facing mercurial economic pressures and rapidly changing tools and products, it helps to have a methodical approach to monitoring and supporting the right working environment. Time And Motion, Toil And Team In the mid-20th century, time-and-motion studies became a big business efficiency technique for improving work methods. Factories (or anywhere where there was physical motion, such as assembly lines) were increasingly optimized for better business efficiency. This kind of thinking influenced businesses of all kinds as it evolved, and the IT industry may be the most obvious inheritor of this style of process management. It would be reasonable to say workers didn't tend to get the better end of the drive for efficiency in times past. Speak of "the factory floor" or an "assembly line worker," and many people may have a bias that such working practices make a person a cog rather than an active agent. It's now well understood that employee experience and productivity are known to be entwined. Only leaders who keep their finger on the pulse of the holistic employee and business experience will keep their project and business performance in the green over the medium to long term. Leaders must understand the processes of their teams and be on hand to offer the benefit of experience. They must also advocate if the cost of toil and poor experience ever degrades their ability to deliver on business goals. KPIs, OKRs and metrics define the company goals and deliverables, but these must be translated into "human-readable" behaviors and processes to avoid work becoming a rote lever-pulling exercise. Starting Right And Continuing The Same Way Culture begins in many places, one of them at the point of hiring. Right from the get-go, find people during recruiting who know why they want to work for this company, fit in and strengthen the existing culture. A person with the right "why" will collaborate on the "how." Of course, it's good sense to offer great pay and benefits to go with a great culture as part of the whole employee experience. Equally importantly, choose people who want to develop and want to do it themselves rather than waiting for someone to develop them. Showing agency and a future orientation is a great way for employees to show they can overcome challenges, show resilience and positively support their teams. From there, every manager has a major task—to ensure the continuous professional and cultural development of their people and help out those whose desire for development has stopped. As a guide, my team members know that if they decide to leave, they will generally be trained and experienced enough to get a job offer from the market that's a level higher. Other companies will see a mid-level Pipedrive developer as a new senior as a result of our culture and drive for individual development and excellence. Experience Supporting Excellence The "greed is good/work 18 hours a day in the boiler room" style of management doesn't build a culture of excellence or long-term success. Collaboration and trust are what's needed to unlock really compounding strength and value. That's not to say the best teams don't have some high targets, tight deadlines or some healthy stress. That's how all athletes and professionals maintain a winning mindset and overcome challenges. What's needed is a culture of trust and a great working experience that supports teams in delivering their best over sustained periods. Working experience is very hard to get perfect. It's probably not perfect. People and their varied circumstances are always changing. Leaders at every level must regularly consider the kind of environment they want for their talent and make the right choices to balance experience, resources and expediency to stay on top of the challenge. Leaders must avoid "setting and forgetting." Culture changes with every act made and impression received. A poor hire, the wrong decision, a disruptive customer demand—anything can change it. Culture is made up of so many parts that it doesn't take much to send it down a different path. The mission/vision set from the top is a great start, but it must be backed by evidence that it's taken seriously and meaningfully across the majority of working activities. Taking Care Of Business "Taking care of business" in terms of making a great working experience means tending to factors like employee autonomy and empowerment. Merely taking a temperature check as part of an annual review cycle is a great way to uncover problems a long time after they should have been solved. Some areas, like recognition and appreciation, don't require much more than a thoughtful and empathetic approach to management. Toil must be transformed into meaningful work, and taking care of business doesn't merely refer to delivering on company goals. The company is an organization of people collectively. When they pull together, they grow collectively. When they lose the rhythm, that growth is hampered. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Malay Mail
13-06-2025
- Business
- Malay Mail
From fishing family to Big Tech: French CEO Fidji Simo joins OpenAI as second-in-command
NEW YORK, June 13 — At just 39 years old, Fidji Simo is poised to become OpenAI's second-in-command after leaving her mark at two other major tech firms, including Meta. Reporting directly to CEO Sam Altman, the move to the ChatGPT-maker represents the latest chapter in a career that has taken Simo from a fishing family in France's Mediterranean port of Sete to the heights of Silicon Valley. As the current CEO of grocery delivery platform Instacart, she cuts a unique profile: a French woman in the male-dominated American tech landscape — who resists advice to blend in. 'I can put all my energy trying to be someone else or I can be myself and pour all of that energy into what I can create,' she told CNBC in February. This philosophy will likely be on display when she appears yesterday at the VivaTech conference in Paris. Raised in Sete, Simo attended the elite HEC business school before joining eBay in 2006, first in France then in California. 'People expect a very business-like story for why I decided to come to the US. It wasn't. The American Dream was on TV every night and that was an incredibly appealing thing,' she said. 'Never Intimidated' In 2011, Simo joined Facebook, now Meta. She was given responsibility for video and monetisation in 2014, a role she considers the defining moment of her career. Simo championed the company's pivot to video, which became central to Meta's strategy despite initial internal skepticism. 'She never let herself be intimidated,' recalled David Marcus, who worked at Meta alongside Simo and now serves as CEO of online payment company Lightspark. 'She had an ability to challenge Mark (Zuckerberg) and push him, when others would have hesitated.' Joining Instacart in 2021, Simo inherited a company that had been bleeding money for a decade. Under her leadership, the grocery delivery platform achieved profitability in 2022 through aggressive diversification: data monetisation, expanded retail partnerships and a robust advertising business. Now Simo faces her biggest test yet. As OpenAI's number two, she'll free up CEO Altman to focus on research and infrastructure while she tackles the company's operational challenges. Despite being one of history's most highly funded startups and ChatGPT's phenomenal success, OpenAI is burning cash at an alarming rate. The company has also weathered significant leadership turnover, including Altman's own brief ouster and reinstatement in 2023, raising questions about management stability. But French investor Julien Codorniou, who worked alongside Simo at Facebook, said she will more than rise to the occasion. 'Fidji's arrival is a declaration of ambition by OpenAI,' he said. — AFP
