EP55 - Leadership Today. With Tomas Barazza, CEO & Founder (wethod)
On other platforms: Web, Apple Podcast, YouTube.
The episode is in Italian, below my takeaway from the chat.
In the latest years, A lot has changed in the way we work: AI, remote work, more intergenerational and intercultural teams, etc. How does the leadership evolved to keep up to speed with all these changes? That's what we discussed with Tomas Barazza, CEO and Founder of wethod.
One of the key point of Tomas' leadership philosophy is autonomy and trust. Sharing information and responsibility is not just better from a philosophical perspective, but it is also quite effective in practice.
"If you give responsibility, in most cases [...] you get responsible behavior. If you remove autonomy and responsibility, in most cases you get irresponsible behavior."
Now, the question for the leaders that are hesitant to delegate: "What's blocking you? What are you afraid of?". Because the answer cannot be a lack of trust in the team, otherwise the problem is upstream: in hiring and team building. Adding more control won't solve it.
When it comes to remote work, it was not a breaking change for people who where already leading with the right values:
"The need to coordinate at a distance [...] caused those who weren't ready to collapse, while those who had already built the conditions for working well with transparency, trust, empowerment, and autonomy flourished. And I believe that path is now well-established and irreversible."
We can't skip AI of course. From Tomas' perspective it is a double-edged sword. On one side it closes the gap between thinking and doing:
"The idea of being able to quickly give shape to ideas, to model an intuition, give it form... That's fascinating. It lets you put something concrete in the middle of a discussion, help a conversation by visualizing things that would otherwise be very hard to pass from one person to another."
But there are some risks as well: since everything is so easy to prototype it can create a distorted vision of the effort required to implement it in a production-ready manner:
""This is a bit of a trap that we all risk falling into, I think everyone does, even those who claim they don't. I myself occasionally realize that part of my thinking goes this way, and I do provoke a little. It then comes down to having some common sense and understanding the complexities of building solutions that have to go into production, support complex processes, and meet other requirements that are orders of magnitude more complex than simply creating some kind of artifact that, shall we say, organizes a thought and gives it shape.""
One thing that stood out to me in this episode is what Tomas calls the "yogurt organization": in his organization the responsibilities have an "expiration date", like a yogurt. They are reset every year and roles are re-evaluated annually:
"Every year we put the structure back into question... not only the structure, but also who handles it."
This is an effective way to avoid to keep investing in wrong paths because of past commitments, aka the sunk cost fallacy:
"But if you take a step back and say: 'You know what? Every year we start from scratch'. Is that a bit costly? Maybe, in the sense that you have to manage the handover of responsibilities well. But if you have the right conditions for it, I've seen it work very, very well. The minimal cost of transitioning responsibilities is more than paid back by the fact that you end up being very agile, very adaptive, and you can also easily move past wrong decisions, because at that point you simply don't renew them. They've expired: you just don't repeat them."
So, to conclude, what is the key trait of a modern leader? The answer is quite straightforward:
"Humility. I think that's something... if you consider the concept of leadership that has always been prevalent, someone extremely dominant, always convinced of their own positions, I think that instead trying to be more aware of the fact that you can sometimes be wrong, and that you're not always the smartest person in the room, helps. And this, in itself, I think is always, always very valuable. But in a context where you want to give more autonomy, more responsibility, more of everything, you also have to be willing to accept that. I think these things have to go hand in hand. Because if you want great autonomy and bold action from everyone, but then you're not willing to question yourself or make room for others, it simply doesn't work."
That's it, see you at the next episode!