Resilient Leadership in Times of Change
By: Laura Marwood
Tags: Growth Mindset, Sap, Change Management, Resilient Leadership, Leadership Philosophy

Leadership Philosophy and Cultivating a Growth Mindset

In converstion: Development Manager, Louis Bridgman (Montreal, CA) and Laura Marwood (Walldorf, DE)

Laura: Hey Louis, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. You recently represented SAP S/4HANA Consumer Industries Cloud as part of an SAP internal Act to Lead virtual leadership development session on Resilient Leadership. What exactly do we mean by Resilient Leadership?

Louis: Hey Laura, happy to share more about this. Resilient Leadership is a particular branch of organizational leadership philosophy that addresses people sustainability. The truth is that, as our organization marches into unprecedented and constantly changing working conditions, we need to develop a workforce that is not only intelligent and innovative, but tough. We do that by:

Cultivating a growth-oriented mindset in people that radically changes their relationship with change, fear and pain

Engineering the most optimal organizational conditions for people to not just survive under pressure, but thrive

Modeling vulnerability and authenticity as we — as leaders — face our own challenges and practice responsible self-care

Laura: As a development manager, what approaches do you use to foster resilience in your teams?

Louis: Strategy, solidarity, and support. When my engineering team in Montreal first learned two years ago they had been chosen to build new industry cloud product on the SAP Cloud Platform, the news caused a lot of anxiety! For many, this meant learning a whole new way of engineering software, starting a topic from scratch, and losing their sense of having an established seniority in the company. After sitting with each team member and listening to their concerns, I addressed the group along three main points. First, contextualizing that the SAP strategy for taking on the cloud market meant all engineering teams would be going through this transition — we just happened to be the tip of the spear! Second, rooting the team in their fundamental identity as engineers: technical experts who apply computer science principles and logical reasoning to solve customer problems. If they don’t know the answer to something yet, they’ll figure out three different ways to solve it. Third, reassuring that every single engineer is not only going to plug into a training plan to get the skills they need in the short term, but a development plan to help them see a purpose-filled career path in the long term.

This summer we not only celebrated our latest cloud delivery but also the signing of our first cloud customer. The customer win is great, but in the context of resilience, the sustainability gain became apparent when the Montreal teams have to do this all over again by tackling Kubernetes and the open build-on architecture with SAP S/4HANA Consumer Industries Cloud. The challenge to the teams is just as high — if not higher — but their confidence in themselves to do this together far outweighs any anxiety in facing the unknown.

Laura: It’s no secret that internal strategic changes, the reprioritization of topics, as well as the Covid-19 situation have brought about big changes and upheavals to work environments. How have you managed to tackle this and come out stronger?

Louis: Strategic changes can be scary, but a growth mindset is how you tackle scary things and grow stronger through them. Remember that you can’t experience growth without change, and you can’t experience courage without fear. Sharing very candidly about my own experience, I’ve known the same boss for years and had no idea what to expect from my current manager. And entering a brand-new internal organization, I had to build my network and reputation completely from scratch. Having a growth mindset means that I acknowledge my feelings of fear and discomfort, but instead of avoiding them I “embrace the suck” and run towards them as a vehicle through which I can learn and grow. After six months, I’ve met some truly remarkable people in our new organization, and am genuinely excited about our mandate and the journey ahead. This is my personal approach to surviving a reorg, and it’s how I try to coach my teams to do likewise.

Laura: What are some other useful insights from the Act to Lead session that you’d like to share?

Louis: When I think of resilient leadership, I immediately think of organizational change management. But I learned that for many, resilience is needed just to develop a stronger — and more equal — voice in the workplace with others who do not share the same gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or neurotypicality. In other words, some people fight every day just to be taken as seriously as everyone else! I became painfully aware of my unconscious bias, and how this need for resilience in less- represented cohorts is just as important for us as building a workforce more resilient to technological unknowns or organizational change. I see the need for a more diverse hiring strategy — particularly at leadership levels — as an essential element to building in resilience to our whole organization.