26: Operational Leadership with Female Perspective

Welcome to Omnipotent Growth with Cal. I'm an acting leader for more than a decade and your leadership trainer and coach. Each week you hear exceptional stories and interviews as well as actionable strategies and tactics that you can implement right away. I want to thank you for spending some time to grow as a leader.

Hello guys in another episode of Omnipotent Growth with Cal. Today we are with Stilana Dimitrova and we are talking about leadership on operational level through a woman's perspective. We are very happy to welcome Stili. She's our colleague from the EMBA in the American University of Bulgaria.

She's the first woman of our show, which is fantastic. And we are so happy and lucky to have you here. The thing that I can say, despite the fact that she's a ray of sunshine, a very positive person. and we always love to spend time with her.

She's also an operational manager in a very large BPO company with a team with 100 plus people. It will be a great perspective and a great view for us to discover this type of leading such a big team. And she also started from the help desk, climbing up to the position that she has now. So, Stili, welcome.

We are very happy with you that we are here and that we can have this experience with you. How are you doing today? I'm fine. Thank you.

Thank you for the nice introduction, Cal. I'm very happy to be the first woman here in this studio. I'm fine. Thank you for the invitation.

Great. So let's start. Still, it's nice. Really nice having you here.

Let's start. I have always admired people who stay with one firm for a long period of time and grow throughout the corporate ladder. For me, this shows loyalty to the company, to its values and mission. At the same time, I'm continuously intrigued by the motivation factor and more particularly, the intrinsic motivation for staying within one company.

Obviously, you have been growing in all these years, but you started as a help desk analyst, which is a very low position and stayed there for almost three years. Tell me, what kept you motivated in this period? In the very first period? Yeah.

Well, I think that the motivation changes with the time. And what motivated me in the very beginning was that I was part of a big team, of a big company. I was quite competitive. and you know that the corporate environment provides incentives for being competitive, like being the employee of the month, different recognitions, which are very important.

And when you grow professionally and when you grow as a person, this motivation changes a lot. At some point, you find your purpose. at some point when you are more proactive, you have more suggestions and you see bigger impact of what you're doing. So this is how my motivation changed with the time and with the different roles I have been holding.

But in the very beginning, I'm not completely sure what I was doing. I was just happy with my job and that I was part of a big team. So it's more of a transformation through the years yeah okay just maybe uh having the balance because this this was what i needed at that point of time being happy and yeah this changes with the time so i think this is what kept me on the same role still motivated for a longer period and when you say that things are growing and changing we are very interested in the perspective of a woman like what difficulties are there and how you managed to overcome them throughout the years yeah um it is i know that this is our topic but it is very difficult question for me because personally i have not had any issues or any i at least i haven't felt that i have had more difficulties because i i'm a woman um so it is very very difficult question for me to to answer um there are many people who have their stereotypes and it is not only only something related to to the gender it could be something related to to the way you look like to your hobbies to to whatever and it's always it's it's not a good thing when you're um when you have your opinion based on your stereotypes or if you have a perception that the women do that thing and the men do that thing it's it's not a good thing maybe something interesting that um uh that is part of my of my job um you know i'm a i'm a manager of a lot of people and maybe something that wouldn't uh that the men wouldn't experience is that um sometimes occasionally there are people that might somehow see me as the mother figure, which is strange.

And of course, this should be addressed in a professional way, but maybe this is something that will happen to a man at work. Yeah. So related to a situation or leadership, for example, when you have to have a relationship with like a parent and a child in one situation, then in the other, you can treat them as well as a grown-up And this is also based in theory, so I really like that point of view. I was also asking not so much of extrinsic side but also intrinsic But I mean men are known that they can endure more levels of stress pure extrinsic stress because of the testosterone hormone and so on and so forth But then I was curious about the ability to create relationships like a woman, like a person that is more caring.

Of course, those are just qualities that can be developed in any case. but especially in your case you have to create a lot of relationships and to do it successfully it was interesting how you keep doing it with the growing numbers and yeah yeah um i i think that what you mentioned about the caring this is one of the let's say stereotypes that the women are like caring this is our two or two we have both examples we have we have both examples of leaders and it doesn't really matter if you're a man or a woman maybe it's a matter of of type of work of matter of leading leading style leadership style so it's not that related to being female or male um yeah the how how i create the relationships at work i mean professional relationships i think that the communication is the key uh avoiding miscommunication is is the the key really um like being honest being very uh straightforward to when any um values are verbalized for the team following those values.

And I think that this is the, at least for me, this is what helps me keep this relationship not only between me and the team, but also this is something that is very important for their relationship between themselves. So over communication. I'm also a big fan. It's like I have an example So my leader says it's better to put your rear light once more when it's not needed than to forget to do it when it's needed the most.

So over communication really, really helps. Cool, thanks. Yeah, and communication is important not only for the professional life, but also for the personal one. So, Stiri, speaking of your leadership style, You lead a very large team of more than 120 people.

My question is, how do you manage so many people in operational terms? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of being a woman? Of course, as we talked already, it doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man, because we don't want to fall prey to some biases and prejudices. We want to just challenge them, and that's why Steely helps us a lot.

Yeah, exactly. In general, how is this happening strictly operational? because relationship is one thing, but then you have a lot of KPIs, a lot of stuff that you have to cover. Yeah, that's right.

Well, the good thing is that you have leaders on all levels and you need to recognize who they are. They might be formal leaders and informal leaders. I would say that both formal and informal leaders are equally important because we are very well aware of the importance of the informal leaders and their role in the team. But also you cannot count only on the informal leaders.

You have formal leaders there as well in the different layers. So this is one of the things that help a lot. You cannot do the job by yourself, never. So you count on your partners within the team.

And the other thing is that I think we should be very, very, when leading big teams, we should be very, very careful who has which role in the team. And this might help you somehow predict when you're in a meeting and when you're discussing a problem or challenge, who would be the one that would come up with a good idea? and who would be the one that would make the fine-tuning of the idea or of the job and who would be the skeptics. Usually there are more than one.

And usually their feedback is super important. So listen to everyone's opinion. Listen to what everyone has to say about a problem and solve it together. So I think that maybe this is what helps me a lot.

you can never, never do it yourself. Yeah, I'm totally with you on that. So my personal experience also shows that different points of view always bring more context to a certain issue or a certain idea. And there is a framework called the six thinking hats.

When you have a lot of people, you always have people that are wearing those hats. But what I find is that if we want to continue developing them, we give roles. like in some meetings I try it out and I know that some people are more skeptic than others but I assign the role of the optimist. Okay, tell me what's good about that idea.

It's a lot of fun but also it's very practically applicable So I think that your approach is great and it helps a lot to have a context in the end Cool So our next question is more related to the current situation as we are still under Corona crisis all over the world And some businesses are on the rise. Some businesses are having difficulties. in your case how are things looking and what is different now for you? How do you handle the current situation?

The current new normal. The current new normal. I don't like the new normal. It's not that normal.

It is not normal. No, it is normal at some extent but it's not the old normal which we prefer, I think. I think that we are all privileged that we are healthy and we have jobs at this at this moment because this is really not the case for many many people and which is really awful and and the things are not getting any better for many people which is not a good thing of course the the thing that changed the Most at my job was the home office thing. Before we had this option, but right now for the last couple of months, we have been working mainly from home.

This whole new setup was something new. Most of the people are very eager to do that and they really want to do that. They like it, which is something good. personally i experience huge challenges with this because um as as you as you know um my team is not like uh everyone has their single tasks and they are performing them by themselves this is a lot of teamwork and many people um doing this doing the uh same thing we need to keep the standard we need to keep the quality of the work which is very very difficult when um when everyone is at their home and somehow our development is a bit, not definitely professional development is stopped, but we cannot improve if we do not have the example right next to us or at least we can do it slower and a bit more difficult.

Also, another very challenging thing is keeping the team spirit. I think this is very difficult when we are not within the room of course this is related to when we are talking about the teams if you're an expert of something you can do your job wherever at the office at home so yeah I can share an interesting example because recently we have had interviews about the vacancy in one of the senior positions in the team and I have conducted more than 15 interviews, quite a lot of interviews.

A lot of candidates, man. A lot of candidates, yeah. And one of the questions was, can you tell me an initiative or activity that we could do to keep our team spirit, to make something like a team-building activity? Online activity or something?

It was not explicit. It was online or offline. I was expecting only online answers. I was expecting that, like, we'll send Friday jokes or we will do some charity together, different things.

But 100% of the answers were for let's go to the mountains, let's go to the park together, let's have some board game days in the office, let's work from the office on rotations, even this suggestion. and obviously we do need this social connection but when we work in team I completely understand that there are positions which could be completely which tasks could be completely executed from home or wherever but in my case I would say that it is a bit making more issues than helping However, this is our normal right now.

At the moment. And I'm happy that we have this opportunity because many, many people do not have this opportunity to still work from home. Absolutely. And basically, yeah, we have to do a lot more to create the relationships or to keep them on the same level as they were or try to make them even better.

it's even harder because you know i have trouble sometimes to um inspire people to put up their cameras because they feel like they don't feel the urge to to uh bring their presence when they know they're just online and it helps when when you give a personal example like i'm always with my camera on and i try to to ignite some some conversations uh and when i talk to anybody i'm making hints because you cannot tell put on your camera yeah maybe your dog is in your lap or whatever yeah because many people don't have their working space if if we had to be completely exact the working space should be one of the main priorities of the companies to to make sure that people have everything they need to continue working from home but yeah this is a job for every company to decide how to do it because it it continuously yeah continuously growing the need yeah and to keep the balance we should also have our retreat place and right now we are merging those two things the professional environment which we try to create at home and the the retreat environment and this is a big challenge um this is this is something very new for me although i have had shifts from home for the last many years still uh that this is our our new day our new day-to-day thing that we need to cope with is is new for me i'm still facing many challenges shared by team members but still uh overall everyone is very happy working from home but i'm i'm not sure when when the real issues might might start at some point it might be escalating at the moment we don't know because we never had such a long period i know it was great for a couple of months but then many people think that the balance and it's important like you you can have home office maybe most of the week but then in the end we we are physical beings we are connected to each other the chemical reactions oxytocin for example creates from a story from a touch for my physical presence of course somebody with a turned on camera can also have such an impression probably the future is some kind of hybrid model between home office let's first survive right yeah indeed indeed because the worst is yet to come I believe but anyway let's hope you're not right next question next question is our signature question for our show what is your recipe for leadership growth my recipe for leadership I think that it is somehow related to our main topic of the women leaders being authentic not trying to to copy not trying to copy anyone's behavior or anyone's let's say tools for being the leader having clear values and make sure that the team is following them and make sure that they are in accordance with the company culture this is very important because we are all part of a context and I think that this might be my recipe great thank you totally agree with the alignment of the values and I always say that you have to when you are somewhere be there, like when you're working for a company you have to find a way to connect with it, otherwise it's not it doesn't make any sense to stay, of course there is always the opinion yeah but I don't have a choice, you always have a choice so if you're somewhere try to make sure to see what the vision, connect them through own your own values you can bring the message and inspire everybody else great steely thank you and we are closing down to our final question which is again some sort of a signature but in your special case it's it's really interesting for us to understand and to find out what you're doing for fun you're a party animal we know that well yeah indeed this is I really like to have fun I really like to go to concerts to go out to be with friends and I think that somehow I managed during the summer and I feel that I might have a bit a bit boring winter because unfortunately my favorite things are about to cancel but still I think that I also read books I also have my group video chats with my friends so we communicate somehow and yeah this is what I do for fun and this is what I'll be doing for fun in the next couple of months the social connection is really important for you yeah it is very important for me very social and it always we can always feel it in the conversations and I imagine that also in your leadership style people feel that you connect easily and you're just trying to find out a way to connect with the other person which is totally great.

I hope so and at least I'm trying. Perfect. Okay, so I want to sum up what we talked about. So we had a plan to somehow try and challenge the women versus men now that you're our first female guest of course we are both like more than certain that females have a greater stance even in the leadership world because we we show that we are all human beings everything is teachable when your mindset is correct it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

It just matters that, as you said, to be authentic, to try to learn, to try to grow and try to connect. It's that simple. And you can, of course, layer it down to a lot of other stuff that we do daily. But maybe this will be the subject of our next meeting in which we can go deeper into some situations and some other stuff.