Farlei Kothe, Stefanini: “We need to find new channels to engage with our people, and that is a challenge nowadays”

“Leadership style must adapt to this type of instability on the market all the time. The last 3-4 years brought a lot of instability into the market. The European people are used to have a very stable market and want to have predictability. Once you have a situation like Covid or the war in Ukraine, the instability kicks in and things got messy,” Farlei Kothe, CEO Stefanini EMEA said during Romanian Business Services Forum organized by Outsourcing Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“In times of instability, leaders need to be flexible. Now everyone needs to move faster. Everybody is planning short-term steps. We are not talking about plans for 3-5 years anymore; we talk about 1-2 years. We review our plans each quarter. We don’t wait one year to review what is going on.

Leaders need to build a strategy and to guide their teams. In Europe, everybody is really well prepared and can adapt really fast to changes in an agile way.

The new challenge for our businesses is AI and we will go through interesting changes.

We need to find new channels to engage with our people, and that is a challenge nowadays, especially with young people. They are really demanding; they have high expectations that we need to see if we can meet and click with them.

The user experience is in the middle of everything nowadays and companies have changed their approach accordingly. The hybrid working model is here to stay forever. I think this working model offers the best balance between different working models.

My advice to leaders is to lead by example and be resilient. If you are resilient, the teams and your people will follow you. Why resilience? Because changes won’t stop, and challenges will keep coming.”