There is no way
yourself
you can do everything
Join us as we get Up-Close with Seema Desai, Chief Operations Officer at iwoca. Dive into the interview to read about Seema’s career highlights and her perspective on what attributes great digital leaders ought to harness.
There have been many highlights and hopefully more still to come, but I think one that has influenced me greatly was probably my first true leadership role that I had at GSMA. In this role, I led our work around mobile money and tasked with driving growth and defined the strategy, led fundraisings, worked with financial regulators and mobile network operator executives, at the same time as growing an exceptional team. That was the first role where I had to make that shift from managing to leading. When it is your first time in a leadership role, you learn as you go; make mistakes and just try to shed your old skin and grow into a new one. It was quite a transformational shift for me. What has then been quite interesting is seeing how, through my career, there have been echoes of what I learned in that role coming up in subsequent leadership roles. There are often very similar challenges, but it is how you adapt to them in different circumstances and looking back on it now, I can see that a lot of the things that I learned in my first leadership role provided me with a really strong foundation for the rest of my career.
What are your career highlights to date?
“When it is your first time in a leadership role, you learn as you go; make mistakes and just try to shed your old skin and grow into a new one.”
What are the top three attributes that a great digital leader and operator should possess?
Firstly, you must be a great architect. You have such a broad scope that you need to be able to design and build exceptional teams and set them up for success - there is no way you can do everything yourself. The hard part is being able to architect each function in terms of their purpose and skills, but the magic happens once those teams become high performing.
Secondly, you also need to be a great thought partner. Your job as a leader is to facilitate the thinking of the people in your team. You need to be a thought partner for them and ensure that they are focusing on the things that matter most and have an impact. So, being that thought partner that not only keeps people's eyes on the right goal, but also helps them think through how best to get there, is vital.
Thirdly, you need to be a great communicator because in your role as a digital leader and operator, your vantage point is really unique relative to other people. Your view is much broader and further than others, so you need to be able to communicate your vision and bring people along with you. You need to find the right language, the right cadence and so on to make sure that what you share is clear and authentic.
Do you believe you need different operational skills for different stages of growth within a company from start up, to scale up to listed?
Absolutely. In my role at GSMA I was equivalent to a startup GM. When I took it on, the team was about five people - when I left it was about forty. We had done two fundraising rounds and at that point the team was on the rails and the focus was more about finding the next steps for change. Compare that to my time at iwoca where I was building the People Operations function from scratch, and then took on existing Operations functions which needed to adapt and scale. Therefore, I do believe you need different skillsets depending on stage of growth. Typically you shift from being a lot more hands-on in a start-up setting and a lot more responsible for execution. Whereas in a scale-up setting it is much more about scaling your own impact through the teams that you are leading.
How has the current economic and market context impacted your specific strategy? And what advice do you have for first time operators leading through these challenges?
Perhaps in all roles but specifically from an operator’s perspective, you learn a lot more in times of crises than when the sun is shining. When there are extreme pressures on the operation, it can reveal several things that require improving or building out. This can feel really tough and frustrating, and with hindsight you may wish you had fixed these things already, but the nature of Operations is that there are always things that can be improved. So while careful planning and prioritisation is important, being able to respond quickly and efficiently to the fires is also an essential skill of any operations leader.
“The nature of Operations is that there are always things that can be improved”
One thing that has changed a lot over the last few years with remote working is that we are using Slack a lot more, so there is a lot more information being shared internally at iwoca about what’s happening in the sector. We are a team of nearly 400 people, so we have lots of eyes on the industry and we have become really good at funnelling through information and news that is relevant. I also keep an eye on places like LinkedIn and get industry news from sources like the London FinTech podcast or Innovate Finance.
How do you keep up to date with your sector?
“Perhaps in all roles but specifically from an operator’s perspective, you learn a lot more in times of crises than when the sun is shining.”
Do you have a particular book or piece of content that really influenced either your career or your leadership style that you can recommend?
I really enjoyed Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink, which has helped me understand what motivates people and how we get the best out of ourselves and our teams at work.
I have also found that it is helpful to listen to some of the broader psychology podcasts and there are some great ones out there at the moment. Hidden Brain comes to mind, and I really enjoy listening to that on my way into work in order to understand human behaviour more generally which is very applicable in the workplace.
