Focus on your Strengths to Inspire Change

In business, it can feel like the only way to success is to throw yourself into management consulting. The underlying assumptions being that consulting is an extension of university:

“Management consulting will teach you so much and it will open all doors for you.”  Sincerely, your belief system.

While the idea isn’t wrong, this path doesn’t suit everyone.

Develop Your Strengths and Choose an Inspiring Environment

Franziska highlights the importance of choosing an environment that allows you to focus on your strengths to inspire change and create a strong innovative company culture. “Becoming a management consultant would have had me focus on my weaknesses. I prefer focusing on my strengths”, Franziska says. By the end of her studies, she had worked different positions. Guided by a mentor, she reflected on what ignited her fire and developed her fortitude. By the time she graduated, she knew better than to push herself into management consulting.

“Choose an environment that keeps your fire burning to stay motivated to change the status quo.“ Finding an environment to focus your strengths and understand if they’re crucial to a specific environment can be challenging during a job search. Franziska suggests searching for clues beyond the job title: “Find out what your job is like on a daily basis, ask to spend a day with your future manager and team. What is the company’s leadership culture like? What’s the team spirit? Is the team motivated and positive? Are they team players or individual performers? Does your manager choose to work closely with the team? Does he call the shots or does the team? Will he invest time to develop you and guide your career?” The organizational context can make or break you, she says.

Outspoken and ambitious, driven and passionate, Franziska is felt in the organization she works in today. She realized early in her career that she loves solving real, human problems, whether it’s a customer or company problem. Her passion for helping people solve problems wasn’t always obvious to her. Design Thinking opened that door to her and she learned its human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative way. Like Franziska, find a way to focus on your strengths to inspire change and to create a strong innovative company culture.

Guided by her strengths in an environment that inspires her, Franziska equipped engineers with Design Thinking skills to develop their mind-sets to embrace customer-lead technical solutions. This is no easy draw. Some engineers give it a shot, others don’t. Seeing the curious and courageous celebrating small victories inspires her, but it’s not enough.

Find Change Agents to Activate Others to Join the Ride

“How are we providing products that enable our customers to do better?” Everything boils down to building a critical mass of change agents who believe in being led by the customer. Franziska invests in opening minds to trial and error, encouraging design-thinking, problem-solving skills, and embracing “failure”. Those catalysts return to their communities ready to challenge existing innovation processes and form new collaboration practices.

Inspire Culture Change with a Passionate Heart and Self-Belief

Influencing communities wasn’t enough, either. Franziska saw the need to change how people collaborate and communicate throughout the company to become customer centric. The mastermind of Siemens Smart Infrastructure’s innovation space, SPARK, Franziska facilitated cross functional, interdisciplinary, and agile collaboration. SPARK’s diverse work environment offers project rooms, focus areas, spaces for knowledge sharing sessions, trainings, and skill-building workshops, attracting people from different parts of the organization and inviting them to interact in fresh ways. It spurs creativity– a place to focus your strengths to inspire change and spur innovation as its flexibility accommodates different needs. Innovation processes start to transform as does the culture. Hierarchies dissolve, albeit slowly, and entrepreneurial leaders begin to emerge.

As of April 1st, 2020, Franziska stepped into a new position as Global Head Digital Applications & Services of Field Devices and OEM at Siemens Smart Infrastructure.

Stay tuned! I can’t wait to further the discussion with her on the change and transformation she is experiencing and is introducing as a team lead, and share that conversation with you. What questions would you be interested in me asking her on change, transformation, and leadership?

I can’t wait to share my next conversation with you. Speak soon,
Helena

Disclaimer: This content includes Franziska’s personal view and experiences; it does not reflect an official opinion of Siemens AG.