Tomek Pająk
Software Engineering Manager, former manager of SEQR, Poland
Tomasz was working as a Software Engineering Manager at a FinTech company Seqr where he faced challenges of developing a disruptive product (mobile payments) for the last 5 years. He specialises in building high-performance organisations by Agile and DevOps transformations. Tomasz shares his experience as a speaker at multiple international conferences (eg. Agile Cambridge, DevOpsDays, Agile Management Congress, Agile Lean Europe) and as a contributor to InfoQ.
Presentation
ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE IS IMPORTANT? HOW WILL YOU DEFEND IT?
Companies make different assumptions about their source of effectiveness. Some define it as compliance to processes, some as aggressive competition (both internal and external), and some as organisational culture. All of them can be successful depending on a context of a given company. However, I would like to share with you my story when together with other leaders in our company we made such an assumption about the culture. The goal was to build a system which empowers people and teams to act autonomously and take responsibility for that, to experiment accepting a risk of failure which is survivable but leads to valuable lessons. It was our answer to a highly turbulent FinTech market we operated on. We believed that command-and-control leadership style was not the way to solve problems in complex systems. To my experience, once such a decision about importance of culture is made, you will be challenged many times as a leader. The way you react defines if culture and values supporting it are indeed that important and strategic. I would like to share with you several examples which caused dilemmas to me as a leader, how I reacted to them and what the outcome was.
