Part-time Rebel, Full-time Leader
A discussion with Kirsten Sutton, VP & Managing Director of SAP Labs Canada, about being a female leader in the tech industry, being a rebel and taking risks. We also hear her advice to young people aspiring to enter the tech industry.
What core values are most important to you and how do these values influence how you operate in your daily life?
At the top of my list is loyalty. Not in the sense of blind faith in people, or always following the hierarchy, but the kind of loyalty where you can really grant trust to people and know that they will accept that, respect that and take care of that for you.
Do you feel that it is important to go against the tide and be different?
Yes, I am a huge believer in that! I was quite rebellious in high school, going “Against the tide” is definitely in my DNA! I think what is important is that you shouldn’t just fight against the status quo for the sake of going against the tide. I think that the thought process should look more like this: “I think this can work better, this idea excites me, others might like it too. How can I make this happen given the reality of the situation we live in?”. I don’t think it is about simply going against the tide, it is more about not being afraid to have a new idea and finding a way to make it happen. It is a bit different from my old rebel days where it was all about fighting authority.
How do you think this attitude compares to other industries? Do you think tech is different in that sense, being a field that prides itself on change and innovation.
I’ve been in tech for so long that it is hard for me to say what other industries are like. My gut feeling is that it is similar in most industries. There are a lot of things in every business that work really well and don’t need to change. You don’t need to be always flipping things upside down, but if you never flip things upside down, then you will never be able to leapfrog ahead. In my opinion, we need both! There are things that traditionally worked and made sense, those we should keep. But if you are going to do something really new and crazy, you can’t just go with the tide because it doesn’t go fast enough. It is when you come off that path for a little while that you can actually leapfrog forward.
In your career what has been your biggest risk and why did you take it?
This is very difficult to answer, because I take a lot of risks. Most of them are risky because they are unknown, not because they are a dangerous activity. For example, agreeing to doing something that you know nothing about, or taking on a team that you know little about, or moving to a new country that you have never been to… The unknown factor is the risky part. For example, I am the head of a global engineering team and I have a degree in English. What do I know about developing products? But I’ve worked in software development for over 20 years. It might seem risky, but I jumped in with both feet. Another example is when we took everyone in the Labs across Canada to the Star Wars movie two years ago. You could say that was risky because someone could come and ask us, was that a good way to spend company money? I thought, yes! But they could have said you shouldn’t do that. I think the biggest risks are taking on unknowns.
I am curious about your process, how do you determine whether you should take on those unknowns vs keep them locked in your brain and unvoiced?
When it comes to taking on unknowns, my simple test for myself is: do I think I can add value? If I think I can, then I go for it. I don’t have to know everything or be an expert, but if I have skills to bring to the table, then I jump right in. For what to spend my engagement budget on, I have another test: If I was stuck in the elevator with our CEO, and he asked about Star Wars, would I be able to defend it? Would I be able to say ‘yes, yes it was worth it!’. Whether it is the CEO of the company or your manager or whoever you’re addressing, who is potentially going to be the one to throw you out the building. Can you pass that test? Can you stand behind what you did? There must be a business rationale or a people rationale to why you do what you do…
So it is never, “my gut feeling told me to do it”?
There has to be a reason behind it. That’s the difference between the old rebel me and the current me. The rebel me would just go on instinct. The current me does that too, but finds a business rationale to back my rebel side up.
There is a growing number of young people and university students who are interested in the tech industry, what kind of advice would you have for the people who are coming into our industry?
A few things. First, I think it is super important that everyone understands the world we live in. These phones and computers are not magic and they actually have circuitry behind them, electronics, and software that make them work. And, that there is a person, or robot, assembling those things and programming them. I think people need to have a general idea about how things work although not everybody needs to know how to code it or understand exactly how it works. Whatever it is that you are studying, you need to think about how technology will impact your field. Whatever business you are in will be impacted by technology. So, in my opinion, not everybody needs to take a Computer Science class, but everybody needs to pull technology into whatever they are working on.
The second one is that there are a lot of important skills not written on the typical job description for a specific role. There are things that you have to do that aren’t just sitting down and coding, even if you are a Developer! Technology is not built by one guy sitting in a dark room alone wearing headphones, that’s a massive urban myth. In reality, it is a very creative and collaborative process where you really need to be able to work with other people in some fashion. It doesn’t mean that you have to be extroverted, but you have to be able to work in teams. People also need to be very adaptable to work in high tech because everything’s changing so fast. I am worried about how students are schooled these days. You go to university and it takes 4 years. What you learn at the beginning of those 4 years might be irrelevant by the time you reach the end of those 4 years. You need to be able to adapt your learning as the world continuously changes in front of you. So building up resilience and the ability to change is vital. I don’t know how they can teach this in university but that’s what we need to learn. I have been in the industry for 22 years, only because I have been able to roll with it. I have had many different roles and responsibilities, but I was ready to take on whatever was coming next. And you have to be able to take on whatever is coming next.
So it is important for students to build themselves, rather than just focusing on skills?
Yes, everyone with a Computer Science degree is coming with the similar skills, programming expertise etc. So, how are you going to be differentiated from the guy sitting next to you? The way you are going to succeed more is by doing these things outside the core skills you need for your job. It doesn’t mean you have to be a great speaker, it doesn’t mean you need to be the team leader, it doesn’t mean any of those things… But you need to understand that that’s how it works inside of a software company. Those skills are going to be critical.
We often talk about skills off the future, sure there are technical skills, you need to understand cloud computing, you have to know more about what it means to deploy a product for the cloud, difference between on-premise and cloud etc. But when we talk about the skills of the future, we are talking about critical thinking, collaboration, cultural awareness… Those are the skills of the future. Because the technology is going to keep changing. The guys I went to school with were learning Pascal (programming language) at the time, is that still being used now?
A lot of the times, we are not learning these skills in school or university, how do we go out of our way to learn those skills?
You have to learn how to learn, and how to re-learn. And be ok that what you learnt yesterday may be completely obsolete today. And coming from a dinosaur like me, I can tell how things can quickly become obsolete. However, I am not going to become obsolete, no way! That’s not my plan. This advice is for all of us, not just for young people. We all have to realize that stuff changes.
How do you think individual’s learning experience would be different if they start with a small company vs a giant company like SAP?
I can tell you from my personal experience, we were first a startup and then we became this big thing. Co-ops and interns who came in when we were smaller, they did very broad things and worked on more than one thing. Whereas now, the company is a lot more specialized. This is true for any employee in a big company vs a small company. In the small company, every employee wears a bunch of different hats. I remember, we used to put the CDs in the boxes, shrink wrap them ourselves and then drive to the airport to deliver them to be shipped out to the fulfillment house. Even though I was running translation and it had nothing to do with my title, I remember being late here and running the CDs to the airport. Yeah, we had CDs we had to physically ship! And boxes and paper manuals! I think that’s just the nature of a startup, you work on more things. It has less structure. A big company will have a lot of structure and infrastructure. So I would imagine the experience will be different from that perspective, more hats, different opportunities. Here, you will be really integrated in a team that has specific responsibilities, unless you are in my team where we still are in the middle of everything and doing 500 different things in a given day.
Young women in tech alot of the times feel intimidated, they feel that they are not being taken seriously. As a female leader in tech, what is your take on that?
Personally, I have seen these things go on. At times they were directed at me but I am one of those people who just refuses to accept nonsense. If you are not going to look at me when I am talking, and look at some guy instead, well, sooner or later you are going to regret that because I am the one making the decision. It doesn’t matter if you are a female or not, if you feel that you are not being respected, it is not acceptable. Assume it might happen, because it can happen to anyone, and know that it is not okay. When you come across it, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to handle it?
I don’t accept anything like this in the moment, I don’t say “hey look at me” in that scenario I described before. I just keep talking until they hopefully become convinced. I wouldn’t embarrass the person, sometimes they don’t know or even realize it. A lot of the times this is unconscious bias, plenty of people don’t realize that they are being rude or disrespectful to someone. Usually it is about being yourself, being authentic and continuing the discussion. If someone is really rude, then I would say something for sure. Don’t be afraid, it is not acceptable and it shouldn’t be that way.
It seems that culture also plays a big role here, especially in a multinational company like SAP.
Culture is king. There’s that saying: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s how people feel about the place that they work that can make or break a company’s success. In a big multinational company, it’s definitely more challenging as each country, each location, each department and down to even each team, there are wildly differing sub-cultures.
The most important thing about culture is that it needs direction. At any company, large or small, a clear vision and purpose give culture a shared destination. Leaders must make this vision clear and accessible for all employees, establish corporate values or behaviours that will serve this shared vision and then it’s up to everyone to live the promise. It will look very different country to country, location to location, department to department and team to team — and that’s what’s so amazing about culture. It is a journey and ever evolving. As long as you are journeying to the same destination, with a mutual understanding and respect, culture is your key to success.
‘Run Simple’, it’s one of SAP’s most talked about mottos. What does that mean to you exactly?
It is on the wall, right there behind you. We call it the ‘operating principle’ at SAP. If you always try to imagine that everything should be easy to do, and that you should be easy to interact with and what process you put into place, what products you should produce, interactions you have with people should not be cumbersome and complex. It is a mindset more than anything. I try to look at it that way. I want to be easy to work with. The focus is not only for us as a company, it is for the customers. They should have a single way to interact with us. They should be able to come into a single site and understand what SAP does. We need to be simple to work with.
By Ali Serag El-din and Salman Alam with guest interviewer Semih Sezer
