Brico Depot Romania

Joanna Matuszak

The importance of understanding human behaviour, key factors in tech leadership, and data-driven decision-making cannot be overstated. Joanna Matuszak, Technology and Transformation Director and Executive Board Member of Brico Depot Romania, delves into her career journey in change management, highlighting emotional intelligence and continuous learning.

Career Choice and Journey

I have been very lucky to work with amazing change leaders over the last 20 years; learning from the best how to help organisations embrace change was a privilege I truly appreciated.

My career journey in change management, in fact, was not so clear from the start and has become a discovery of a fascination in behavioural psychology and behavioural design.

In my first years, I was learning the power of marketing arsenals, helping organisations achieve their sales goals by making their service or products chosen by customers or even changing their habits with new solutions. By understanding customer needs, thanks to vast intelligence (whether qualitative or quantitive), supported by transactional data and connecting it with the knowledge of how we “operate” as humans–one can effectively translate the insight into a powerful program in marketing or any other field to achieve the goal of persuasion.

I spent 10 years in the marketing field. While working with customer data insight to grow company sales, I also had the opportunity to land various projects that made me realise how important it is to look equally deep into how we land the change within an organisation to maximise results while smoothing the disruption it usually brings at the start. 

"I strongly emphasize making data-driven decisions and encourage the project teams to harness the power of data analytics to drive business insights, help discover real issues and assess their scale before applying tailored solutions."

I discovered by testing and learning how to make the change successful and kept exploring the 'Why' behind failures. As my career evolved in other business fields like Operations, Commercial, and Strategy with various goals to be delivered for the company/customers, every area I touched had one thing in common. It was the need to progress. Businesses evolve by making progress either via continuous optimisations & improvements, small but steady steps, or by embracing the strategy of disruptive changes. The bigger the gap between the AS IS current company situation and the TO BE the company vision, the more important it is to build the robust bridge proposition to take people from the current state of mind, routines, and rituals to a completely different dimension. For me, this became a fascinating area of exploration and experimentation, testing concepts to help colleagues absorb new, move towards the unknown, and get out of their comfort zone while unlearning old practices. Driving transformation for me is also a living experience. I take myself out of my comfort zone to go beyond my role and beyond known fields to work with different functions, cultures, and countries, as I currently enjoy working in Romania.

Key Factors in Tech Leadership

We live in fascinating times from a technology perspective. Rapid technological advancements and evolving customer expectations seem to have no limit.

In the past, technology departments were focused more on infrastructure and enablement of basic operations. Yet, nowadays, the role of technology and business transformation is critical as a key enabler to drive growth. Key success factors are digital transformation (to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer experiences, create competitive advantage and create new revenue streams), strategic planning (linked closely with the tech as an enabler & driver of the agenda), innovation (creating environments that foster learning & experimentation), agility (in ways of working, prioritising), and last but not least, robust change management approach with E2E focus. All this depends heavily on attracting the right tech talents, retaining the best and ensuring the whole organisation can gain the necessary skills to leverage the endlessly changing technology landscape as well as the power of data & enhanced analytics to make the right calls for the right priorities.

I believe that to drive this agenda, leaders should be very strong communicators, deeply immersed in the reality of their daily business operations, while seeking external stimulus to provoke & challenge the status quo, benchmarking across industries to capture new opportunities and finding ways to embed the necessary improvements seamlessly. 

Measuring Tech Initiative Success

Before starting any major change or project in the organisation, the first and most important element is to analyse the AS IS with any potential data points to describe what is the business challenge, what is the customer disruption/pain point or challenge in the existing journeys, and what is opportunity, the potential for TO BE with improvements - all of this needs to be underpinned by data, which helps us identify where to focus our attention, as not every pain point is worth the effort & investment. 

Based on the nature of the endeavour, we choose the right KPIs, from process improvement and financial company performance indicators to customer KPIs like NPS & others or colleagues’ satisfaction via e-NPS or other detailed job satisfaction KPIS. This gives a fair variety of perspectives to assess the true impact of the change and its actual success rate. 

Managing Risks in Tech Projects

As part of the initial project scope mapping, business insight and external context analysis, our teams capture potential risks, define their probability & impact levels and depending on the business appetite to accept some risks, they put relevant mitigation plans, which are reviewed periodically by project teams to assess their effectiveness with sponsors as part of regular governance and to share with the Board for acknowledgement.

Leveraging Data for Informed Decisions

I strongly emphasise making data-driven decisions and encourage the project teams to harness the power of data analytics to drive business insights, help discover real issues and assess their scale before applying tailored solutions. I cannot imagine strategic planning without business intelligence, and it is great to see with the advancement of data analytics, ML, and AI, this has become so much easier for companies to access than years ago. 

Career Advice for Aspiring Change Managers

First, I am certain that change management is not only important in our professional careers to deliver the best outcomes, but it is also essential to grow personally & lead fulfilling lives. Two important pieces of advice from me would be to cultivate emotional intelligence, with self-awareness, empathy and relationship-building skills to become effective and truly authentic in understanding our audience & their challenges, and secondly, be a continuous learner, embracing a growth and learning forward mindset to learn from failures and successes as these experiences can lead to better decision making and leadership approaches in future. Being curious helps discover what is buzzling behind the scenes to tailor the right solutions at the right time towards the right audience. I would conclude by saying that we all need to be courageous to ask questions without judging but with pure interest in solving problems the best way we can, caring about our colleagues, customers, and partners.