Interview by Armin Forstner
We met Verónica Pascual Boé, CEO of ASTI, one of the fastest growing automated vehicle companies in Europe, to speak about her personal leadership journey and how being a positive and mindful leader in the age of Industry 4.0 not only transformed herself and her company, but will also transform the lives of the next generation of (female) engineers.
Tell us more about your own leadership style, how has it changed in the last 10 years?
I don’t know if my leadership style has changed, I have always been very collaborative, trying to get the right people into my teams, meaning people that have the strengths for the work to be done and helping them building these strengths.
When you think about the leader as hardware, a leader is like an antenna that tries to communicate. For me, my hardware hasn’t changed but I became a lot more conscious. Being more conscious allowed me to be more responsive, where I would have been more reactive in the past. I became a more sensitive antenna, to stay with this metaphor, that is much more in tune with the overall mood and my abilities grew, especially my analytical capacities and how I receive feedback, positive and negative, either from my team or third parties and how I use this feedback in this highly competitive market.
Growing in this highly competitive market with these high levels of uncertainty, feedback can even appear aggressive. So, it is important that you create a space as leader where you can receive this feedback and market pressures and improve without putting too much pressure on your team in order not to destroy their engagement.
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