I assumed the leadership of Vertiv LATAM in November 2020, when the entire world was facing the worst health crisis in recent history, physical contact was restricted, and remote work became mandatory. At the same time, a sudden digital transformation of businesses and economies was developing as never before. Vertiv, a company that solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities, was considered an essential business in many world regions.
What an environment to start a new role! On one hand, isolation became an issue for our internal culture and relationships with customers and employees. On the other hand, we had to apply new strategies to anticipate our customers’ needs to provide them with the effective solutions they required at the right time.
I realized that we should focus on three things to meet the needs of the market, our employees and our business: integration, communication and inclusion.
Consolidate and Conquer
Recently in my professional career, I had the opportunity of being Vertiv Brazil’s General Manager. I led the country business for many years. This gave me the experience and knowledge to believe that Latin American businesses should work together, as one, merging our operational processes. Despite our many similarities, Latin America is an extremely diverse region, not only due to its different cultures but also because of the diverse languages that are spoken.
It is in that diversity where I can see our greatest opportunity for integration, especially during a pandemic. So, we conceived a new leadership identity called “One LATAM”, a plan to join forces within Vertiv LATAM and start operating as a single organization driven by a common goal.
Our objective was to comprehend the digital transformation processes, the market’s needs, and the opportunities we were facing from a regional perspective. With that initiative, we were aiming for more collaborative, transversal, and cross-cultural work, where we aimed for the highest levels of service for clients, no matter their location.
Communication as a Key Value
If we want to respond to the market as a single entity, we have to act as a single entity on the inside. For me, customer experience is built from what people live internally, so human talent is the first link to transmit to the market as? a goal of excellence.
Ensuring that internal culture during the pandemic, when uncertainty and stress were affecting workers around the world, was, without a doubt, one of my biggest challenges.
I have always believed that internal experience is built daily, through a series of guidelines and behaviors, promoted from the highest levels of the organization. What I had never contemplated was how to build it when we were no longer physically present on a day-to-day basis.
In this context, communication has been essential to promoting our organizational culture and build trust in our teams. As leaders, we had to learn to constantly communicate with transparency and empathy, making our people see that despite the distance, we were in this together.
Through the “One LATAM” culture, we look to inspire, facilitate, accompany, and guide our collaborators through a difficult time. The daily and weekly integration activities in a virtual format helped us maintain the feeling of closeness. It was not easy, but the effort was well received. In these two years, we have grown and learned a lot, but above all, I can say that today, we are a much stronger, resilient, and integrated team than we ever were.
Integrate Through Inclusion
Within a region as diverse as Latin America, inclusion is imperative. In the past two years, cultural differences have helped us promote interpersonal relationships and maintain constant communication between our teams.
From my perspective, maintaining diverse teams has allowed workers to think beyond their borders and increase their knowledge of the particularities of each regional LATAM market. Embracing diversity allowed us to have more generative listening, build consensus, and nurture a respectful dissent to seek the best decisions for the company and its customers.
At the end of the day, the integration of the region really happens when diversity and multiculturalism are integrated at every level of the organization. As we work in an inclusive way, we will grow more as an organization and develop our employees’ skills even further.
So, what's next? Post pandemic market standards have changed, and so have leaders. There are new needs and different forms of relating to one another, but if there's one thing that we have learned from this experience, it is that we must rely on our assertive and synchronized communication processes to take care of our teams.
