Last week saw Boston host Worldwide ERC’s annual Global Workforce Symposium, a gathering of the global mobility industry’s biggest builders, innovators and disruptors. During the conference, ReloTalent CEO and Co-Founder Sebastien Deschamps sat down with Peggy Smith, Worldwide ERC’s President and CEO, to speak about business integrity, leadership and the importance of centralised global mobility management technology.
[Peggy Smith, Worldwide ERC]
So, here we are in Boston at Leadership Unplugged 2019 and I'm here with my friend Sebastien Deschamps. How are you? Good to see you.
So, you're the CEO of ReloTalent, right? CEOs have pretty big responsibilities and are really looked up to for their leadership qualities. What's the number one leadership quality you believe is necessary for CEOs to have?
[Sebastien Deschamps, ReloTalent]
Well certainly the values of business integrity, I mean, as a software company CEO you have to deal with a lot of the precious data of all of our clients. So, business integrity is definitely the first leadership quality we should see nowadays in every CEO because everybody is integrating more and more technology, more and more relationships with those data and the compliance aspect and the business integrity is fundamental.
[PS]
Yeah you know it's really interesting because when you talk about business integrity and we've put much more of our lives into a digital environment, and we tend to trust. Just, I know it as a consumer we tend to just trust that that exists because the opposite of business integrity means that you've broken trust. So really what you're talking about is a trust-based environment, so talk to us a little bit more about how you take this and weave it across your culture.
[SD]
Yeah, exactly, so internally what we found is that the HR managers nowadays used to rely on a number of vendor management platforms and member access to data vaults, so to say. And we believe that nowadays it's really about putting this layer of trust through one central place, which is one piece of software where they can have compliance and data security in one place.
So, that's very important for them not to be spread around not knowing where their precious data of their assignee; sometimes some important and personal data in our industry has been managed not so carefully.
[PS]
Yeah, I think that's the thing and you know more and more in cybersecurity being a sensitive item you've got to secure that.
So, I want to talk to you; if you were talking to young Sebastien, what piece of leadership advice, what would you go back and say to little Sebastien?
[SD]
Yeah well, I was lucky enough to start my entrepreneurship journey very early, but having said that, to a little Sebastian I would definitely say “do what you like”. Because when you start doing what you like you actually end up serving people better and they feel it very much when you interact with them so definitely at a younger age I would have started my entrepreneurship journey.
[PS]
Yeah, you would have said “do what you like”, which all this ties in to sort of finding your passion right and the whole integrity and authenticity you talk about. So, who were your leadership heroes?
[SD]
So, as a company owner, you always try to put yourself surrounded with people with same values right, and as a company, with multiple offices around the world you need to find those leaders for each of those offices and that's exactly what we've done. So, with three offices around the world, I had to find those leaders in each of those offices, and my co-founders are definitely there the role models for my day-to-day jobs today.
[PS]
So where are your three offices?
[SD]
So, in Vietnam, in Hanoi, and in Singapore, as well as in France, in Paris.
[PS]
So, you have an incredible challenge of making sure you bring this transference of leadership values across cultural divides that's quite the journey for you. I think that's going to keep you busy in 2020 and beyond.
[SD]
Oh definitely, thank you so much.
[PS]
Thank you so much, I appreciate you being with me.
[SD]
Thank you for the opportunity.