Has anyone ever found their dream career by pure chance? This is Roxana Tudor’s story! An unexpected experience in an NGO ignited her passion for leadership and led her down a fulfilling path where she guides teams and people towards success.
Roxana’s journey was not without challenges, and through her own experiences, she learned how crucial it is to align a company’s goals with employees’ aspirations. Roxana Tudor, Marketo Integration Manager at IBM, was kind enough to answer a few of our questions.
C&B: Your leadership career started unexpectedly through an experience in an NGO. How did this experience influence your professional path, and what lessons did it teach you?
Roxana Tudor: The experience in the NGO gave me my first exposure to the different ways you can motivate team members to work together. By achieving positive results and coordinating different personalities, I realized I wanted to learn more about management.
C&B: You place a strong emphasis on aligning the company’s goals with the aspirations of its employees. How do you identify these needs, and how do you manage to strike a balance between them?
Roxana Tudor: I believe that every employee has certain aspirations when it comes to their career. From my perspective, to achieve the company’s goals, it’s important, as a leader, to clearly understand where each employee wants to go professionally and how they envision this growth. Based on that, the team members can be aligned in the most suitable positions within the organization, making it easier to achieve both the team’s and the company’s objectives.
C&B: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve encountered in leadership, and what strategies have you used to overcome difficult moments?
Roxana Tudor: The biggest challenge for me is always the recruitment process. I believe it’s quite difficult to fully understand a potential employee’s needs and desires during the interview process, especially to determine if they will align with the organizational culture. Often, candidates are eager to get the job but aren’t entirely authentic. In this case, someone might seem a good fit after the interviews, but once they start the onboarding process, they may not fit with the team at all. I’ve chosen openness as my communication style, trying to help candidates realize for themselves whether they are truly suited for the job. During the interview, I present real situations we face daily in the form of role-playing, allowing each candidate to see how they would handle the responsibilities of the future role.
C&B: You mentioned that a demotivated team member won’t achieve the desired results. How do you handle situations where an employee feels demotivated, and how do you decide when it’s time to guide them towards new opportunities?
Roxana Tudor: I believe demotivation stems from frustrations that build up over time due to situations that either can’t be changed or can’t be resolved as quickly as we’d like. When this frustration grows and one-on-one discussions with the manager revolve only around problems, I begin to shift the conversation toward shaping their ideal job. From there, the employee can determine whether they want to pursue something different or invest more time and resilience into solving the challenges they’re facing in their current role.
C&B: How do you apply the values of honesty, teamwork, and empathy in the organizational culture you’re building, and how do you integrate them into your relationships with your team?
Roxana Tudor: Through the way I behave every day with my team. There’s no concept of “Roxana at work” versus “Roxana in her free time,” and this has spread to the team as well. Regarding teamwork, I’ve created a transparent environment where everyone understands that we each have a unique strength. In this way, we know who is a good organizer, who can handle a difficult conversation better, and so on. Whenever a problem arises, we get involved in solving it based on these individual strengths.
C&B: What advice do you offer young people who want to become authentic leaders, given the importance of openness to feedback and adaptability to others’ perceptions?
Roxana Tudor: Something I learned very early on is that we should never criticize the person, only the situation. I believe this should be essential for any leader. When you receive feedback, the first thing to consider is that the person giving it might not have the experience to deliver it correctly. Also, most of the time, something that bothered the person was related to a specific context or situation, so the questions from the one receiving feedback are crucial. I usually ask, “When did this happen? It would help me understand the context so I can be more mindful in the future.” “Is this something you’ve noticed in me consistently?” “Can you give me examples of other times when I reacted this way?” I then finish by asking the person to point it out to me if they observe anything similar again.
C&B: What role does continuous feedback play in maintaining employee motivation, and how do you ensure that this process remains constructive and positive?
Roxana Tudor: I apply the principle I explained earlier: we don’t criticize the person, only the situation. Also, before I give someone feedback, I try to understand my own personal context related to the situation that bothered me. For example, was I tired? Did I have something urgent to handle, and was I rushed or stressed? When giving feedback, I explain the context, such as: “I was very tired that day, and it might have just been my perception, but I think next time we could resolve the issue more efficiently by following steps A, B, C, D—what do you think? Would you like to try that?” Once the team saw this way of communicating, they slowly started adopting it, and feedback became more of an alternative way to solve problems.
C&B: How do you see the concept of leadership evolving in the coming years, and what aspects do you think will become priorities for successful leaders?
Roxana Tudor: I think in a world where we’ve had a long pause in physical interaction, and most large companies are still focused on a global leadership style, where management is often in another country, we’ll need to quickly learn how to connect with our team members in a human way, despite the distance and the often disruptive nature of online communication.
C&B: At SMART HR, you’ll discuss the challenge of questioning the status quo in people management. What changes do you think are necessary in how organizations handle the personal and professional development of their employees?
Roxana Tudor: The personal and professional development of employees depends on the learning and career-change opportunities offered by each organization. For an employee to be satisfied and stay with a company for as long as possible, it’s important that they feel they can grow internally above all else.