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Sandrine Desbarbieux-Lloyd is a senior executive with over 25 years of international experience, leading organisations in the implementation of strategic change and digital transformation. She is the European Vice President of Digital at Samsung, where she oversees digital sales and marketing, a multi-billion pound business across 33 countries in Europe. In this role, she is driving major innovation, including machine learning applications.
Previously, Sandrine was the Director of Marketing and Digital at Avis Budget Group with the responsibility for all digital platforms and marketing programmes across Europe, Middle East and Africa. In this job role, she focused on growing the digital business, specifically direct channels, and successfully increasing revenue year–on–year.
Sandrine has also held several senior e-commerce, digital and marketing roles for internationally recognised consumer brands including BT, LACOSTE, AXA, BAA, E.ON and BUPA.
Notable in her career is the national launch of broadband and Wi-Fi for the first time in the UK. This extremely challenging role involved defining the wireless strategy for BT Group following the de-merger of 02, building a mobility business, launching BT Openzone the UK's first Public WLAN service, and the re-launch of BT Mobile a new SP/MVNO business.
During her career, Sandrine has driven several major digital transformation projects in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Throughout those projects, she has learnt some valuable lessons and she shares:
1. "I spend a lot of time investing in people, recruiting experts who are different and better than me in their specific areas, and building teams who will challenge me in every way every day which is the best way to learn and continuously innovate. I find the most mature leaders surround themselves with experts, question, and listen attentively before they make a judgment. Early in my career, I learnt that inclusively going around the room, asking for views before making a decision always helps me make better decisions in the end."
2. "Like all big transformation projects, some of them succeed; some of them fail before they succeed. I have learnt to accept failure is the first step to success. If we don't try anything nor take risks, we cannot go forward. As I was going through a complex e-commerce re-platforming project, a President I worked with demonstrated the best leadership behaviours I have ever experienced. Whilst the initial pilot was not successful, he insisted that I carried on, that he had a trust in me to resolve the issues and find a way forward, which we did as a team. He taught me that in leadership, you only earn the right to challenge and lead if you also know how to support. The best leaders are challenging, yet supportive, encouraging, praising and rewarding. I try and be as good as a leader to my team as he was to me.'"
3. "Whilst working through large multinationals, and with the help of business coaching, I learnt that stakeholder mapping and 121 engagements is critical to business success. I now spend a lot of my time and energy understanding various leaders around the business, what motivates them, drives them, and more importantly jointly agreeing how we can help each other. People are at the heart of any business so working together is the only way to win."
4. "Transformation roles are very intense, especially those rooted in technology. As a leader, I try to help fix the basics and also constantly keep an eye on the future and what growth areas we should focus on as a team, such as AI."
When Sandrine was young, she initially found it challenging to know what company and industry she wanted to work in and what role she wished to do. "Everyone was advising me to get in FMCG, but I found myself working in Telecoms when companies were strategically moving into ICT (Information and Communications Technology)," she says. It was a big and exciting challenge for her. At the age of 25, she was building e–Commerce solutions, running multi-million campaigns across traditional and digital channels, launching Broadband and Wi-Fi for the first time in the UK, etc. Whilst on that journey, she met a few clients who were resistant to change. "I remember the Marketing Director of a global hotel chain who mentioned she didn't believe Wi-Fi would ever take off! Looking back, I realise now that one of the biggest challenges in my early career was to understand clients and stakeholders, and why they were resistant to change, and how to take them along on that journey with us," She adds.
Leadership Qualities:
As per above, to be successful in driving change, Sandrine believes transformation leaders should always:
1. Identify key stakeholders, clients and suppliers
2. Actively listen by asking open questions
3. Try and understand the different agendas and motivations by putting themselves in the shoes of their stakeholders, clients and suppliers
4. Define a win-win strategy
5. Surround themselves with teams who are better than them
6. Deliver against promises
7. Support in challenging times and praise/reward success
8. Measure everything (ideally align those metrics with commercial measures agreed at Board level).
"I think that 'change management' is a misunderstood function, which is crucial in transformation," she says. "I have had the chance to work with fantastic change managers in my career, and it is a vital role in the organisation because it does not deliver the change itself, but it allows leaders like me to take people on the journey of transformation through training and communication for example. The key to successful growth is not what you implement but how you implement it," she adds.
Sandrine believes that the key to product innovation is customer research and meeting customer needs. "At Samsung, we go one step further, we innovate in our products and services not just by understanding what customers want, but what customers do not know they want," she states. Customer needs and behaviours change all the time; every generation, every segment, every customer is different, so it's a core skill in the organisation. We put our customers first," she said.
Sandrine believes that the new era of tech (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Deep Learning/Automation/Cloud Computing/Big Data) will drive profound change, and these changes have already started in many ways. But according to her, these technologies are also causing a lot of uncertainty for leaders. Sandrine states, "At least 50% of our human tasks today could be automated, leaving people to focus on more valuable pieces of work." She adds, "In life, people are generally time insufficient, so they seek out the quality of content, but machines don't suffer the same constraints and so will dramatically increase the speed of change that teams can deliver on a day to day basis. How do businesses get ready for that shift?"
"How do the marketers transfer our knowledge from selling and marketing to people to selling and marketing to machines?" she asks. Leaders will need to lead the change without understanding it themselves. They will need to build a test and learn cultures in fast, agile environments. Businesses will need natural leaders who can deal with ambiguity and complexity more than ever."
As per Sandrine, the future is going to be AI-based, and it is around the corner, so get involved, read, learn, try things, fail, learn fast and re-apply. There are going to be so many opportunities that come with it in the space of intelligent automation, but also in machine learning algorithms helping a business run better and faster.
It was reported that this year only 17% of people in the tech specialist roles were women (source: The Guardian UK, April 2020) so the industry needs more diversity. Diversity will make women in the tech industry even more successful. "The best teams are made from differences," she adds.
