As Janice Hoogeveen, Head of Marketing at Terrywhite Chemmart reflects on her career in the latest episode of Leadership Amplified, one key piece of advice that she passes on is to always look for the learning opportunity.

She was and remains keen to receive feedback, as she knows just how important it has been to her.

She says, ‘If I learned the hard way, I found out what I could do better next time.’

‘What did I do well, what could have been done better, is there a learning opportunity?’

Her career has spanned Australia, Switzerland and the US, and through that she’s learned a lot about understanding different cultures, and the impact on problem solving techniques and leadership styles.

She found that having frameworks helped to navigate these differences, manage relationships with stakeholders and reduced the guesswork in decision making.

Here’s a summary of her key lessons:

✅ Get in quickly with new roles, and within the first 60-90 days find a way that you can add value, otherwise it’s easy to get lost in analysis paralysis.

✅ Be really honest and authentic: with experience you become more comfortable in your own skin.

✅ Build relationships with people at all levels across the business

✅ Learn continuously because it could take you down a different path: you can pass on what you learn to your team

✅ Create a team charter – this is a recipe for how the team operates and a way to keep everyone accountable

✅ Share the love, because passion motivates. If you have a particular skill set and people need help in that area, share your skills across the wider business.

The key focus for our discussion was on how leaders can successfully navigate the increasingly digital world we inhabit.

Alena started her career studying English, then moved to Economics and finally settled on Geography in her quest to understand why things are the way they are.

Geography provides her with an interesting perspective, revealing how much our lives are informed and touched by where we live.

Over time she’s moved into the technology side: she says we have a big data problem as we’re always collecting masses of geospatial data, and the big challenge is what to do with it, how to learn from it?

Which is now her day job as Principal, Technology and Strategy, at Digital Twin Victoria.

Alena counsels leaders unfamiliar with/suspicious or nervous about AI to take the time to become familiar with the technology tools.

She reassures us that it’s easier than we might think.

Her tip is to use a simple AI tool and ask it all your ‘dumb’ questions about other tech tools to build your understanding of what’s going on.

Her three top pieces of leadership wisdom apply both to leading in general, and leading through technology:

📌 Relationships first – as a leader you have to build the bridge to your people, so psychological safety, reaching out to others, providing support and being empathetic are critical to leading well.

📌 Ask the stupid question – that way you can direct yourself through situations and information that is unfamiliar. There is so much change we’re always beginners so stay comfortable in not knowing and always asking.

📌 Leaders are great communicators, that’s they’re real strength, so use these skills to help technical teams to get cut-through for their work, and to help them understand what the organisation needs from them.

🤔 How does your placein your environment affect the way you lead?