A Career Outside the Comfort Zone
“I always need to keep moving; I like to get out of my comfort zone to seek new challenges and to experience moments of transformation. Even at the risk of feeling a little inadequate.” Laura Cioli is an electronics engineer and one of the most highly regarded managers of her generation. The list of positions she has held is a measure of her professionalism, which has allowed her to reinvent herself in several sectors: from TLC to media to energy. Today she is the CEO of the Sirti Group, a company specialized in the design and implementation of large telecommunications networks. During her career she has also served as CEO at RCS Mediagroup, Gedi, Sky Italia, and CartaSi (now Nexi), as well as senior vice president of Eni Gas&Power and executive director of Vodafone Italia.
But how do you get to the top by following a non-linear path? (Cioli earned an MBA from Bocconi after graduating in engineering from Bologna. “Only four of us were women, out of 400 students,” she says). “The first big step in my career was consulting, which I still think of as a knowledge accelerator: it allows you to see many things in tandem and follow big projects. The learning curve is very steep.”
Curiosity is one of Cioli’s personality traits. Her drive toward discovery grew to the point where, after eight years as a consultant, she wanted to change fields. “The trigger was that I wanted to go beyond the concept of ‘recommendations and next steps,’ the document that consultants leave at the end of a coaching session. I wanted to find out how it would work to be the person who actually took the steps, measuring the recommendations against the results.” So she entered the private business world and faced the challenge of developing in a fast-growing company like Vodafone.
The other milestone is to become the person who takes the decisions that transform the company. She did that at Eni, Sky, and CartaSi. “I like to see a company with a direction that’s marked out, and I think it’s the job of a good leader to communicate that to everyone. The manager works a bit like an orchestra conductor, aware that a company is never a single engine, but has many different sources of power: its people.” It’s a philosophy that she takes with her wherever she goes in her career.
She says: “Moving from one industry to another is tiring; there’s always a sense of inadequacy when you arrive in an industry and you’re not on top of things, but it’s also a motivation to learn. And I am someone who always asks a lot of questions; I love working with people from different businesses and backgrounds.”
Beyond her executive roles, over the years, Cioli has served as a non-executive director on various boards: Mediobanca, Sofina, Brembo, Autogrill, Pirelli, Telecom Italia, Webuild, and Ansa. “I was there – and often I was the only woman in the room – long before the gender quotas that helped increase the demand for women on boards. For me, it was an opportunity to see other business contexts and to learn more,” she smiles. As the mother of a teenager, she advises younger women to work hard and set goals: “It helped me on my journey that I had the title of engineer and I was seen as a technical expert. I’ve had the attitude – ‘the more I see, the more I learn’ since I was a girl, and it has paid off.” For Cioli, this approach is fundamental because it helps you grow and “enrich yourself along the way.”
