Putting Your Idea of Success Down on Paper
You always get an underlying sense of backdrop and ambience when you talk to Federica Ambrogi. For example, when she explains that “it is better to create work environments in which different models of success are celebrated because this is the only way inclusive and cohesive teams can be formed that share the results obtained and know how to reason about mistakes”. And how do you build a professional climate like this? “By recognizing the path of personal awareness that each of us takes, when we understand what type of career we want and what goals we want to achieve, be they professional or private. It is from these elements that we must start to build, brick by brick, a more inclusive and high-performance work environment.” This is the immediate reply of the Bocconi Alumna and Business Administration graduate, who now works as Taboola’s Regional Director for Southern Europe, and works according to very clear commercial sales objectives at a technology company specializing in content discovery and performance advertising. But equally, “I know well that the concept of success has full value in a context that balances the short term with the long term: I set my quarterly objective but I also have to consider whether I have achieved it by increasing customer loyalty and whether my team was able to face unexpected challenges without hesitation,” continues Ambrogi.
She began to understand what future she would want for herself by writing it down on a piece of paper. “It is a kind of practical advice I always give to younger people: take a pen and write your definition of success on paper. Maybe it will change later but by putting down your general vision and the practical steps to implement it you prepare yourself for the future. It also helps to explain to others clearly who we are and what we want. I wrote my vision and then specified it by emphasizing how long I wanted to work in a company aligned with my values, what field I wanted to work in or what kind of manager I wanted to learn from,” says Ambrogi. Today she has put her professional philosophy into practice outside her company, by coaching young executives. In this second activity of hers, she begins precisely by trying to identify together with her mentees their specific way of being, behaving and communicating, their scale of values.
Federica Ambrogi's attention to gender, age and class diversity was born almost by chance by following a course in business strategy that had topics such as Chaos Theory or the concept of relativity: “After those lessons, something clicked in my mind and I began to get a better grasp of the many subjective aspects of reality,” recalls the London executive. “But I must say that, in a broader sense, the propensity for openness and inclusion was born in a small room, perhaps the ugliest one, in an apartment I shared in Milan with three Dutch students, during my university years. At home I interacted with a different culture and a window onto the world opened up for me. I became fully aware I wanted to become a citizen of that world. In the end, I lived and worked abroad a lot over the years, in various countries including Singapore, Qatar, and London where I have lived for 20 years now.” However, it happens that work environments are not always inclusive and multicultural. How do you solve this problem? “It is always possible to recognize so-called blind spots, the hidden elements that prevent us
from cultivating diversity. If you don’t know where to start, just look at the numbers,” says Ambrogi proactively. “If you want to pursue gender equality, then it is important to look at the number of women in top management. Then it is immediately clear whether the strategy for gender equality is efficient or not. And it may well not be, if you are looking for a female executive but then the job requires in-office presence five days a week,” Ms Ambrogi notes with a touch of irony, recalling that women still have the additional burden of children to deal with.
