LOCATION: London, UK
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Spanish and English
CURRENT ROLE: Co-CEO, Eightfold AI
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLE: Co-CEO Workday
BOARDWAVE ROLE: Patron
Sitting above Chano Fernandez’s desk in his London home is a black and white 3D artwork. It represents a cloud. “We live in the cloud,” Fernandez says, “and I have been working on software in the cloud for a number of years. That’s why I bought it.” Fernandez’s career to date is impressive. He launched a business – Blue C – which he took public on Germany’s former Neuer Markt stock exchange and has held roles at McKinsey, Infor and SAP. And, for nine years, he led enterprise software giant Workday, as co-president and then co-CEO where he helped scale revenue from $469 million to $6.2 billion.
With a talent for expanding businesses, he reveals his secrets to good growth. “You need a unique value proposition that appeals to the market,” he says. “And then it’s a question of setting the right purpose and getting the right people on the bus, so you are surrounded by great talent. Next, you need to ensure that there is alignment between the planning and ambition,” he continues. “Make sure that there is trust in the team and they work very well together. They should be aligned, working in the same direction. That is a great recipe for scaling up businesses.”
But the Spaniard’s successes are not just down to numbers, but exemplary leadership too. His management skills were recognised in a 2022 poll when he was voted the world’s second best CEO of a large company by Fast Company. (He was pipped to the post by HubSpot’s head, Yamini Rangan.) Fernandez’s somewhat unusual role as co-CEO, a model that Workday had used initially with two co-founders, is credited with bringing much success to the company. This shared responsibility meant that ego had to be set aside and that Fernandez and his co-CEO Aneel Bhusri had to play to each other’s strengths. “Aneel is very passionate about product strategy and technology. The way we divided it was: me on the growth and revenue side, and Aneel on innovation and product. But, of course, you cannot grow much without a great product.”
Fernandez confides that he almost didn’t take the job. “I’d had a few conversations with Workday for the EMEA President role, and it was a combination of me being happy where Iwas but also starting to believe the role would go to a native English speaker,” he says. “You try to be thoughtful about career changes and what is the right criteria for you. And you start thinking, do I want to make the jump when I am happy where I am? I did change my mind and I called them up to say I was withdrawing.” They wouldn’t take no for an answer and Fernandez was persuaded to take the job.
“You try to observe great leaders, and you see what this person is good at. And then ask, what can I learn from those traits or attitudes or skills?”
The Workday way
“Learning has always been a key criterion for me. If you keep learning, you keep growing,” he says. “You try to observe great leaders and you see what this person is good at. And thenask, what can I learn from those traits, attitudes or skills?” But, Fernandez continues, it is important to stay true to yourself too. “I don’t want to change authenticity. Because that has played well for me in terms of how people see me. That has created good trust, which is a great element when you are navigating high-performing teams – and I’m all about the teams.”
Interestingly, he reveals that it is not someone from the business world that he most admires, but someone from the world of tennis. “I like the approach of Rafael Nadal. He’s an amazing competitor, a super-hard worker and his behaviour is impeccable. When he loses, he doesn’t try to make excuses. He keeps working to improve, even when he’s on top.”
Fernandez believes that people should bring their best selves to work. And,as dancing is one of his passions, he has been known to get on stage and perform at big work conferences. Although he says that he draws the line at dancing in the office. Fernandez grew up in Cáceres, a province that borders Portugal and is the poorest region in Spain. He learned the value of hard work from his parents who grew up in the shadow of the civil war.
“My dad got his first pair of shoes when he turned 14. There was also a lot of hunger. I am very grateful that I inherited great values from my dad who always said it was about integrity, honesty and hard work.” His father also taught him that it was important to do the right thing, a value he has carried throughout his life. “I try to understand, analyse and not overreact. I am not the type of person who gets angry or shouts. I think it’s important to always do the right thing, even if it is very difficult to know what the right thing is.”
What does he see as the right thing? “For both customers and employees, it is to keep a long-term view in place,” he says, coupled with plenty of optimism. He gives two examples from his time at Workday, when he had to keep that long-term view in mind even when the short-term looked tricky. “I took the decision to grow ourselves at a time when we were decelerating,” he says. “And, when the pandemic hit, we were very calm, very thoughtful. We tried to do the right thing by understanding what our employees and our customers were going through.”
Workday now offers flexible working, but Fernandez believes it is important to spend time in the office together, because that is where company culture is cemented in ways that can’t be achieved online. Company culture is hugely important to Fernandez and
he acknowledges that the fast growth of Workday, which meant the hiring of many new managers, caused a drop-off in employee work satisfaction. It was something he witnessed first-hand.
“You go into the headquarters and you see people who are not smiling that much in the morning, or not saying hello. Or someone drops a piece of paper in the parking lot and it’s not picked up. At a big company gathering, people are complaining that the hamburgers are 45-minutes late, and then one or two people are complaining about it on social media.” He recalls a management meeting to tackle the problem in 2016. “We created a program that we’ve been doing for the last six or seven years. We get people together, either junior first-time managers, or more senior managers, and we have 800 to 1,000 people together for two or three days,” he says. “We talk about values and culture in action, how to manage our employees the ‘Workday Way’ and do the right thing with our customers. But we also talk about fun and integrity. We talk about what would be the right decision to make based on real-life cases, and we have round-table discussions about those scenarios.”
And the survey says
Fernandez studied physics at the University of Salamanca in Spain, and went on to gain an MBA at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid. “I’m a data-driven guy”, he says. At Workday, where he said the mantra was employees, not customers first, data was used to gauge how happy employees were. This was done via a Friday survey. “We asked two or three questions and it took 30 seconds to complete. Sometimes it was about strategy, sometimes diversity, sometimes it could be more about just testing the mood.”
He says that 80% to 90% of employees took part, providing “great feedback on the state of the nation, where people feel happier, or areas that we clearly need to double down on or focus on”. The data also showed that a diverse workforce performs better, something Fernandez is passionate about encouraging. “We put a program in place focused on our Black and Latino populations and we achieved a significant increase in the number of Black and Latino managers across the company,” he says. “We also hired for some positions based more on skills than university grades, and that also provided opportunities for underserved or under-represented communities.
The gender balance of senior positions at Workday is around 50% and he is also proud of the training programs that the company runs to entice women back into the workforce – including mothers who may have left the labour market to start a family but also those who have retired.
Fernandez stepped down from Workday in December 2022, and took up a new role as co-CEO at Eightfold AI in January 2024. As he looks back on a stellar career, he mulls over what he considers to be his greatest achievement so far. “I’ve been happily married for over 26 years and I have three wonderful children. That’s my main achievement, because it also gives me energy and keeps me happy,” he says. “I’ve travelled a lot throughout my career – several tours around the world. But I always aim to minimise the number of nights that I’m away from home. If I need to meet customers and employees, I try to bring it all together so I can return home as soon as I can.”
Tips From The Top
What are your top tips for business success?
1. Foster a great culture.
2. Get the right people on board.
3. Seamless execution and a sense of urgency.
How do you relax?
I like to spend quality time with family and friends, and I also enjoy listening to music.
Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?I practice salsa, disco dancing, and kickboxing a few times a week.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?Headphones.
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