The former athlete with one eye on the bigger picture
LOCATION: Milan, Italy
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Italian, English and French
CURRENT ROLE: CEO, TeamSystem SpA
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES
Engagement Manager, McKinsey & Company
Senior Consultant, Bain & Company
Production unit manager, Procter & Gamble
BOARDWAVE ROLE: Patron
Federico Leproux is the chief executive of TeamSystem,an Italian tech company leading the market of digital transformation. Under his leadership, the firm has increased revenue from €78 to €650 million. During a career that has taken him from international rower to CEO of one of Italy’s leading software firms, Leproux has learned the importance of seeing the big picture and developed a passion for understanding how things work.
In July 2007, Leproux became the CEO of a small Italian softwarefirm with a staff of around 150, and 30,000 customers to its name. Today, TeamSystem has grown to employ around 5,000 people and serves two million customers. Much of the company’s success is thanks to Leproux’s leadership. “When I took on the role of CEO at TeamSystem, it was a very small company. We completely transformed it not only in size but also in what we do as a firm,” Leproux says.
Leproux was a sports-obsessed teen,and leading a software firm is far fromwhere he thought he’d end up. “I never thought that I was going to work in tech and software. I spent a lot of time and energy on sports. I was immersed in rowing as a teenager. I was rowing for my local team, and then for the Italian national team,” he says.
Leproux has faced many crossroads in his life, and the first was choosing between university and the Sydney Olympic Games, where he was due to represent Italy as part of its rowing team. “It would have meant spending six months in Australia, which was not compatible with studying. I had to decide whether I wanted to study or park it all for the next four or five years.”.
The deciding factor, and something that has shaped many of his life choices since, was a desire to keep his options open. “I would have to commit to being a sportsman for the next 10 years until I was 30, and then become a trainer or a coach. That would have meant deciding that the rest of my career would have been in rowing at the age of 20. I didn’t feel comfortable. I wasn’t ready.”
The driving forces
Leproux admits that he is a generalist by nature. “I feel constrained when something is forever, of narrowing my options. It is something I have learned – that I don’t have passions strong enough to quit all the rest. I’m quite well-balanced. Sometimes I almost envy people who have a clear drive or passion for something in life, because I think life is simpler for them.”
That’s not to say that he isn’t passionate. From an early age, Leproux was fascinated with engineering. “If you had asked me what I wanted to be when I was 15, I would have said I wanted to work for Ferrari.”
Leproux followed this dream to university, where he studied mechanical engineering. Afterwards, his childhood ambition of working for the iconic car manufacturer came within touching distance. “My girlfriend at the time had the chance to get her dream job at Ferrari. She spent six months – days and nights – in front of a desktop designing a small specific item,” he says. “The task was all about being a great specialist but, in doing so, you were missing the big picture. I realised that I didn’t want to do that. Understanding the bigger picture, more than the specifics, has influenced all of my career decisions.”
So, rather than opting for the Prancing Horse, Leproux’s first job was as a manager at the manufacturing firm, Procter & Gamble. “I was 20 something and I was managing around 200 people, all older than me, who didn’t have any career ambitions, didn’t have much chance of a salary increase, and who weren’t doing particularly stimulating jobs. It was an interesting chance to put a team together without having any incentives.”
Leproux’s experiences at Procter & Gamble had a big impacton his management style. “Trying to be part of the team, forgea positive environment, create a collective objective. That is something I have kept up throughout my career. I have always been guided by the leverage of the team and team contribution. Having a common vision and objective has always been a drive.”
Leproux’s team approach harks back to his early experiencesas an elite athlete. “My sports experiences taught me a lot about fairness, improving yourself, working on the details and knowing there are moments when you simply shouldn’t fail. And the concept of trying to win not just for me but for the team. Put aside your ego and contribute to the common cause.”
Rowing more than any other team sport, Leproux explains,is about working towards a common goal. “In rowing, it is impossible to tell which team member contributes the most. You are in a boat with eight people, and you have to do your best. You may be dead at the end of the race but no one will know that you contributed more than the others. This knowledge shapes the way I work, and how I expect my team to work.”
Stick or twist?
While Leproux moved higher up the ranks at Procter & Gamble, the Italian had an innate desire to keep moving. “They had this strict policy of promotion from within, which has incredible and powerful implications but was also dangerous because almost everyone who works at Procter & Gamble has always worked there. No one ever saw a different way of working. It is great to have a culture where you invest in people but there is a risk that you will not be able to work anywhere else because you think you’re not ready to adjust. I realised I was not ready for that.”
His next move was to management consulting, first at Bain& Company and then McKinsey & Company. “I started to have a clear idea of what I wanted to do – it was to be something in-between an entrepreneur and a general manager,” he says. It was while Leproux was on a management development course in the mountains above Montreal that he met a person who would later recommend him for the role of CEO at TeamSystem.
“We were doing some late-night drinking, and talking about what we wanted to do with our careers. I said I thought I wanted to run something.” The job at TeamSystem followed shortly afterwards, and he admits that it was a daunting move at first.“I didn’t know much about software, so I couldn’t be the guy who told them what to do. I was the guy who was asking, ‘What shall we do?’” But part of the benefit of his varied background is that he had plenty of experience to draw on. Leproux started by engaging his engineering brain.
“Being an engineer and having that mindset of trying to understand helped me leverage my team as doers and as thinkers,” he says. “At the beginning, it was a bit unnerving. It’s not really about making everyone happy but listening to how things are seen from different points of view. It is not necessarily that someone is smarter or right, it is having different points of view and frameworks of reference. It might take a bit longer to get to a conclusion or a decision, but the decision will be better.”
Putting family first
Leproux’s latest move is into fatherhood. “I came to it later andI don’t even know why. If you asked me 20 years ago, ‘Do you want children?’ I would have said yes. But in life, things happen. It’s a long story and very personal.” He says he is “ready to take on the challenge” of being a parent. “Starting at the age of 50, there are pros and cons, but I am much more in control of my life. I can spend more time with my children.”
He is also delighted to be a part of Boardwave. “It was an honour when Phill asked me to be a part of the team. Firstly, because it is about improving things. In Europe, we have great potential but it’s still somehow under-utilised. We need to work as a network, as one single industry at the European level.” The second reason he is enjoying his Boardwave membership is because it has opened a new path for him. “I have been very focused on my company, so I liked the idea that we could have a positive impact on the whole system of competitiveness.”
While Leproux’s biggest regret is not going to the Olympics “because the value of it is beyond sport”, he is not one to dwell on the past. “Every time I made a change, it was because I wanted to learn something new, have a chance to expand, and increase the number of options I had.” He has been in the same job for 17 years, and has discovered his real passion. “It is about understanding how things work in business, how an organisation works, how human beings react and how you can leverage the organisation. It is about understanding what raw material you have and then making the best recipe out of it.”
Tops From The Top
What are your top tips for business success?
1. Believe in what you do deeply andfor the long term.
2. Have fun while you are doing it.3. Pick, retain and empower the best team to achieve and share success: you don’t have to be right as a CEO, you need to make sure the right thing happens.
If you hadn’t become a software leader, what career would you have pursued?A career in sport, a large corporate manager,a partner in management consulting or a motorsports design engineer.
Can you tell us something surprisingabout yourself?For a while I thought I could pursue a career as a professional athlete. And two years ago I had no children, now I have two (for the time being). A new phase of life has just started for me.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?I am a mechanical engineer, and I still lovethe old-school technology achievements such
as boats, bicycles and cars.
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