Our next speaker is the head of strategy, transformation and Innovation at Orange International Networks.She's in charge of defining the strategy of Orange International Networks and she's as well an innovation catalyst leader in promoting a data centric strategy together with several initiatives to scale use of A I and big data automation and network functions virtualization. She, she leads a large transformation, promote agility, adaptive governance, autonomy and self initiative. In order to enhance the delivery performance, please meet Kola Cao Lao. Hi, Koan, welcome.

Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. It's my first time and uh I'm really happy to be with all of you. I can see all the and feel all the good vibes.

Thank you very much and great. I hope for the first one but not the last one. Do you have slides? And if you do, I will stay with you just a second to make sure we're all set.

Y Yes, I do have slice. Um OK. Good.

Just click the screen sharing button. Yeah, it's happening. We see your slides. Great. You're doing already a great job. I will leave the stage to you and we'll be back for Q and A. If you have time, enjoy and

have fun. Thank you, Ana Thank you all. Um Happy to be here with you. Um So uh if you're a woman, then you have the right profile to become leader. I guess if I have said the same sentence. Um 40 years ago, I may have been seen as a crazy person or a nonsense person, but today it is quite close to the reality. So let me ask you a question first. Do you see yourself today as a leader or having the skills to become a leader? Do not hesitate to use the chat. But I bet that if you're attending this event, I will have a lot of yes answers. But in the reality, in your opinion, how many women will answer? Yes, I believe not so many. And actually less than 40% of women working women. When they're asked this question, they do not want to be a leader or have higher positions in the organization. Why is this a question of confidence women have, have all the skills to become leaders. They only have to dare. I want to share with you a personal experience that I had a few months ago. And that left a huge imprint in me. Well, I had an open position, um 100 engineer, uh management role and I had two candidates equally qualified. Um They graduated from the same in school in year, a man and a woman. Well, you can see me coming. Uh I had a preference for the women actually and no discrimination here. She only had a more diverse career. Uh She works on marketing, on technical environments.

Uh She uh had experiences in several companies and I thought it will be a good fit. So I met both of them and the interview confirmed my first impression the the lady was really a good fit. So I was ready to uh to hire her. And a few days later, uh I've been contacted by the man, uh reassured me about his motivation that he has all the skills to, to be the right fit for the role. And I had a call from the lady and she told me that she can read the position and she thinks that she do, she doesn't have all the skills for the role and that she wants to start with the lower uh position in the organization. And then maybe uh a few years later having this kind of position. I was a little bit shocked and I told her that actually I disagreed that I see her in this position that she has the skills, she has the background and that she is a good fit, but she was, she stood firm and she, she, she has made up her mind and she told me that she is afraid of failing, especially that she was in charge of her two kids and that she was afraid the job will be so much that was really disappointing.

And it was the real time in my career, not a long career, but it was the real time I really experienced and I really faced what we call the confidence gap. And I saw how much the woman which for me was even more qualified than the man s so herself, I mean, was lacking of confidence and the man wanted the job and felt himself enough skills for the position. So um I myself never have uh would have um refused such an opportunity all the way around. I always thought in order to progress in my career, even if I've been told that I am young, I am impatient. I didn't have the skills I wanted to progress. And uh when I had my first uh kid, um I set myself a challenge. I didn't want my kid to uh or my motherhood to uh to slow down my career. I had some uh inappropriate comments from time to time from my colleagues saying that I am leaving very early that I am coming late to work because I had to uh to put my, my myself, my Children into kindergarten. And I asked myself this question at that time, do we have to choose between motherhood and career success?

And I want to share with you my personal experience in the um while we are working, talking about motherhood, it won't be very long I only have two kids um at uh in 2017, uh I was 28. Uh and I was having a very good, it was a critical time in my, in my career. Uh I was having a lot of success in my projects, having my management and uh my, my management consideration and recognition. Uh I have been promoted to my first uh management uh role. Uh And my daughter was two and I, uh and I decided that it is, it was time for me to have my second child. But I was afraid that motherhood and that fight of having a second child will stop or slow down my career progress. Um I was afraid of announcing to my employer that I will be not, I won't be here for the seven coming months and that I won't even be able to answer emails or, or phone. But again, I took the risk and I decided to um not have to choose between my personal uh life and my career success. And I was confident in my capacity to catch up after my maternity leave.

And there is something I can tell you today is that if you are capable of managing two toddlers, there is nothing on earth you cannot do. And this is exactly what I told my um my employer at a job interview after my maternity leave. And I got the job. Uh I've been appointed as chief of staff. At Orange International Networks, which is a very, very challenging job role um with a lot of work. And people told me first, are you crazy? Hundreds of two years and uh three months and you took this position and I didn't see it as a big challenge. Um The job required a lot of stress resilience, uh a a big amount of work um organization uh capacity to adapt to, to learn, to react fast to, to, to imagine the long term uh to see, I mean to apply on the on the short term and to imagine the long term impact. And actually this is what mothers do. And there is something I can't understand mothers do that every day, why they don't do it at work again. It is a question of confidence and I was successful at this role and I've been appointed two years later as my current position as Head of International Network Strategy, innovation and Transformation, which is actually uh the biggest progress I ever made.

And I've, I've never even dreamed of having such a progress in such a short time. And today I'm really happy. I didn't have to choose between my career progress and my personal life. Well, we have talked about personal life and personal challenges. Let's talk about professional challenges.

Today, we are living in a very transforming world with a lot of technologies that are transforming the way we work, the way we live with. Five G Artificial intelligence satellite constellation, bringing connectivity everywhere, cloud native native services, bring bringing s services everywhere for all companies and all customers.

And today, the challenge is that we need to learn fast and to adapt very quickly. For example, artificial intelligence will change the way we live. Uh We will live in smart sixties, drive, smart cars have smart fridges, designing menus or even sleep in smart beds uh helping us to sleep better. But it will also change the way we work. A lot of people believe actually that more than 50% of our actual job will be transformed or even disappear uh replaced by artificial intelligence. But there is something for sure that artificial intelligence will never be capable of changing or replacing its human emotions and emotional intelligence.

So in order to coexist in a world that will be technology and A I driven, we have to develop our emotional intelligence. And actually, it would have been obvious, made obvious nowadays that um emotional intelligence actually is very much linked to leadership and that people with high emotional uh cautions are more likely to become successful leaders at the, during the, the previous talks, we have talked about emotional intelligence and II I guess that cooper explained uh what emotion emotional intelligence stands for.

Um But let me just remind you uh what are the, what is emotional intelligence where emotional intelligence is related to a lot of emotional uh capabilities that we can uh group in four main components, inner components, self-awareness, self management, and outer components, social awareness and relationship management.

Um But I think here that women has a real leverage, we develop emotional intelligence naturally since we are small kids, let me give you an example to illustrate that um for girls, it is very easy to cry. I mean, it is normal or acceptable to cry when they are sad with cheese. The natural way to express sadness. Boys are not allowed to cry because they must be strong. They are not uh pussies if I may say so, so they don't have to cry. So when men are sad, they are angry, they shout, which is not the normal way to express sadness because anger is different than sadness. So you see here that since we are boys or girls, little boys or little girls, we uh uh develop or not our um we develop or not our emotional intelligence. So gender bias starts from the beginning and both men and women are suffering from gender bias. The there is a uh a study, a corn, um a corn um just I don't remember the, the name of the study. Um Let me just check my notes. Um Yes, it's, it's a court. The study that showed that women uh scored higher uh on emotional intelligence capabilities when men and women are having the same leadership position, women always scored higher. Well, not to create an uh a new gender bias here uh about the superiority of women.

They relate that to the female brain and the male brain, both men and women have female brain and male brain and emotional intelligence is more related to the female brain. So the idea here is that in order to develop the emotional intelligence, we should develop our female brain.

Um I wanted to share with you uh also uh an important thing that we have experienced the, the last month all together, we have lived during the last month. Um an unprecedented crisis since 1918, since the, the Spanish flu. Um It is a very, very strong crisis and guess what the countries that had the best response to this crisis to the COVID-19 crisis has something in common. They are all led by women. Well, I guess that you have seen this post on Twitter or, or linkedin, but I have a personal experience that I wanted to share with you on, on that, on that purpose. I've, I've been in charge of the COVID crisis management in my entity and or international network, uh managing the impacts, anticipating the strategy in order to react and also anticipating the the the impacts on people, the return to office after the lockdown, et cetera. And um I had a lot of male peers having the same uh responsibility in other entities in, in orange and they were all struggling with communication. They wanted to um to communicate about the fact that everything is under control, that we uh we have, we have, we have everything handled, but I decided not to come with that. Uh I, I decided to be transparent.

I shared when I had doubts when I had questions because it is a very unprecedented crisis. Uh I shared questions with people. Uh I listened to them and I adapted to them. I reassured them about our capacity to adapt our capacity to listen to uh their requirements, to listen to their fears and to listen to the, to their questions. For example, after the lockdown, um people was afraid to come back to office, they were afraid of getting the COVID at the office. So uh I asked them if they ha if there is some volunteers that want to come to the to the site before the, the, the, the big opening of the site and return back to office of, of people and to check if they can see something we can improve in order to enhance the security on site.

And we have a 10 volunteer team that has been created by uh among among the employees and that came to office and that gave us a lot of ideas. We didn't have, they were very happy to contribute and then they were very reassured of what we have been, we have put in place also after the, the, the lockdown and when people started coming back to office, um A lot of companies I heard was pushing people to come back to office.

Um And even there were some teams in, in my company pushing people to come back to office because they, I wanted to see people. I mean, we spent uh three months working remotely and the work was done. Why the hell we want us, we want people to come today to office. So I listen to people actually, I had two of people, people who want to come back to office uh because they, they wanted to have a kind of return to normal and people was afraid of the COVID. Uh And even if we explain to them that uh we don't catch COVID, but there was a lot of security, et cetera, et cetera. But they were afraid and we should take that into consideration otherwise we will have this engagement. So I decided to listen to people and to let everyone go at this rhythm and we had a meeting after a, a kind of retrospective meeting after, after no, what announced after the return to office. Um And we asked people about what the way they feel, their, their feedback. And I got really positive feedback. I, I got no uh negative feedback about the organization, the communication we had and I had AAA feedback of someone and I, that really left an impact on me.

Uh He said today, I would like to be nowhere, less, nowhere else than Orange International Metrics. And I said, I saw people nodding and I was really, really happy of the way we have managed this crisis. I'm

really happy to hear, to hear that. And I'd suggest to finish this wonderful presentation on this positive note. And thanks a lot for everything you shared and everything you do. I really love the example with the female led countries because they are in fact performing better.

And uh thanks to amazing female leaders. Thank you very much, Kola and stay with us for the networking. We'll be glad to have you speak at our future ones. I see you are very passionate about the topic. And thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting me and thank you and uh have a good day. Hope you enjoyed this

virtual experience. Thank you very much. Great. Thank

you. Bye bye.