Stephanie Pope is part of the leadership team heading up Boeing Global Services, a new business unit with which Boeing aims to increase their services revenue from $14 billion to $50 billion. Stephanie is vice president and chief financial officer for the new unit which is headquartered at Legacy West.
“We’re bringing together our commercial and government service capabilities into one business focused on being the number one aerospace service company in the world,” Stephanie explains.
As keynote speaker at Plano Profile’s 16th annual Women in Business conference on September 29 at the Renaissance Dallas at Plano Legacy West Hotel, Stephanie has some advice for all leaders—male and female.
YOU’RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR TEAM
“I think very early on in your leadership journey you recognize you’re only as good as the team, and that forces you to transition from being an individual contributor to being a leader.”
CHANGE DOESN’T HAVE A DEFINED END
“I think change is hard because we try to define it as start/stop activity. Change is something we have to embrace every day and acknowledge that every time you have one success or one setback that there will be another one coming at you.”
THE RIGHT WOMAN (OR MAN) FOR THE JOB
“As a leader you’re constantly developing talent and matching talent with the needs of the business. In a very dynamic business environment you’re always assessing if you have the right people doing the right jobs in the right areas. It’s just an ongoing evolution as you grow and change and develop a team.”
BE INTENTIONAL
“I have been very intentional as a leader. I come in every day and focus on being the type of leader that I’ve worked with in the past that I aspire to be: humble, thoughtful, very intentional in my actions and really focused on developing people. People took risks on me and gave me opportunities, so I try to be very intentional about building my team and taking risks on our future leaders.”
CULTURE EATS STRATEGY
“Culture eats strategy: You can put together the perfect strategy, but if you have the wrong culture you’re never going to succeed. As leaders we spend so much time on execution and strategy, that we really have to work on being deliberate and intentional.”
FROM FAILURE COMES SUCCESS
“Very early in my career we had an issue—a big visible failure for the company—and I was leading the team. I remember going to speak to my boss, who was also my mentor, but before I could even get my first sentence out he said, ‘Stephanie, you need to stare into this and acknowledge it was a leadership failure.’ It changed my perspective on my career. We all fail, but out of failure comes success. You don’t innovate the right solution every time. You can’t be afraid of failure.”
Stephanie will be addressing all these topics and many more at our 16th annual Women in Business conference on September 29 at the Renaissance Dallas at Plano Legacy West Hotel.
