March 23, 2022
33 min Listen
Learn lessons from the former Chief Procurement Officer of Lufthansa on leading teams through challenging times.
In this episode of Masters of Digital Transformation, Tony Saldanha hosts Angela Qu, Senior Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer at Lufthansa Group. Angela’s more than 25 years of experience have focused on organizational transformation, people development, supply chain management, procurement, and management consulting.
Angela was recently named one of the most powerful women working in supply chain by SupplyChainDigital.com and was featured on the Procurement Power List for 2021 by the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply. As CPO of Lufthansa Group, her vision is to transform the procurement function to further enable the company’s success and create value for the customers, employees, and society as a whole.
Key Takeaways
Be a humble empathetic leader
According to Angela, workforce transformations related to innovation in ESG and sustainability always start with the people. In her over two decades working at Siemens, ABB, and Lufthansa Group, Angela has remained focused on leading with empathy and empowering her teams by hiring people who are sharper and more skilled in key areas and by serving those talented experts. To achieve success, she worked to create an honest, transparent, and fair team culture, which allowed her teams to perform at the highest levels through empathy.
Make an impact from a people perspective
While Angela’s achievements are extensive, she’s proudest of not only leading the highest performing units but also having the happiest people working in her organization. She attributes this success to raising leaders who care for their teams by fostering diverse and inclusive cultures that inspire and motivate employees to go the extra mile. Early in Angela’s career at ABB, she started a women’s development program within her function before it was rolled out globally. This program now serves as the framework for their entire DE&I program.
Build long-lasting trustful relationships with suppliers
Angela led her team with a strong focus to build trustworthy relationships with suppliers through fairness and respect. That does not exclude having high expectations towards suppliers. She encourages organizations to drive end-to-end solutions with ecosystem partners in the area of efficiency, innovation, and sustainability.
About the authors
o9
The Digital Brain Platform
o9 Solutions is a leading Enterprise Knowledge and AI-powered platform helping companies build Agile, Adaptive & Autonomous Planning & Execution Models for transforming enterprise decision-making in environments of rising volatility and uncertainty. Whether it is improving forecast accuracy, matching demand and supply and driving collaboration across the multi-tier supply chain to improve resilience at optimal costs and inventory, or optimizing new product and commercial initiatives to drive revenue growth and margins, decision-making processes from long-range to tactical to execution horizon can be made faster and smarter and connected on o9’s Digital Brain Platform.
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