Solita Culture – Part 2: Autonomy and professionalism

“Everything is flexible as long as the work gets done. This level of autonomy and trust is something that we haven’t experienced before.” These are the words of our two Belgian colleagues, Michaël Bouraga and Brice Angiono who started their Data Engineer journey at Solita in June last year. I think their wording pretty much summarizes the alliance of autonomy and professionalism at Solita.

Although it seems like a simple coalition – autonomy and professionalism, let’s open this up a bit. Autonomy is often described as freedom. Freedom to decide how, when and, where you do your work – and to some extent also what you do. But autonomy also means accountability and responsibility. And here professionalism steps in. How well we understand our role as part of the team, how we seek ways to develop others, alongside ourselves, do we ”know what we know”, what we need to know, what we need to learn, when we need help. And most importantly, do we have the skills to reach for others – offer and ask for help.

Professionalism loves curiosity

Professionalism loves curiosity. Meaning the will and eagerness to find out, to seek, to fail and try again, to be brave. To do new things – as Michaël and Brice continue, it can mean for example this: “In addition to technical learning, we’ve also had a chance to grow the team. It’s been interesting to think about the roles and profiles that could fit into this project; something new for both of us. A business analyst, a data architect, a scrum master, and a data governance specialist have joined the team. We currently have people from the Finnish and Swedish offices in addition to our Belgian crew.”

At Solita we are focusing heavily on building all the skills needed to help our customers drive change, digital transformation, and user-centric services. So, although we are much about tech, the value we create doesn’t solely come from technological knowledge and know-how. It can also come from our ability to communicate and form efficient teams with others, the curiosity to learn, or carrying the responsibility from start to finish – and beyond.

Value-creation also comes with high levels of self-leadership accompanied by the support of the community.

Our Growth Academy focuses on skills development on a wide spectrum – a good example being Data Architect path, where we coach data professionals to find the essence in Data Architect’s role to consider multiple approaches to demanding situations in projects and to support their teams even better than before.

To be seen as professional in the eyes of the customer means focusing on practices and ways of working both as a community as well on the individual level. At Solita we want to focus on both.