Episode #4

The man in the center

Interview with: Tomasz Konik
CEO at Deloitte Central Europe

What did Tomasz Konik, a boy from Silesia, want to become in primary school and how did he manage his career to eventually take the prominent position of CEO of Deloitte Central Europe?

In the Top Leaders Club podcast, we talked about professional goals that are not always possible to define at the very beginning of your career and going with the flow of professional opportunities.

Interestingly, Tomek is another guest in the Top Leaders Club whose professional success contradicts the stereotypical thinking that long careers in one place of work are synonymous with lack of development and work is boringly repetitive.

We have delved deeper into this topic. Listen to this interesting story!

Tomasz Konik
I try to encourage people to experiment. The goal is important, but the path to that goal is equally important. And by the way, experimenting often opens up various other possibilities that we don't see at the very beginning. Not only do we have to have, as we call it, "accountability" in all of this, but this experiment can also happen up to a certain point. That is, if we see that it's terrible and doesn't bring anything, we also have to have the ability to say - stop, turn around, go in a different direction. Experimenting is probably the most difficult part of managing people. People act, and I've seen it many times, repetitively. I've asked many times - why do we do something this way? - Well, because we've been doing it for years. Ok, but that's not the answer. - But we don't want to try differently. And it's not easy to convince people to start thinking differently.
Tomasz Konik says, CEO at Deloitte Central Europe
During the conversation, we mainly focused on leadership and business aspects:
  • effective leadership and encouraging people to experiment,
  • the strength of diverse teams, developing talents, and putting people at the center,
  • Deloitte’s feedback culture and values ​​that motivate long-term careers,
  • burnout, benefits, and costs of work in consulting,
  • the future of consulting in an era of galloping technological progress.