Inspired by innovation and driven by the desire for comprehensive inclusion, Gina Perini, CEO of Somos, Inc., is advocating for diversity and collaboration across the ICT industry.
In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review during the 18th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, Perini emphasized the importance of welcoming more women into leadership roles, an ambition that aligns seamlessly with Somos’s guiding principle, ‘Go Further Together.’ She further shared her opinion on the progress that has been made over the past year, the transformative power of female leadership, and the collaborative strategies essential for overcoming the industry’s evolving challenges.
You were a speaker on the ‘Women in ICT’ panel at the 18th Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, where you mentioned that you “want to see more women welcomed at the table.” Now a year later, do you think the industry has progressed in this domain?
It's definitely been a year of progress. I think, like anything, this is about systematic change that takes a long time. You have to put the wheels in motion. You have to really think about what you want the change to look like and how you will facilitate that change. In the last year, we've seen progress but we need to look ahead with a long-term ‘North Star’ mindset to increase the representation of women and other underrepresented people in leadership roles. These are the roles where we really need the best and brightest to enable innovation as the world is changing fast.
For me, it's important to identify how we can bring this great talent into our boardrooms and to events like this so that we can really meet a future that consistently requires creativity and innovation.
How does Somos’s "Go Further Together" initiative aim to shape the future of telecom, and what collaborative strategies do you believe are key to driving innovation and overcoming the challenges facing the industry today?
Thank you for that question because it addresses how, as a company, Somos identifies how we can work together internally and with our external partners and customers to ‘go further together’; It's always about collaboration. We always look at how we can converge our ideas to solve problems.
Internally, we address this by identifying how we can work together and leverage our strengths to solve our customers’ and stakeholders’ problems.
From an external perspective, it’s why this event is so important as well; it's bringing together different folks across the industry, whether it's people who are at the governmental level, people who are working as service providers, or people who are part of industry groups trying to solve big issues not only in telecom (now that there's so much technological innovation) but in the broader landscape.
'Going further together’ encompasses how we can take all that collective intelligence and make the future so much brighter.
Your advisory and executive board currently comprises 10 women, including yourself. Taking this into account, can you elaborate on the impact that female leaders, particularly those in executive roles, have on driving business transformation?
I like to surround myself with the best and brightest to achieve our customers’ and stakeholders’ goals; thus, those numbers make complete sense to me because you want to be surrounded by the people who are thinking ‘outside of the box’ as we try to figure out how to adapt in a fast-changing world.
When I think about my leadership team and the people in my organization, I always try to recruit the best talent, and as we all know, you have to find those people. They're out there in the world and they're not always in the places we expect them to be or in the same groups that we're in. We need to actively seek out women and underrepresented people in our environment to attract them to the telecom industry because there's so much happening in the telecom space. We want to make sure that we're exciting those people and inspiring them to be a part of the change we want to see—which is more innovation and more adaptability.
We have multiple technologies and we need to figure out how to leverage them to create a more trusted telecommunications industry, bring more exciting innovations, and offer better experiences to our customers and those that rely on communications in their everyday personal and professional lives.
Attracting people to the telecom pipeline will only make us stronger, more innovative, and will equip us with the ability to meet future needs and serve consumers across the world.
Do you think women in leadership positions have adopted more traditionally masculine traits, personas, and leadership styles to bridge the gender gap on boards?
I think anyone who wants to be a leader needs to be who they are. They need to be authentically themselves to truly lead because if you take on traditionally masculine roles, or any other type of gender-stereotypical role, you won't really be you.
Leadership is about meeting people as they are, making connections, and helping them understand your vision. If you are presenting a persona that's not you, then it's really hard for you to make those connections and people won’t truly understand your goals.
I love to see different types of leaders in action and learn from them so that I can see how I too can adopt different strategies as a leader. I think it's always better to be who you are and build from there. As the world embraces this, I think we will see really exciting developments in the future of leadership.
Perini at TRS-24: Women in ICT: Breaking Gender Barriers in the Industry
