#7 Leadership essentials with Rafi Katanasho

As a Vice President of Solution Engineering, Rafi has firsthand experience leading teams in an ever-evolving industry. For him, leadership is about passion for people, helping them to walk towards the vision of the company, and acting with integrity towards customers and the team. Get ready to explore Rafi's insights on leadership and what it means to be a people leader.


In this episode, you'll hear: 

• What it means to lead from the front  
• How to know you're ready for people leadership 
• Key attributes of a good leader  
• The significant impact of active listening 

Where to find us: 

• Connect with Rafi Katanasho on Linkedin 
• Connect with Sue Quackenbush on LinkedIn 

Discover the opportunities at Dynatrace and take your career to the next level: careers.dynatrace.com

Transcript

Rafi Katanasho

And I believe leadership starts and ends with people. It's about making sure that we're connecting with people—and humility and, of course, leading from the front.

Sue Quackenbush

Leading from the front. That is one piece of what we're going to talk about today. Hi, I'm Sue Quackenbush, and I am your host of this next episode of Real Talks. I'm here with Rafi Katansho. He is our VP of Solution Engineering for all of Asia-Pac. And Rafi, when you speak about leading from the front and humility, those two things really strike me as the key to successful leadership. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that if you could share more.

Rafi Katanasho

Absolutely, Sue. And good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you're watching this from. So leading from the front to me, means I must make sure that I'm still connected with our customers at the front, understanding the pains that they're actually going through, understanding the challenges that they're going through, and helping connect the dots between their technology challenges and the business goals that they're trying to do. And so that's what leading from the front means, means I need to make sure that I'm spending enough time with my customers and my partners to understand, you know, the challenges at the frontend and to leverage, obviously, the wealth of experience and good judgment in helping the team be able to navigate the complexities of dealing with the front and the team themselves feel like they can trust you because you have dealt with that from the point of experience and not just theoretical backend judgment kind of perspective.

Sue Quackenbush

And when you think about leading from the front for yourself specifically, you've been a leader for a long time; you have teams. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you show up and lead from the front.

Rafi Katanasho

Yeah, the key to bringing the teams together is about bringing them around a shared vision, right? We need to have a shared vision and a common goal, but it's also trying to ensure that we maximize the, you know, the personality styles, and within the sort of engineering community, you've got a few people that are like, you know, potentially that could be strong opinions and there's a lot of them that could sit back and listen like a very conscientious and very detailed core-oriented people. But when they speak, it's like pure wisdom. So as a leader, you need to ensure and make sure that everybody is given the opportunity to contribute and to be listened to amongst the team members, regardless of how strong or different style their personalities are. And about also celebrating our success together. And I think that that's an important thing. So, you know, we have "work hard, play hard" kind of mentality in sales. And that's the mentality actually, though, we work hard when we need to, but we also enjoy ourselves at the same time.

Sue Quackenbush

No, that's great. And let's take it from the perspective of someone who's not a leader right now, and they want to become a people leader. What would you recommend some of the behaviors or actions do they demonstrate to really start their leadership journey?

Rafi Katanasho

Yeah, I think the key here is to understand someone's real, real intentions here, because most people want to become sometimes a lot of people want to become a leader because they feel or at least a people leader because they feel that that's a way of progressing their career. Maybe, you know, better packages and better salary and things of that nature. And I think if if that's the only intent, I think you've got to really question yourself and really dig deep inside of you to see whether you have passion for people, passion for the vision of the company, passion for helping and taking out of your time to actually lead the people.

Sue Quackenbush

And I think, you know, when someone does decide that they want to go down the people leadership role.

Rafi Katanasho

Yes.

Sue Quackenbush

What are some of the key attributes of that individual that they should be aware of?

Rafi Katanasho

The key attributes is, first, you need to be someone who understands, who cares, and listens to the people. As a human-level supervisor, we initially mentioned at the beginning, you know, connecting at that human level. If you feel that that is part of your passion, connecting at a human level with the individual and, you can see the big picture and help to drive that big picture by developing, you know, those individuals. And that's something you should be definitely exploring.

Sue Quackenbush

In that connection, through listening and really trying to get to know and understand the individual not only from a work perspective but from a holistic perspective.

Rafi Katanasho

Yeah, And I think, you know, you're right that you know, there's a big blurring between work and the personal life, and it's very blurred specifically in our kind of field that we're dealing with. And I think it's everywhere. So and. Oring means that you need to have a holistic understanding of the human and their needs. Right. And to be able to sort of connect with them.

Sue Quackenbush

Sometimes it's just sitting back, and the hardest thing to do as a leader is to listen, ask those questions, seek, and understand. And there have been recent articles about leadership with kindness and just being able to to say, Hey, wait a minute, I understand we have all these pressures and deliverables, but let's connect at the level of I know you go home at night, and you have a life outside of work. And so being able to really care and want to understand what's going on in an individual's life, I'll give you an example. I'm in Gdańsk today. I met the team last night and spoke with one of my colleagues, and then she was sharing with me what's going on in her personal life. And if you realize the amount of what we're trying to do during the day, working hours, and then also what they're dealing with outside of the home or outside of work, it's compounding. It's it takes all your energy. And how do you navigate that? And as a leader really leaning in to understand what I think is critical. Yeah.

Rafi Katanasho

I think you've hit the nail on the head there up to about listening to the teams, listening to their concerns, to their successes, to their challenges. And it's not always about, you know, giving them directions of what to do. Still, often it actually involves a lot more listening and obviously some, you know, wise advice in terms of, you know, the the challenging that they're doing. And they need to know that you've got their interests at heart. You want to maximize their potential as individuals and I think, to fulfill the vision of the company. You know, people obviously talk about customer experience and how important that is. But to me, the customer experience reflects the employee experience. It's a reflection of how well we're treating our teams. And then they're obviously reflecting, you know, the experience that they're having. Would you go back to their customers and to their partners?

Sue Quackenbush

I 100% agree. And the other thing I thought of when you were saying that is I was just in a meeting earlier with the guidance leadership team, and the interplay between the three leaders of this office was phenomenal. And you could see that they have the relationship and you're like, Wow, you show up like that in front of a client and customer or a broader employee base. It is just actions speak louder than words. And it was just so magical. You're like, Wow, you guys really, really enjoy working together, and what you're bringing to you believe passionately in what this team can do. And it did. They did have to say they showed it.

Rafi Katanasho

Yes, that's right. And that's when really belief people said and start obviously believing your message when you're passionate. And I think given that Dynatrace really got a great vision of helping the world deliver better software is that's a great vision to ensure that we are bringing that technology into the hands of everybody to be able to use it flawlessly and securely. So this is a great vision we're trying to bring to the world around us. I think that is a wonderful vision that we have, and it's sort of cross to get the team around living that vision and fulfilling it with our customers and partners.

Sue Quackenbush

Yeah, it's leadership, it's a team, and it's one. This is awesome. So, Rafi, I want to say thank you so much for your time today. It was fabulous having this conversation with all our listeners. If you'd like to find out more about Rafi and his journey, check him out on social media and his LinkedIn page. And thank you so much.

Rafi Katanasho

Great pleasure, Sue. And likewise. Thank you.

Sue Quackenbush

And thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Real Talk. Subscribe to stay tuned, and more episodes will come.