Ana Hirsbrunner: Creating High-End Technological Solutions Through New Ideas and Disciplines

Synectics is a customer-focused information management services firm that offers diverse capabilities associated with the core competencies of IT Modernization, Artificial Intelligence, Research & Statistical Analysis, Data Analytics, and Knowledge Management and Data Visualization. The company has focused on serving the needs of Federal Government agencies since 1976. By combining technologies, proven methodologies, and best practices, Synectics has developed a unique set of offerings to provide better and effective solutions to its customers. The effective remedies include IT solutions for public health, IT solutions for grants and waiver management, research & statistical services, the company's SynectikosTM telehealth monitoring platform, and cloud technology implementation.

Meet the Visionary Trailblazer

Ana Hirsbrunner is the President and Principal Owner of Synectics, a Woman-Owned Small Business (WOSB) in Arlington, VA, that supports several Federal agencies. Ana's connection with the company began in 2006 when she joined as a research assistant on a Health and Human Services contract. Fourteen years and several promotions led her to the position of President and Principal Owner of Synectics.

Ana has the privilege of leading an extraordinary team of professionals such as project managers, engineers, data specialists, technologists, and statisticians, who practice different disciplines but unite for a singular purpose: to make data meaningful for Synectics' Federal clients. Synectics is a fusion of ideas and STEM practice areas, wherein Ana ensures that Synectics as a company champions opportunities for women in STEM.

Synectics core competencies are data management, IT for grants management, healthcare IT solutions, DevOps, surveys, statistics, cloud initiatives, analytics, visualization, artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning. Personally, Ana oversees the company's Program Management Office, technical innovation and corporate operations, including business development while implementing Synectics' long-term strategic vision to be a leading WOSB in the federal market space. A key for Ana is empowering others to reach their professional potential and ensuring Synectics meet the needs of its clients.

Setting a Way And Walking Through It Without Distraction

For many years, Ana worked under her father's leadership who founded the company and learned how to run the business from an early age. She always knew the kind of leader she wanted to be: confident, empathic and innovative. Some people questioned Ana's ability to lead, based on her young age and gender. Despite that, Ana evolved her style to be fair and firm to set the right tone.

Ana's first action when she stepped into the role was to surround herself with a strong team that shared the same values and is good at collaboration. Ana was also engaged in making tough decisions like who would not be a part of the team. She welcomed different perspectives on how to run the company, but wanted people to work together and not against each other. As a busy leader of a small, growing company, Ana wasn't familiar with everything, so she trusted her leadership team and chose them with that intention. They strive for extraordinary results, and constructively challenged Ana, often with a out of the box approaches. She also focused on training to develop subordinate leaders. Ana believes that successful organizations need a bench of leaders.

As the steward of her father's legacy, a business he built from the ground up, no one could match Ana's level of passion and determination to take Synectics into its next-generation. Along with her passion, the company's leadership team has made changes in the right place that led Synectics to its current successful position. Ana is confident that Synectics can accomplish her future goals.

Resilience –  The One Mandatory Characteristic For Transformational Leaders

Ana insists that transformational leaders should have resilience. She says that good leaders will experience failure before they taste success; as the saying goes, 'The only way to lose is to give up.' Ana advices leaders that they will hear many 'why not's?' and some days will feel longer than others. She believes that in order to succeed, leaders need to recover, move fast and be steady in their purpose.

Ana presumes that as a leader in technology, transformational leaders will have more than one sleepless night and advises leaders to trust themselves. Ana mentions that the leader's brain is always running at a 100-miles-a-hour, and even with the best team behind them, they still have a constant concern that the engine will stop running. She questions if leaders do not dare to keep working despite the upsets, then who will? No matter what, leaders must get back up and keep striving to get to "yes" and build wins. Ana alerts that leaders will have people around them who can quickly tell that certain tasks are impossible. She suggests transformational leaders not to be one who accepts others' opinion on giving-up. Ana asserts that leaders should keep themselves engaged and motivated to make their team follow them.

The Three Pillar Strategy For Innovation

Synectics processes rest on several pillars. First, the company seeks to develop an understanding of its customer's current and future needs. Their future needs are often based on the application of emerging or even revolutionary technologies. What Synectics learns from this informs the company's second pillar: Synectics looks into the future through the lens of emerging technology. The Synectics team studies these emerging technologies and asks themselves, 'What if?' Synectics answers the question in its third pillar: The company's innovation lab called 'SiLab.' In SiLab, the Synectics team studies and tests emerging technologies and applies them to openly available data sets to see how they might be used to provide more efficient approaches for the company's current and future customers.    

Overcoming the Challenge of Earning Team Members' Trust and Confidence

Although Ana's succession into the President's role had been public knowledge and planned for several years, her promotion happened during wide-ranging changes in the organization. After 12 years with Synectics, Ana's colleagues respected her as a contributor. Yet, Ana knew there were (understandable) uncertainty and doubts. Many team members were more tenured and experienced, and Ana was the untested leader, asking them to trust her and the revised strategic vision for the company.

In her experience, people fear changes regardless of whether it is good or bad. It was no different back then. During Ana's first year, she worked harder than anyone else to prove that she was the right person for the role. Ana knew that she had to earn employees' respect as a leader. What helped her the most during those months was her good listening skills.

Understanding the employee's concern and considering their recommendations and comments, while balancing the new vision and corporate interests were Ana's strategies. She still embraces an open communication style with her team and makes decisions together. Collaboration is vital to Synectics culture. The team's core competency at Synectics is harnessing quality data to make more effective decisions. It is what employees at Synectics do for themselves and the clients.

The Path Ahead

Synectics is always looking into its crystal ball about what the future will bring, and the company has a disciplined process to do so. Synectics VP of BD manages the company's strategic planning process to help employees carry their capabilities into the future and to new customers. Synectics COO is trained in scenario planning and applies techniques he learned in past experiences to predict what future business environments will look like and the emerging threats and opportunities for business. This helps Synectics to see opportunities and risks early. For example, the company identified the risk of COVID-19 and entered it into the corporate risk log on January 23, 2020, about the same day that the US intelligence community reportedly briefed the President on the threat.

This gave Synectics several extra weeks to prepare and test all of the company's systems in the event that telework became a requirement. As a result, Synectics was fully prepared for the company's customer transition to telework and have had no employees become ill, have lost zero billable hours as a result, and were able to begin to look for ways that the company could support its employees, customers, and nation during this tragic period. Synectics customers took note of the situation as well.

Words of Wisdom for Budding Women Leaders

Ana advises emerging women leaders to be clear on what their vision is as a leader. She remarks that it will guide the leaders in their actions. Ana guides leaders to hire people who are smarter than them and asks leaders to be willing to listen to them. To be an effective leader one must develop exceptional listening skills to hear what their team says and what is unsaid. Ana discloses that she was impatient, so she learned to pause and give her team undivided attention. In the end, it made her job easier and got Synectics closer to achieving the company's goals. Ana instructs leaders to trust their instincts and follow the gut. In a nutshell, she tells leaders to hire smart talented people, listen to their input, have a clear vision, and trust their instincts. Invariably this will lead to success.

Ana informs that something that is palpable as a woman-leader is being a parent. Personally, she has a sense of guilt that comes from balancing the time demands of growing a business and simultaneously being a good parent to her two young boys. She briefs that those demands are real; women play many roles, and at the end of the day, everything may not get done. Ana directs women leaders to give themselves a break once in a while and know that it's okay to say 'no' to those people or things that are keeping them from attaining the balance leaders need. She concludes by asking women leaders to stay healthy and successful.