Kate Pretkel: Transforming the Industry by Connecting People through Confidence and Communication

There have been many discussions on women in tech, women leaders driving successful tech companies, lack of equal gender representation in business, and more. Women leaders have always been a terrible deficiency in the business world. Many social factors stop women from breaking the glass ceiling. Here, we are coming out with one exceptional woman leader, Kate Pretkel, leading the HR team at EPAM. She is an excellent example for aspiring women leaders as she shares her challenging journey as a woman leader and her thoughts on the ongoing digital transformation and its impacts.

About EPAM

EPAM is a leading global product development, digital platform engineering, digital and product design agency. With engineering and innovation at its core, the company uses strategy, consulting, and design to help its clients solve the most difficult technical challenges. EPAM works with global organizations across a range of verticals, including financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, business information services, media, entertainment, telecommunications, and many more. EPAM is one of only four technology companies to appear on Forbes 25 Fastest Growing Public Tech Companies list every year of publication since 2013.

Redefining the Company Internally

As the Head of HR for North America and Global People Programs at EPAM, Kate is involved in designing the company's internal programs that stretch from onboarding to performance management and compensation. She is also responsible for HR software selection and development and acts as the product lead for some of the tools EPAM creates and uses internally.

Kate reveals that her career has not always been in HR as she started as an engineer with an interest in computer programming, web design, and computer graphics. Kate soon reached a point in her career where she realized her interest was more in engineers as people rather than engineering itself. After this enlightening awareness, Kate entered into the HR field without prior experience in people management.

A Successful Career Shaped by Struggles and Challenges

Kate believes that her childhood laid the foundation for her success as an empathetic and attentive leader. She shares that as a child she was bullied in school and struggled to feel accepted. This challenging experience taught her to always make sure that everyone around feels safe and comfortable. Kate says that regardless of the circumstances, it is important to make sure people feel connected and supported. Kate prioritizes this when rolling out new business processes and initiatives because part of her success stems from building up and empowering others to achieve.

Another part of Kate's success and confidence as a leader, she mentions, has stemmed from her familial relationships. As the daughter of an engineer, Kate's father included her in conversations about his career and encouraged her to help him fix things around the house. In doing so, she says she never felt like engineering was something intended only for men. Kate remembers how her parents supported all her interests and never imposed limitations, which later empowered her with confidence in a predominantly male-dominated function. Kate reveals that as an adult it became significant for her to choose an equal partner who would share the household duties. These personal environments have helped them to succeed in her career and made her empower others to do the same, observes Kate.

From Being Unacquainted to Leading a Company

Kate reiterates how she started her career in HR without any prior experience in the field and when she joined EPAM in 2012, the company was reinventing itself. Once she joined, Kate had to work on projects that no one else knew how to accomplish since they had not done anything of that sort before. Without prior experience or a management title, Kate joined management meetings and took the lead on how the company should proceed and communicate with people across the organization.

Kate acknowledges the challenge involved in the process, and she found it exciting and scary because the responsibility was huge. Kate knew that the team needed to lead change management to help the company grow and succeed.  The company wanted to create processes that worked for its people and not simply for the sake of having them. No one knew exactly what to do, but as a team, they all were committed to figuring it out, says Kate.

Transforming Leadership with Unique Qualities

According to Kate, practicing self-awareness and self-reflection is the most important factor to understand oneself as a leader, including learning what motivates them and why. In Kate's words, by understanding oneself more, a person can understand others and their perceptions better. In change management, Kate finds self-reflection critical, as it is a way to process whether change is understood and accepted. Start by asking yourself whether your actions or plans are the right things and why, says Kate. This brings another important characteristic, which is intuition because as Kate puts it, "If you feel like something is not right, you should stop to assess the situation." Kate believes that intuition is like an internal machine learning system that develops through curiosity and confidence. Kate admits that all her experiences and lessons learned came together to form this confidence, which indicates the importance of listening and trusting one's gut feelings.

Being adaptable and agile is another quality Kate believes is important for a transformational leader. The current complex world makes it almost impossible to create plans that will remain consistent. Hence, as Kate suggests, a leader should learn to adjust on the go and accept that one may not know all the answers.

Lastly, Kate focuses on fostering a product mindset that enables the leaders to strategically deliver the most value to their teams, clients, and stakeholders, and avoid doing something for the sake of doing it. This is important no matter your role, says Kate. She incites an example from her career. When Kate and her team consider rolling out a new HR program, she says how they think about it as a product for the employees. This allows the team to consider how they will be consuming it, the value they will receive, and how the company will communicate the plan, elaborates Kate. Listening to feedback is also a key attribute for leaders, as far as Kate is concerned.

Continuous Innovation and Evolution

At EPAM, the team is constantly reinventing itself and anticipating how the team can solve the next big technical challenges for its clients. Kate says that digitalization and digital transformation have been key focus areas for EPAM, both internally and for its clients. Before the pandemic, the company realized that its workforce was becoming more remote, which challenged it to rethink the employee experience and how technologies and programs can be leveraged to adapt. Kate reiterates that this thought process helped EPAM to quickly pivot and help both its employees and clients adjust to the disruption caused by COVID-19. She conveys programs and processes mustn't become stagnant as the world continues to evolve. Complexities are always growing, which pushes EPAM to continue innovating solutions and evolve as a company, discloses Kate.

Simplifying Business with Modern Technology

Disruptive technologies are here to stay and should be embraced, states Kate. She and her team continuously think about how to improve the employee experience and productivity with technologies like artificial intelligence and automation. Kate notes that these technologies aid in solving challenges by making them faster, providing more informed decisions, facilitating feedback, and fostering employee growth. Predictive analytics is another benefit that shows potential risks and highlights areas that need attention. For leaders, Kate adds, this means they have more information than ever before at their fingertips. This complex data can be overwhelming according to Kate, but with the right systems in place, its value significantly helps streamline the decision-making process and create new opportunities for success, she says.

The Future is Safe in the Hands of Technology

Kate strongly believes that digital transformation will continue to be at the forefront across all industries. However, to be successful, Kate clarifies that the focus should be on creating unique experiences for both customers and employees. Technologies will become more interconnected, raising the need to evaluate long-term strategies and business models, concludes Kate.

Keep Moving Ahead and Never Turn Back

As Kate suggests, it is normal and completely okay to be scared and feel like an impostor as a woman leader out there. Nevertheless, she asks these young women leaders to remind themselves every morning that they are good enough and can do this. Kate understands that self-doubt is exhausting and takes energy away from accomplishing more productive things. However, she reminds me that one should take the first step and do not be afraid to learn further in the journey. Kate intends to communicate to budding women leaders that making mistakes is normal, but they should never stop moving ahead as they might not know where the next step leads.