Santiago Argelich Hesse, CEO of Cellnex Poland, Europe's largest digital infrastructure provider, shares his approach to leading diverse teams that are aligned with both local market needs and a unified global vision, as well as how the maturation of the digital infrastructure sector is changing talent needs, specific skills, and mindsets. He also shares the strategies he feels are most important to foster trust and alignment within the leadership teams of organizations during a merger, and what specific steps he took to minimize attrition and ensure continuity of expertise, especially for critical leadership roles within the strategy of the expanded organization.

Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior-level executive search, leadership assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture shaping. Every day, we speak with leaders around the world about how they’re meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Hi, I'm Lukasz Kiniewicz, partner in charge of Heidrick & Struggles’ Warsaw office and a member of the global Technology & Services Practice. 

In today's podcast I'm excited to speak with Santiago Argelich Hesse, CEO of Cellnex Poland. Santiago oversees the company's operations and strategic initiatives in the Polish market. Before assuming this position, he held various leadership roles with Cellnex Telecom, contributing to the company's expansion and integration efforts across Europe. His international experience has equipped him with a diverse perspective on leadership and market dynamics. 

Santiago, welcome and thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. 

Santiago Argelich Hesse: Thank you for having me. 

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Santiago, to start off, could you tell us a bit about how your international journey from Spain to Germany and now Poland has inspired your approach to leadership? In what ways has working in Poland shaped or reinforced your leadership style?  

Santiago Argelich Hesse: Sure. I had the privilege to have an extremely international journey in my career. Obviously, my Spanish-German origins root my leadership in both of those cultures. Today, after twenty-five years of international exposure, I'm in Poland, which is certainly one of the most interesting and unique environments. 

To be very clear, yes, my leadership is defined by a sequence of international experiences that took me to almost every single continent and had me working in extremely diverse environments. But at the end of the day, I am extremely defined by my origins and the cultures. On one side, the Spanish culture takes you into a highly relational, people-oriented management and leadership environment, where culture is very important, where collaboration is key to any relationship, and where adaptability is basically the definition of management. This goes together with my German roots, which are structuring and driving a lot of management decisions through process. 

Now the combination of the two—on one side efficiency, precision, long-term strategic thinking, and on another improvisation, adaptability and fast reaction—you can use both of them. It's just a question when and how it is most effective to use one or the other. 

Now today in my career, I'm in Poland. Poland in particular, for me, has reinforced the importance of the empowering of the team and fostering the culture of trust. I found those two to be very specific challenges and lessons—hard lessons—that I had to go through in the last four years where I have been based. I think Poland is unique in the way that it is incredibly ambitious and entrepreneurial; that drives talent and talent evolution. As a leader, that's what you need to explore, that's what you need to use and leverage to make a company successful. 

Now overall, I would say that yes, I have the privilege to have had a very diverse and culturally rich experience in my journey. Somehow, that helped me especially to embrace diversity and inclusion values in a much deeper and different way. For me, at the end, the underlying key success factor is open communication and understanding that leadership is not about a single model. It's not a book with a single concept that you read, apply, and can be successful everywhere. That's not what works, especially in a very diverse and international environment. 

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Sticking with cross-cultural implications and with Cellnex International footprint in mind, how do you lead diverse teams that are aligned with both local market needs and a unified global vision? 

Santiago Argelich Hesse: At Cellnex but also personally, we believe that diversity is not to be oversimplified in the question of gender and age. We think that diversity is also different ways of thinking, working, or approaching or adapting to change. That is as important as more, let's say, structural diversity dimensions. We have expanded internationally in a very accelerated and fast way, entering 13 European markets in a pretty short period of time, 5 years, and we had to integrate a diversity of different organizational cultures. 

When you grow so fast through acquisitions, your company—within a given country and across countries—is a melting pot of different cultures coming from different company backgrounds. The challenge in diversity and inclusion is here not about defining a common policy for everybody, but recognizing that each of these cultures, coming from a different background, has its own value, and how you bring them together is the core part of the strategy. 

So, we look at it in a very structured approach. This is about making sure that you don't get into deadlock because you have discrepancies and diversity of culture within each of the local organizations. Therefore, you need to bring everybody onboard by homogenizing the building blocks of any culture. Those are the way you hire, the way you promote, the way you develop talent, the pay equity. You need to align those basic pillars, because otherwise it will be impossible to bring cultures closer together.

The real impact comes at the end of the day, once you can really focus on how to redefine, how to embrace, how to develop a better common culture starting from very diverse and different cultures. So, our goal is to reach that. I'm proud of what we have achieved till now, but we are certainly not at the end of that journey. It will take a lot more adapting and embracing values and collaboration to effectively bring together not only local organizations but countries, to maybe reach an ideal stage in the future—which is rather an objective than a kind of thing that ever can be achieved. 

Now, leading diverse teams today, which is the reality with different cultures, is about creating this environment where different cultures can come together, can understand and communicate effectively with each other, and, by doing so, can redevelop themselves into a common culture.

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Santiago, Cellnex has indeed achieved phenomenal growth, becoming Europe's largest digital infrastructure provider largely through M&As. During a merger, which strategies do you deem most important to foster trust and alignment within the leadership teams of both organizations?

Santiago Argelich Hesse: So, I think there is no universal way of achieving this, because not only does the management team have its unique talents that you need to take into account, but there are also shadow areas in every organization. The CEO is a person with specific experiences, beliefs, and success stories that precede him in his experience, and that is nothing that you can generalize or put on but a common framework of what makes you successful or what makes you fail. 

I would start with the awareness of your own preferences and of your own leadership style, recognizing the areas where you are not talented. We all have this. Being very self-aware is key to then develop or complement yourself with the necessary talent, inviting the people that bring what you cannot to the table. So, I don't think this is very original at the end of the day, but the risk is that if you don't embrace diversity, you surround yourself with people that fit well with you—that align with you on the things and make management smooth and easy—but you lose the richness of the diversity and the complementarity in a leadership team. 

I typically like to confront my own ideas and solutions. I don't say my ideas in advance; at least I try not to put forward what I think is the solution or what I think is the action to be taken with my team. But I ask them. I then tell them, “Can I be your sparring partner?” Or I do it the other way around: I give a hypothesis and ask them to be my sparring partner. But open up! There is nothing better to consolidate leadership than having constructive debate. 

At the end of the day, you’ll be surprised that you get to very similar conclusions and can avoid falling into a trap that is, I think, a killer for a leadership in such environments, which is when the CEO is the only one who knows. The temptation in an environment where communication is not the easiest, where diversity sometimes requires putting yourself in the position of others, can push you either by urgency or by crisis to think, “I'm the CEO. I know everything—just do what I'm telling you to do.” The moment you fall in that trap, you're basically destroying the leadership in a company like ours.

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Speaking about talent, talent retention can often be a challenge during mergers. What specific steps did you take to minimize attrition and ensure continuity of expertise, especially when it comes to critical leadership roles within the strategy of the expanded organization? 

Santiago Argelich Hesse: Talent rotation is a major challenge overall, but specifically in Poland where the job market is so competitive. It is a key to the success of any company. At Cellnex in Poland, specifically, we make this a key priority. We approach it in different ways, both by structuring and adapting the organization to the talent we have and to the development of that talent, and then operating in a way where we try to make sure that we generate opportunities that create incentive and motivation for the people that work in our country. 

I think, sometimes, there is too rigid a view about what is the optimal and right way of organizing a team and we go by over-simplified principles. We do not realize that we are creating a glass ceiling or capping the opportunities and the possibilities of talent to strive to develop and contribute even more to the business. I always surprise people when I say that our industry, which is the infrastructure industry—you would assume it's a boring, stagnant, and unstable environment, but it happens to be exactly the opposite. I think it's a permanent change. There are continuous challenges. There are continuous new strategies and projects coming to the table. Retaining talent is, in many cases, making sure that everybody in the company can be part of the development of these new projects, of these new challenges. That was what makes people want to stay in the company. 

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Digital infrastructure is foundational to the modern economy. As the market matures, what does that mean for talent? Are there any specific skills or mindsets that will define success in digital infrastructure?

Santiago Argelich Hesse: Sure. Let me first draw a picture of those challenges specific to Poland. I think the Polish telecom market is undergoing a major shift, probably the largest shift in the last two decades, and it has huge implications for talent. First of all, I think the infrastructure ownership and management has changed. It has changed overnight, extremely fast. We as Cellnex are moving from serving single clients into developing what we call the neutral host model, supporting multiple clients.

So, an infrastructure that was captive and kind of a sunk cost within a given company becomes a platform that has to serve as many clients as possible in the market in the most efficient way possible. It is quite dramatic for talent that has been working in that industry under a different paradigm for over two decades to move into a model where all these fundamentals are being ratified. 

I think the second one is that Poland is still in front of a massive infrastructure investment, and it is no longer limited and constrained to the mobile operators or the fiber operators. I think the investments in digital infrastructure are now critical for railways, airports, private 5G, indoor connectivity; the market is evolving very, very fast, and adaptability is critical. I think there is still a big gap to close before on the talented professionals in this industry can embrace that there is much more beyond a mobile network. 

Third is the fact that the separation between the infrastructure and the service is so transformational that it takes time to fully understand. If you are part of an MNO [mobile network operator], you're a service company. And yes, you have to strive for innovation, for new product development, for quality of service. If you are part now of an infrastructure company which is a separate company, you are striving to enable the growth and creation of new infrastructure and managing infrastructure in the most efficient and open way that it exists. That separation means that people and talent in one part of the digital ecosystem and the infrastructure ecosystem are different and acknowledging that is still far from being a reality. 

So in a nutshell, what does it mean for talent? I think yes, technical skills continue to matter a lot; this is an industry full of engineers. But the mindset is key. Yes, I love these VUCA and BANI concepts, and they drive the world. Everything is constantly and unpredictably changing, and that is a reality in the infrastructure. However, I would say as much as we have to embrace this, this is an industry where we design a plane. We need to make it fly in record time, and it has to perfectly work. So, as much as we like to be agile and adaptive, we still have very stringent commitments not to crash the plane, even if we have to make it fly in a very short time period.  

So, it requires a special kind of talent, and this is why mindset is so important. The mindset is: extremely skilled and proud to continue learning and developing on a technical side, and, at the same time, can be agile under very, very strict conditions of reliability, continuity and safety. Here is where we have the key challenge to make sure that we have 360-degree components in every talented person that contributes to our industry.

Lukasz Kiniewicz: As you think about the future, how do you see the role of leadership evolving and which capabilities will be needed for leadership in an industry undergoing such profound change? 

Santiago Argelich Hesse: Performing the profession of a boss, on top of what I describe as this mindset dimension in the previous question, requires understanding the importance of the trend defined as human-to-human. This area specializes in building relational motivation, which is not trajectory based, and fundamental on benefits and remuneration and promotions. 

I think the big challenge is that you cannot omit or ignore that there is always an underlying leadership style that will drive or condition the engagement that an organization has. The biggest challenge, at least in our sector and for our company in the future, is where to find this healthy balance between taking personal care of the people, developing them, and keeping them engaged, while setting ambitious challenges and goals for a continuously transforming and evolving company. 

I strongly believe that ability to create an environment of radical candor ignites the unique power of individual talents and protects the organization from delaying action until it's too late to change. It is a major risk in our environment to get stuck, to over-complexify, and to analyze and investigate yourself to death. Creating the right environment with the right balance that helps you navigate and successfully serve a wave of investment, technology, and innovation is the key of success.

Lukasz Kiniewicz: Thank you for sharing your time and insights with us today. It's been a pleasure. 

Santiago Argelich Hesse: Thank you very much.

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About the interviewer

Lukasz Kiniewicz (lkiniewicz@heidrick.com) is the partner in charge of Heidrick & Struggles’ Warsaw office and a member of the Technology & Services Practice.