My Story: Tania Songini

by Tania Songini

When reflecting on my career and an experience that illustrates my collaborative leadership style and drive for transformative change, an early example from my tenure at Siemens UK springs to mind.

Siemens’ head office in Germany traditionally managed relationships with country offices directly, on topics such as strategy, business development, customer focus and organizational structure.

At the time I had started a new role as finance director in the UK, and Siemens had recently decided to transition from a country to a regionally-based organization, in our case appointing the UK to represent the North West Europe region, which included 11 countries. This change faced resistance as countries in the region were reluctant to lose their direct communication line with head office.

Simultaneously, the new regions were tasked with implementing a cost efficiency program. Seizing the opportunity I organized and chaired a comprehensive one-week workshop, bringing together the country managing and finance directors. Together we explored best practices across functions, focusing on better aligning sales, product and project management, increasing process automation in finance and other areas, and moving certain backoffice functions to a regional level. By facilitating open discussions and the sharing of experiences, we identified best practices at country level and adopted these across the region, significantly reducing costs and enhancing effectiveness.

The workshop also served as a platform for the leadership of the 11 countries to start building relationships and trust. They shared what was and wasn’t working within their organizations and began to view the new regional structure not as a constraint, but as a forum offering broader debate and business opportunities. This cross-country, cross-cultural collaboration led to more robust strategy and customer focus decisions.

The ability to harness collective knowledge to develop solutions with diverse teams has been a cornerstone of my career. This experience highlights the importance of uniting individuals who had not previously worked together, encouraging them to share their perspectives. It fostered cohesion in the North West Europe leadership team, demonstrating the impact of shared effort and vision in overcoming resistance and achieving remarkable outcomes.

I am grateful to TechWomen4Boards for the nomination and look forward to the award ceremony on October 1st.