Orange's goal-getting VP targets digital innovation

It might seem an unlikely leap from playing soccer for Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), one of Europe's top football teams, to being a senior telecoms manager. But when Aliette Mousnier-Lompré was picked more than 20 years ago to play as a midfielder for PSG Féminine – a premier division team – soccer offered women little in the way of professional opportunities.

Instead, after brief stints as an intern in the diplomatic service and banking, Mousnier-Lompré found an unexpected outlet for her ambitions and interests during an internship with Orange. Her career led her to become Executive Vice President for Operations at Orange Business Services, before stepping up to the role of interim CEO of Orange Business Services at the end of December 2021.

“Like many young people, I had no idea of what I wanted to do exactly, but I knew I wanted to have an impact somehow,” says Mousnier-Lompré.

“I was really interested in how you can bridge culture through some kind of mediation to solve conflicts,” explains Mousnier-Lompré – which was what initially led her into the diplomatic service. “But I could not see the direct impact between what I was doing on a day-to-day basis and the bigger picture.” Banking was a similar source of disappointment.

Early on she joined a small team building a roaming hub to accelerate the opening of bilateral roaming routes with African communications service providers (CSPs).

“You could see very concretely the impact on the traffic and ultimately the impact on people. When I joined Orange, I was happy at first because of the working atmosphere, but I stayed because I could relate what I was doing with the bigger societal picture.”

Mousnier-Lompré, who studied political science and economics while continuing to play football, also discovered she enjoyed bringing a business perspective to problem-solving teams made up largely of engineers.

As she progressed through Orange, she worked across a mix of international teams that were addressing a range of business and technical challenges, from enabling money transfers between Europe and Africa, to providing cybersecurity services for public companies, and optimizing the environmental footprint of networks.

“All of this gave me a sense of purpose,” she says. “Digital is having a big impact on societies, on economies and on political systems. We know it's both an opportunity and a threat, but by having strong ethical drivers I felt I could have a positive impact at a large scale.”

She also values working for a company that sets out to tackle discrimination.

“I think there's a very practical and structured policy and strategy at the top of the group to promote diversity. It’s not perfect and we can always do better. But there is a visible willingness to improve and to fight stereotypes and bias.”

The reskilling dilemma

Orange Business Services’ operations span 50 countries and rely on technological experts in fields such as networking, cybersecurity and data science, as well as project managers, program managers and customer relationship managers.

Automation, however, is changing how many people work.

“Automation is everywhere, and low-value repetitive tasks are progressively disappearing. What we keep is the high-end technological experts, senior project directors and those handling the human dimension of the relationships with our customers.

“So, what we need is either people who really understand the technology, or people who really understand the business and the customers.”

Getting everyone up to speed with the new requirements demands investment in training.

“We try to anticipate all the skills we will need in five years, which is barely possible. But we look at trends and we design training plans, and we try to have both a collective and an individual approach. It's really a dialogue between the employees and the managers, depending on the profile of the employees or the work they want to do.”

Like other CSPs, Orange needs more data scientists and data analysts, as well as individuals who understand cloud native architectures, the virtualization of network functions, cybersecurity, machine learning, robotic process automation and IoT.

But it also requires softer skills such as a broad understanding of what a team is trying to achieve and the ability to bridge different business and technology environments to help deliver results, explains Mousnier-Lompré.

“When we work on use cases for machine learning or artificial intelligence, we need both technological experts and operational people who understand how it works on the field. It’s this bridge that is creating value.” For this reason, “we try to spend quite a lot of time to enlarge the strategic vision of the teams so that they understand the big picture and do not stay in their silo,” she says. This includes having people work in small, cross-functional teams to deliver the same objective.

“It takes a bit of time and could be considered as a loss of productivity on a short-term basis. But broadening people’s perspectives is absolutely key.”

Busy schedules, however, can scupper the best-intentioned plans to give people the time they need to retrain. So, Orange measures and rewards retraining efforts.

“We have a huge list of training programs in a catalog, but we have also created key performance indicators (KPIs) at a company level to help push more training and create a learning culture.”

Measuring performance

Indeed, Orange Business Services Operations has changed its overall bonus structure and KPIs to reflect new measures of success.

“We used to have KPIs in silos based on operational performance but have moved away from those to really focus people on value creation at a larger scale.”

As of 1 January, this year, Orange Business Services Operations’ bonus structure and KPIs will center on three objectives: Creating value for the customers as measured by the net promoter score; creating value for the company as reflected in EBITDA at a company level; and creating value for the employees, which will include training metrics.

However, Mousnier-Lompré recognizes that it is not always easy to adapt to new objectives.

“People will tell you: ‘I was mastering my own tiny KPI in my silo. Now that you give me an objective which is much broader, I feel I have no leverage’.”

Like other CSPs, Orange has no choice but to change how it traditionally worked: “We know software is eating the world and everything is now inter-connected,” says Mousnier-Lompré. “Our organizations and our business are so complex that working in silos is totally meaningless. So, from a cultural standpoint, we need to shift the mindset of people.”

But if managers are going to request that changes be made for the greater good, then they also need to demonstrate altruism and show intelligence and flexibility when it comes to evaluating performance, believes Mousnier-Lompré.

“I try as often as I can to show my teams that I'm voluntarily degrading some of my KPIs because it creates value for other teams or for the company at large. Sometimes KPIs become just counterproductive. We need metrics to understand how the business is trending, but they are just metrics.”

All of which brings Mousnier-Lompré back to her first passion. “I sometimes think soccer taught me more than my studies in economics and science. What is very clear in soccer is that you can have as many [star players like] Messi or Neymar as you want, but if you don't have a cohesive team, you will never make it. And that's the same in a company.”

In particular, a flexible team that understands its collective strengths is better able to collaborate quickly and autonomously when faced with unforeseen challenges and opportunities.

“The other very important element is that you can train and prepare as much as you want; the game never happens exactly as you predicted it. So, you need to have players reacting in a very synchronous and rapid way to take decisions without calling the coach or calling a big meeting to decide what to do,” believes Mousnier-Lompré. “The rules of the game need to be very explicit and then you leave total autonomy to your team members.”

This will be important as Orange Business Services continues transforming its business models and skills to become a digital services company.

“The digital market is booming, and the opportunities are everywhere if we [have] a culture to deal with uncertainty and keep together…both from a business standpoint and from a broader purpose standpoint.”