«There is always a crisis», – emphasizes the head of the Ukrainian office EPAM Stepan Mitish. During the three years of his leadership, the company faced a «growth crisis» after the covid and a «survival crisis» due to a full-scale invasion. Plans for the industry’s growth were abruptly cut short by military risks.
The same measures and principles helped Stepan Mitish to adapt to the new market conditions and survive in the face of uncertainty. He told us about them in an interview with MC.today journalist Victoria Pushkina.
«We believed that we would double in size in the next two years»: about the slack times and the crisis of survival
My career at EPAM developed organically: as soon as a current project became routine, a new challenge would appear. When I joined the company in 2006, I managed teams of 10 people, then 100, and later 1,000. At the time of my promotion in 2021, I was managing the Kyiv and Vinnytsia offices, so it was a logical step to lead «EPAM Ukraine».
Now my task is to make Ukraine successful. This means business growth and satisfied customers. My core team consists of 15 people who head the main organs of the company. I also work closely with a delivery team of 40 people – project managers, development managers, etc.
I was lucky enough to lead EPAM’s Ukrainian office in the «golden age». In March 2020, there was a covid crisis in IT, but in the summer, a revival began, which quickly turned into a frenzied growth.
The pandemic forced businesses to adapt to online life, so there were requests for digital solutions from everywhere. This crisis was based on a challenge «run faster than your competitors». I remember those times with a smile and warmth in my heart.
In the crisis year of 2020, the company grew by 16% in sales, and in 2021 it grew by a whopping 41%, with the team in Ukraine growing from 10 thousand to 14 thousand people.
In the fall of 2021, we sincerely believed that we would double in size in the next two years. In December, it became clear that it was futile to hope for this. But even though we started preparing for the worst, we underestimated the risks. I personally did not believe in a full-scale war until the last moment, and this is my biggest failure as head of the Ukrainian office.
However, we had a strategy in case of an invasion. First of all, it was aimed at evacuating employees. Because in order for them to continue taking care of your clients, you first need to take care of the specialists themselves. We have set up temporary sheltered locations in Vinnytsia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and opened offices in Uzhhorod and Chernivtsi. We provided one-time financial assistance to each EPAMer and additional financial assistance to employees and their families who sought refuge in other countries.
We have also become more flexible in dealing with risks. We moved a number of projects and teams to other countries. Some of the teams abroad covered Ukrainian specialists in case they were unavailable.
However, there were almost no such cases because Ukrainians turned out to be real heroes. For me personally, the whole team opened up in a completely different way. Some went to serve, others volunteered. At the same time, everyone continued to work: from shelters, on buses, trains, and shelters; day, night, and weekends.
However, on the first day of the full-scale invasion, it turned out that I did not need to call each of the 15 members of my core team and tell them what to do. Everyone already knew everything. And although we held a series of meetings to prepare for such a development, I didn’t expect the work to be so well-coordinated.
One of my top priorities was to write a general letter announcing that the President had declared martial law. But I was pulled by clients, family, specialists and could not concentrate. And I am very grateful to my colleague, Maksym Doroshenko, who is now in the Armed Forces and was responsible for internal communication at the time. Even though he was busy evacuating his daughter, he prepared a draft of this letter for me. I was impressed with the way the team worked. But I cannot give universal advice on how to build such a team.
I was greatly influenced by Patrick Lencioni’s book, «The Five Flaws of a Team: Parables of Leadership». Its main idea: A team of stars is not the same as a star team.
One of the most important flaws in teams is a lack of trust. If everyone in the team cannot be honest, there is no healthy conflict. As a result, compromise decisions are made that don’t actually solve anything.
An open communication culture in a company starts with the leader. They must treat people with understanding, be able to control their emotions, and explain complex things in a simple way.
In addition to trust as the foundation of an effective team, I am guided by the following rules of crisis management:
- You should always be prepared for crises. Any plan, even a bad one, is better than no plan.
- Any right decision made too late is a wrong decision. I took this advice from the book «Our Iceberg is Melting. How to Achieve Results in the Face of Change by John Kotter. This is a fairy tale about penguins who at some point realized that their iceberg was melting and they needed to look for a new one.
- In order for people to follow you, you need to give a clear explanation of where you are going and why. If people do not understand this, they will simply ignore the request.
- In highly effective teams, the issue of delegation is very important. A leader should always understand that there are dozens or hundreds of people who want to help and prove themselves, so each such person should be empowered to do certain things.
- Big goals should be broken down into small steps and victories. This is how even impossible things become tangible.
In general, human life is becoming more complicated every year, and the number of problems and unknowns is increasing. Therefore It is very important to just try and then learn from your mistakes. Adapt, try again, learn from mistakes, and adapt again. The difference between successful people and companies is that the successful ones are not afraid to make mistakes, draw conclusions and move forward.
EPAM’s plans for the coming year
EPAM’s mission is to help clients despite any crisis. Today, this means surviving as a business, holding on and, if possible, growing. Given that in 2023 the volume of IT services exports in Ukraine fell by 8.5%, the goals are quite ambitious.
For clients to understand why they should order services in Ukraine when the war is on, Ukrainian teams must have competitive advantages. We believe that the key to this is to master artificial intelligence technology better than others. For the client to say: «I am ready to take risks because there is high quality and greater efficiency here, which has not only not changed but has improved».
In addition, we need to offer solutions where clients pay for the result, not the team.
In this case, military risks will fade into the background, because if there is a result, the client will pay for it, and if not, he will lose almost nothing.
For both purposes, the emotional and moral state of our people is very important. The full-scale war has been going on for three years now, and many people are exhausted due to stress. EPAM pays a lot of attention to this area: it holds specialized events and provides the opportunity to use the services of a psychologist and coach.
But despite the war, we believe that the company should invest in the development of young talent. We did not shut down our EPAM Campus, but rather expanded free career guidance opportunities for schoolchildren and basic courses for students. We opened dozens of courses in popular areas, added new courses and formats for service members and veterans returning to civilian life.
This year we plan to increase the number of students by 2-3 times. Sooner or later, the war will end, and if we do not encourage the development of talented people, we may be left with a significant shortage of specialists in 3-5 years.
Author: journalist MC.today Victoria Pushkina.