Esther Schagen-van Luit leads cybersecurity strategy and risk management for Microsoft in Europe, a field she herself calls stressful. Yet the leader in this conversation measures success in other people’s careers: the promotion she sponsored, the work she kept off her team’s plate, the team still standing at the end of the month. She speaks plainly about AI, about who gets left behind, and about the introvert behind the easy communicator. And at the weekend, she works in glass.
What is the essence of leadership talent for you, and how do you recognise it immediately?
Being a leader means having people place their trust in you, to care not only for the company’s best interests but also their personal best interests. Helping them make that next career step, giving them more space during a difficult time in their life, and making sure that when you benefit, they benefit. And when you lose, you try your best to prevent them from losing. Their success is your success.
Bringing your difficult messages with kindness and honesty, bringing your vision with passion and integrity. It’s easy to recognize: a great leader talks about the greatness of the team members they enable, more than about themselves.
A great leader talks about the greatness of the team members they enable, more than about themselves.
Which moment shaped you more as a leader than any book or course ever did?
Every time I’ve been able to support someone from my team to get a promotion or role in another team or company that’s a clear step up from what they would’ve been able to handle a year ago.
It seems I have the opposite of ‘empty nest’ syndrome: it makes me proud because it means I was able to identify the right training, offer stretch assignments and coaching to someone to get them to that place. And I am happy to sponsor them into their next step on the career ladder.
What should leaders stop doing because it no longer works in this time?
This is my personal opinion: leaders should immediately stop taking AI productivity enhancements as a means to save costs on their staffing and deliver short-term shareholder value.
They should instead focus on retraining their current staff in roles at risk and enhancing their span and depth of skills to add more value to the company supported by AI, rather than do the same things they’ve always done, but just more cheaply.
In the medium term I believe AI will create additional demand and workload, and many of these short-term focussed companies will have fired the people that knew their company well, which is such a waste of company assets plus a loss of an opportunity to be a great employer to your people.
Which leadership decision made you or your team visibly stronger?
I have always been very good at drawing the line on which work my team owns and which work it doesn’t, and shielded them from unnecessary increases in their workload which were not adding value to our core goals.
Of course, conditions and remits change constantly in a business context, so we would consider adding work when required, but only if the people needing to execute it agreed it would be the right thing to do. And if so, it should come at an explicit re-balancing: either dropping other work or getting more resources to execute the work.
Cybersecurity is a stressful field, and maintaining a feasible and diversified workload has always been top of mind for me to ensure I’d have a team left standing at the end of the month.
What gives you energy in other leaders, and what drains it?
It gives me energy when I see other leaders be their authentic, full, quirky selves (without having that be an excuse for misbehaving). Regardless of how big the role is, they aren’t afraid to have fun whilst executing on it, and stay human, relatable and accessible to the people that work for them. Even better if they dare to be vulnerable about some of the aspects of the role or their personality that they sometimes struggle with.
What drains it would be if leaders are there for themselves first and foremost. When something goes well, they’ve achieved it and should get a bonus. When something goes poorly, the team’s done it and people get fired. I believe leadership comes with a duty of care; we win or we lose together.
I believe leadership comes with a duty of care; we win or we lose together.
How is AI changing what you expect from yourself and from your team?
I am in a very dynamic organisation and role when it comes to using and securing AI. I get ample opportunity to discover, innovate and change our processes based on what AI allows us to do. The pace of change is sometimes exhausting, and we make a deliberate practice out of sharing our notes, lessons learned and interesting resources to lessen the burden on everyone having to figure it out by themselves.
I know my position allows me to grow much quicker in this particular area than leaders at most other companies, and I worry about the increasing disparities between people who do have access, training and support to engage with AI, and those that don’t. Both from a career perspective, as well as a rapidly widening gap on digital inclusion.
What do the people who work with you every day know about you that the outside world does not see?
The thing that people get surprised by the most is that I am an introvert. I tend to come across as extraverted and having an easy time to communicate, but my personal preference is truly to do a lot of thinking, creating and writing by myself. This forces me to create very clear boundaries on what social engagements I am able to take and which not, to ensure I can optimize between what people need from me and what I need from myself.
People also have a hard time reconciling I am both highly structured and strategic, and very creative and open to experimentation. I need that latter part of my identity to ensure I won’t get bored, and making my glass art has been a great means of enabling my continued professional success in IT.
Which insight about people do you wish you had understood ten years earlier?
The insight that there is not such a thing as a simply good or bad employee. Everyone has their own ‘manual’ and set of tasks that they will thrive at, and my job as a leader is to figure out that manual if they haven’t been able to vocalize it explicitly to themselves or others yet, reshape the work I’m asking them to do and communicate with them in a way that will get the most out of them, given the type of person that they are.
Of course, people can grow and change through training and coaching, but seeing ‘the shape’ that each person has from the start can greatly reduce friction and support their growth.
There is not such a thing as a simply good or bad employee.
What will a bright leader in 2030 do differently from today?
This is my personal opinion. 2030 seems like a long way off given the speed with which our world is changing right now.
A bright leader should have a clear strategy on how they leverage technology, particularly AI, in their organisation, and which roles and responsibilities will explicitly stay human. I think we will go through a period of uncertainty on what work people will continue to do alongside AI, and that bright leaders offer them vision, stability, empathy and the perspective that even though their job changes, they still add value to the company and to society.
Recognition that not everyone is equipped to deal with fast changes, technologically skilled to get along, and they might simply fear what they do not know, asks extreme focus from a leader on how to bring everyone along for the ride.
“Their success is your success.Esther Schagen-van Luit
Bright Leadership, according to Esther.
For Esther Schagen-van Luit, leadership starts with the trust people place in you: to care for their careers and their lives, not only for the company. She measures her success in the promotions of the people she coached and sponsored, guards her team’s workload in a stressful field, and believes leadership comes with a duty of care. She asks leaders to use AI to grow their people rather than to replace them, and keeps an eye on those who risk being left behind. Structured and creative, an introvert who comes across as the opposite, she finds in glass the inspiration she brings to her work in IT. Be kind. Be brave. Be honest.
