Meet the Team - Stephanie de Wangen, Director
This week we caught up with Stephanie de Wangen, Director at The Up Group since 2011. Find out how Stephanie fell into search by chance and why she is so passionate about her day job.
What attracted you to a career in Executive Search?
I have always been naturally curious about people. As a French-Belgian-American born and raised in Spain, who was largely educated in the US and lived in London for over half of her adult years (with a few additional country stints spanning Moscow to Mozambique in between), I grew up straddling numerous cultures and languages. I inherently love meeting people from around the world and am drawn to trying to understand what makes people tick, what motivates and drive them, where they come from and where they want to go. I am genuinely intrigued by people.
Equally, I love problem solving. I am convinced search is a genuine problem solving exercise that requires the marriage of left-brain and right-brain – and I love a good problem to crack! Problem solving in search is an agile process of iterative course-correcting and hypothesis testing as one goes along. Unlocking the answer with a win-win-win outcome, I find, is deeply satisfying on both an intellectual and emotional level.
Why did you join The Up Group?
I believed in what our CEO and Founder, Clare, was creating 14 years ago and I still have the same unfaltering conviction in our company’s vision today. Clare and the team never doubted the digital economy back in the day when it was called ‘internet’, when Series A was at most $1m, when ‘unicorn’ was a child’s play word and when Chief Data Officers were not even a notion – and neither did I.
I had straddled an earlier career in executive search with numerous years in-house in performance marketing and business development roles at Amazon, AOL and Excite (for those who remember the company, it reveals your age!) and I knew first-hand how hard it is to scale a company – I had been there three times over. I was keen to work with start-ups and scale-ups to help them on the similar journeys I had witnessed and lived myself and help them solve those growth pains.
Over the years, we have all witnessed an explosion of the digital sector and this has been amplified through the pandemic. As the sector we serve has matured so has our own business, following a similar curve that so many of our clients have, from investor-backed to exited. We speak the same language as our clients and empathise in a way that is unique. We are living and breathing the same world they are and we instinctively “get it” as we are on that same journey.
What has been your career highlight to date?
Without any doubt, taking a full-hearted leap of faith in Clare Johnston and her vision of what The Up Group could become when she and I first discussed me joining in 2010. I have not looked back since. I am so immensely proud of what we have all created together as one team - of the team members I work closely with who are all fantastic human beings – and of the privileged place we hold as trusted advisors and partners to the most innovative and bold businesses, and the founders, business leaders and investors behind them.
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
First, the reality that I need to be my home’s human alarm clock by 6:30am latest (6am if I am feeling courageous), and then my post-espresso conscience that I need to be at my spinning class by 7am.
Once back home and settled at my desk however, I am driven by making a difference to peoples’ lives. I am a part of a collective team that really cares about driving positive outcomes – for our clients, our candidates, investors and for our team members. We are helping founders disrupt entire sectors, helping Boards and C-Suites navigate the complexity of hypergrowth and/or transformation, helping scale-ups propel to become the next unicorns, helping investors maximise their portfolios and helping candidates realise their professional ambitions. I find search deeply rewarding on an emotional level.
On an intellectual level, we hold a privileged role in the digital ecosystem and one we have collectively worked hard to build and are proud of. We are speaking daily with exceptional people who are inventing new technologies and changing the ways we consume and behave. The market intelligence we are privy to is second to none, and as a result we are constantly learning about new sector trends, new emerging technologies, new competitive growth strategies and challenges. Our days are intellectually energising.
If Executive Search was not an option, what do you think you would be doing?
In another life I almost became a war correspondent.
I fell into search by chance (and slightly by accident), and it has been the best accident ever.
At 22, fresh out of college, I was en route from New York City to Grozny as a CNN junior war correspondent when I decided to deviate from the road I was on and ended up in Moscow instead working for a Washington DC political think tank. To the dismay of my parents at the time who wanted me to be slightly less adventurous, perhaps more conformist and certainly closer to home, my alleged three month stint in the region (with frequent crackly telephone pleads of “Stephanie, please will you come home now?”) ended up lasting two and a half years.
With the decision firmly in-hand that I was staying in Moscow, I went off in search of my first permanent job locally and landed by sheer luck at Korn Ferry – though a bit of stubborn tenacity did help. Russia at the time was witnessing explosive market expansion and it was a fascinating adventure, a stark contrast to what is unfolding today. I eventually moved to London where I encountered my next hypergrowth journey with the budding early years of the ‘internet’ economy in 1998.
And looking back 25 years, I wonder where I would be today had I followed in the footsteps of Christiane Amanpour. Whilst I sometimes ponder what my parallel life behind a lens might have resembled, I equally know that my aborted war correspondent track allowed me to stumble into search, and for this accident I am deeply indebted and grateful for I would not change it for anything.
When you are not building the leadership teams of Europe’s current and future Unicorns, what do you get up to?
At the weekend, you will always find me active in sneakers. Please never ask me to wear heels.
I will be spending time with my children - running around doing things children their age love to do whilst trying to negotiate the odd interjection of “mom’s old-fashioned ways” (museums) as a counterbalance to modern escape rooms and trampolines. Keeping up with my childrens’ social agenda requires me to be the chauffeur of the household too, so you will often see me behind the wheel. Despite the buzz of our weekend activities, we will always find the down time together to relax at home in PJs with board games or a good Netflix movie.
When I am not with my children, I drag (or am dragged by) my amazingly good-natured and active partner on half marathon walks, come rain, shine or snow. At home, when not ensconced in digital photography classes or online digital albums, I also attempt to partake in cooking – badly (my partner ends up taking over most of the time to avert disaster while I keep on vowing to myself that I will improve – a persistent new year’s resolutions problem child). We also devour Netflix series while eating Spanish jamon and sipping Ribera del Duero, although our loyalty is recently being tested by Sicily’s Nero d'Avola.
When I can, I love the occasional lazy afternoon on my sofa diving into fiction (Stefan Zweig, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Dostoevsky please) with classical music in the background and a pile of old Economists on the floor. I recently scored 100 on ‘Traditional’ in a Hogan assessment. I can see why.
What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given?
My grandfather who was one of my mentors often used to say: ‘Hard work and determination go a long way; in fact, they are really the only way.’ I believe in that whole-heartedly.
The Up Group is hiring. We want to hear from you if you are excited by what you hear from our Team. You may be at the start of your career and looking for early exposure and rapid progression, or looking for a move to access the unparalleled network that The Up Group is part of. Come and talk to us by connecting today - [email protected].