Peter Lukomskyj has plunged into the deep end several times during his career.
As a young engineering grad, he bootstrapped and started his own business manufacturing snow-making equipment.
At the age of 25, he was working as a product engineer at an electronics equipment company as the business was being stripped of its assets by an investor.
He partnered with four other employees to buy the company’s intellectual property and equipment to keep the business going.
“It was a ridiculous thing that we were trying,” Lukomskyj recalled. “This company had probably invested about $30 million into this production plant, and we found a backer with half a million bucks and we bought the business and we kept it going.”
Further along in his career, he was working at Sophos, a software company in Vancouver. His job was to run the company’s product line. But after a time, he started feeling like he needed another challenge.
“One of the things I was offered there was a job that was completely out of my product-oriented realm,” he said.
“It was a job to drive sales and customer retention across an area of the business that I had never understood before.”
He found that experience so valuable that he now encourages employees he is managing to take a similar plunge and explore different jobs, or simply stretch themselves to learn new things.
“It’s important to try things you’d never imagined you could do.”
On the importance of diversity | “I look to be a facilitator of a team rather than a leader of a team. I find that the best leadership comes from the team coming up with the answers. What I do is I try to build really strong teams, and really diverse teams. I find that the best teams are ones where everyone thinks that everyone else in the room is crazy at one point because they’re so different from one another.
I’ve seen teams that have a very strong groupthink, and there’s never any innovation there.”
Has a work or life challenge taught you a key career lesson? Contact Jen St. Denis at [email protected]
