Lucas Sy is a Partner at Strategy& Germany, specializing in sovereign cloud and cyber strategies. With over ten years of consulting experience and 12 years as a cyber strategy officer in the German Armed Forces, Lucas is a renowned expert in advising government, defense, and IT organizations.
He holds a master’s degree in business administration from Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and the University of New South Wales Canberra. Lucas is dedicated to bridging the gap between digital transformation initiatives and cyber strategies, ensuring robust cloud resilience and cybersecurity.
Made for Leadership
Lucas has always been keen to learn how inspiring personalities have changed the world we are living in. For him, two of them are Albert Einstein and Katherine Johnson. Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th century, transformed our understanding of the universe. Katherine Johnson was critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landing program, establishing the technology to meet international interests in space. Lucas’ family has always supported him in finding his own way of leadership.
Early in his career, when he joined the German Armed Forces in 2002, he assumed a leadership role as an officer. This was a time when the German Armed Forces opened up their career models more diversely, and Lucas is proud that he has contributed to shaping this inclusive leadership style alongside his comrades back in those days. The strong responsibility he held for his team during missions also shaped his leadership style during his later transition to the business world.
Honing the Leadership Skills
Lucas suggests that to achieve business success as a leader, you need different types of qualities and backgrounds in your team. Hence, you must be able to combine these competencies for your business, clients or customer needs in the best way. For you as a leader, it is important to lead by example in exploring the teams’ strengths. This might involve re-engineering an existing business function in an imaginative way and then balancing the potential risk vs. the value for the project or firm. It might also include being more ‘adventurous’ e.g., by questioning an existing IT function with regards to disruptive technology.
“In all cases, it involves the courage of your team to rethink established business constellations. At Strategy&, we create an environment where every voice is heard, encouraging open dialogue, and ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to contribute their best. Exchanging ideas between countries and regions is also important for maximizing the global benefit of local inventions. The global PwC network serves as an essential driver for this international collaboration,” he says.
An Effective Leadership Style
Lucas’ leadership style includes different elements which he has picked up over the years to help him and his team to work effectively. At the beginning of a new project, his style might be more stringent, with clear directions and a vision for where to take the client with the project. This is essential for bringing the team together and working towards a clear, common goal. In the area of strategy consulting and the rapidly changing cyber domain, they are often confronted with a pacesetting environment.
Lucas’ team of driven and experienced colleagues consistently does their best to meet challenging deadlines. “Holding yourself and others to high standards only works if you can also create balance and provide compensation for these efforts. To this end, we regularly run lessons-learned sessions and identify areas for individual growth. I take time to evaluate the team’s and each individual’s development areas both over the course of a project and throughout the year,” he shares.
Overcoming Challenges
The biggest challenges might occur when fundamental disruptions affect your personal or business environment. For Lucas personally, this was the transition from being an officer of the German Armed Forces to working in the private sector. Having studied business management, it was clear to him that he needed to experience business demands across different industries. Although he started in business valuation, Lucas always kept in mind how best to apply his military experience from the cyber domain to a business context.
A major business challenge for the company was the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. As everyday commerce was shut down in 2020, Strategy&’s clients quickly shifted their focus, switching to fully remote work or adjusting production significantly. “We saw this as a chance to explore new ways of working on our projects. In the post-pandemic reality, this experience became crucial for us and our clients to evaluate which changes were here to stay,” says Lucas.
Taking Risks
During the different stages of his career, Lucas has been confronted with many types of personal, operational, and business risks. He has learned from the military how to deal with operational risks, such as pre-thinking alternatives, the effects of your decision, or sensing your environment. The decision to leave the Armed Forces and start in the business sector was a significant risk for him personally. The motivation came from his passion for business strategy and his aim to fuse his military cyber know-how into new business approaches. He did not take this step without thinking of alternatives within the Armed Forces or the broader government ecosystem.
In the first years, Lucas was absorbing every learning from different industries and strategic approaches in the project work. Over the years he identified more and more where to support organizations within the public and defense sectors.
“Due to increasing geopolitical turbulences, cyber resilience, and sovereign strategies became main global drivers for my clients, and I was able to combine the best of my experience from both worlds, military and business, helping them to succeed,” shares Lucas.
Motivating the Team
Lucas feels that understanding one’s team members’ long-term goals, for their personal and professional development, is key for reflecting aspirations and achievements and hence for providing adequate advice. Strategy& enables its team with dedicated training to work on their development needs and to grow everyone’s personal strengths, for example in advanced cybersecurity methodologies or strategic project management. Challenging strategy projects naturally lead to an intrinsic motivation of the team to help the client via well-proven as well as new and innovative approaches.
“Setting development goals with your team helps to effectively improve everyone’s potential. This can be set up as short-term (project-related), mid-term (fiscal-year focus), or long-term (perspective for the next 3 years). The more concrete the development plan is set up, the better we can work on each team member’s goals. Appreciating project and team success with an off-site activity furthermore helps us to reflect and generate team power for the next projects,” he shares.
Fostering an Innovative Work Culture
Lucas believes that a culture of innovation is fundamental to enabling new approaches in times of technological disruption. The transformative power of the digital era we are living in is enormous, and organizations must perform innovatively to keep up with that speed. Fostering Strategy&’s culture of innovation he pursues three main elements: an agile project management, an inclusive and diverse work setting, and a strong coaching and mentoring environment.
Agile project management helps the company and its clients to evaluate an initiative faster, accelerate the team’s learning curve, and emphasize flexibility. Daily stand-up meetings and specific sprint reviews help the team with effective project management. In an inclusive and diverse working setting it is important to have the best expertise on board. Innovation is only possible by supporting a variety of viewpoints and perspectives to create new approaches and eventually achieve improved business results.
“Embracing the unique perspectives in my team is essential to encourage creative thinking and problem-solving. We have a well-established mentoring and coaching program for the team. This helps to quickly participate from others’ experiences and integrate smoothly into different project settings,” explains Lucas.
Balancing Business and Other Aspects
Lucas concurs that the fast-paced strategy consulting business requires a lot of energy. The more important it is to find ways to refuel this energy. He spends his free time with his wife and three kids. While he does certainly enjoy this, it can also be quite demanding. Especially with regard to the unique learning needs of every child.
“Supporting your children’s education is about developing skills that will help them become better decision-makers, problem-solvers, and critical thinkers. Another joyful way for me to spend my “quality time” is a joint sports interest, for example, skiing during the winter holidays. But it can also be a simple hide-and-seek game with the small toddler, which often helps to switch your focus. A passion that I do not (yet) share with my children is good coffee. This is an essential ingredient for every type of day. Good days become even better with coffee, at bad days you have had at least a good coffee,” says Lucas.
Mentoring Young Leaders
Mentorship always has been key in Lucas’ leadership journey. In the Armed Forces, this has been fostered through a strong connection between the graduate classes in the officers’ academy and university. He learned early on how to engage the next generation of leaders and guided selected mentees during their military careers. Also, in the business sector mentorship is an important function.
Strategy& has a mentorship program where everyone has two mentors: a junior and a senior mentor. The junior mentor supports daily project life and more operational needs, whereas the senior mentor is an important anchor for career development and sponsoring of the mentee’s strengths for successful positioning in the firm. Lucas is using his role as (senior) mentor to support his mentees’ career plan by critically reflecting on their self-assessment in both ways, over- and underestimation. They work throughout the mentorship on re-calibrating potential self-biases. “There are many great people in my team, who have the potential to excel at something. Through active mentorship we work together in achieving this individual excellence,” says Lucas.
Gearing Up for Goals
At Strategy& Lucas has built up a team with expertise in sovereign cloud and cyber strategies. With its strong PwC network, Strategy& can support its clients along the entire cloud and cyber value chain, from sovereign strategy to cyber operations.
Focusing on the public sector, Lucas’ goal is to further support Strategy&’s trusted clients in their ambitions towards sovereign cloud and cyber initiatives. Especially in Europe, but also in other territories, the requirements for sovereign solutions will stay a hot topic within the next years. His focus on solving strategic challenges will help his clients to update their cyber defense strategy in light of increasing needs for their resilience in turbulent times, and to create strategic sovereignty through secure cloud strategy and transition.
“I will continue to link the necessary knowledge through my client and the firm’s network to drive forward our new approaches and anchor their strategic relevance. I empower my team with a special skillset and inspire them for my endeavor by further strengthening a culture of trust,” concludes Lucas.
Life’s Lessons
Summing up the most important lessons he has learned throughout his career, Lucas says:
“Motivate others, trust yourself, and team up for innovation. Innovation comes from your intrinsic ability to re-think an approach, a client project, or your own situation. During extreme (training) situations at the Armed Forces, there were days when you thought there was not much energy left, however, we were trained how to steer yourself through this low and raise your energy level. It is not just about being optimistic; it is enabling you to power up. Trusting yourself is essential for bringing this power into action. When I left the Armed Forces and continued my career in the private sector, I was asked by many colleagues if this was fulfilling me, changing from field suit to business suit: The answer is yes, because I wanted to expand my business knowledge and gain experience quickly – transferring military assessment into business valuation. Additionally, teaming up was essential for me in shaping my way to lead. Teamwork provides an opportunity for both personal and professional growth. The effects of collaborative efforts and enthusiasm are significant.”
Message for Aspiring Business Leaders
Lucas’ message for aspiring business leaders is:
“First, it is important to know and trust your strengths. This will also help to identify your own areas of development needs. Establish a strong network of peers to stay connected over different phases of your personal career. The further you advance in your career, the more you can benefit from this network. You should also expand this over the years with trusted clients. This will help you to solve problems with allegedly non-connected areas of expertise. Setting up your own goals is as important as setting up team goals and defining how you can divide and conquer business aspirations. Practice and repetition will help to expand your own range of leadership varieties. Stay humble with your team in each of your career steps, however, actively steer your own career and professional development with your superiors.”
