By Rebecca Sperti, Chief Commercial Officer, Idwal
Careers rarely follow a carefully planned path. More often, progress comes when someone offers an opportunity before you feel entirely ready to take it. Looking back on my own career, that has happened more than once. Moving from business development into sales leadership, expanding into marketing and product responsibility, completing an MBA alongside a full time role and navigating private equity backed growth all involved stepping into roles that initially felt slightly beyond my comfort zone. Each time, the opportunity arose because someone believed I could grow into the role, rather than because I had already mastered it.
What made the difference was the support that came with those opportunities. The leaders who backed me did not simply hand over responsibility and step away, but shared context, challenged my thinking and stayed close enough to help me work through the difficult parts. That experience has shaped how I now try to lead others.
The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Give to Gain” which is a very appropriate. Organisations become stronger when leaders invest in people before they feel completely ready. Trusting individuals with responsibility, sharing knowledge and encouraging them to stretch themselves allows capability to develop much faster than waiting for someone to feel perfectly prepared. When leaders create that environment, confidence grows and people begin to take greater ownership of their work. Teams develop depth rather than relying on a small number of individuals to carry the weight of progress.
As businesses grow, it becomes even more important because expansion inevitably brings complexity through new markets, additional stakeholders and the interaction between different commercial functions such as sales, marketing, product and delivery. Leadership then shifts from simply managing people to helping teams navigate that complexity while remaining focused on what actually matters.
Focus plays an important role here, as teams need to understand what the organisation is trying to achieve and how their work contributes to it because otherwise growth can easily become fragmented, with different parts of a business moving in slightly different directions. When teams operate across regions and markets it becomes easy for local priorities to take precedence over collective progress. Alignment depends on leaders being clear about priorities and ensuring that people understand how their decisions affect the wider organisation.
Structure alone, however, does not create a healthy environment because people perform best when they feel trusted and when they understand how their work contributes to something larger than their own targets. When individuals have that confidence and clarity, decisions becomes easier and organisations are able to maintain momentum as they grow. These leadership challenges are not unique to any one industry, but they feel particularly relevant in maritime today.
Before entering the sector, I spent much of my career working in construction, another industry that operates in complex, asset heavy environments where safety, compliance and operational performance depend heavily on inspections and oversight. For many years construction faced similar challenges around fragmented information and manual processes, which often made it difficult for organisations to see the full picture of what was happening across projects and assets.
Gradually that began to change as inspection and audit data became easier to analyse, as organisations gained clearer visibility of risk, alongside stronger oversight of assets and far greater confidence in the decisions they were making. Maritime now finds itself at a similar stage. The industry already generates a vast amount of operational and inspection data, yet much of its value remains locked within individual systems and reports. The real opportunity lies in connecting that information and using it to support better decisions across the lifecycle of a vessel, whether that relates to asset performance, operational risk or long term fleet management.
For someone entering shipping from another sector, the depth of knowledge within maritime is immediately clear. The industry has long been built on experience, trust and long term thinking, and those qualities remain central to how it operates. At the same time, industries tend to move forward when established expertise is combined with fresh perspectives. New ideas alone are rarely enough, but when they sit alongside deep operational knowledge they can help challenge assumptions and encourage different ways of approaching long standing problems.
Progress rarely happens because someone feels completely ready for the next step. More often, it happens because someone was willing to offer the opportunity and support them as they grew into it.
