Patricia Pomies

I was born on a farm in the south of Argentina, and I was raised there until I was seven or eight. It’s in Pigüé, a very small community of 20,000 people, and my whole family is still there. For them, my life is like I’m an astronaut. It’s like I took the Artemis. 

As a little girl, all I wanted was to be with my family and my cousins, playing with mud, making houses in the trees and spending time with the horse. 

“I was very savage at the time. I liked being with the animals, and I wasn’t afraid at all. I was also very courageous. I was more like, ‘Let’s be free!’” 

I was also very curious. I was all the time on the limit. Go until 200 meters, and I was at 250, just to know if there was something else in the last couple of meters. That was always my mindset. 

The friends I made in those small schools, at the age of four, are still my friends. Some of them came with me to Buenos Aires for university, and we lived together in an apartment. People who have been with you all your life mean you don’t have to explain yourself. They know where you came from, and that you’ve been a fighter. 

Impact at a different scale

Before Globant, I led Educar for ten years, a company in education and technology. We delivered computers to students and teachers, and I ended up distributing 5 million computers in the Argentinian educational system. That was social impact. When I jumped into the private sector, my first question was how I was going to make impact. In the public sector, impact is exponential. In a company, you feel you probably have nothing to do with that, and it’s not true. 

“I became this company, with these 30,000 employees. I feel that I have 30,000 families I can touch.” 

So, I built a university inside Globant, and we created the Be Kind program: be kind to yourself, and be kind to others, including diversity. Women are underrepresented in IT, and we have awarded many scholarships to women over the years. 

I was the COO for eight years, leading 30,000 employees in more than 35 countries, in a public company listed in New York. As a public company, you cannot fail. You give the numbers to the investors, and you must achieve them. But I’m all the time thinking about teams. When you work, you work with a team, and the team means everything to me. 

The only woman in the room

In board meetings where 90% of the people were male, I was probably sometimes the only woman in the room, and I didn’t feel like the only one. I knew my strength. I had a 360 view of the room that nobody else there had, the power of reading people, so I could answer questions before others did, because I understood where the conversation was going. 

But I did realize that I was the only one, and that is something I didn’t like as a woman. So, I built programs to bring more people to the table, not because of my own experience, but because I want everybody to be able to sit at the decision-making tables and have their point of view be heard. You need to sit at the table. 

What doesn’t appear in the magazines

My success story is the professional part of my life, and everybody knows about it. You can read it in many magazines and many interviews. But while I was driving the growth of the company, my father died. My sister died too, and my brother couldn’t stand the idea of her not being there. For a couple of years, I was in charge of a family, not only the company. It doesn’t appear in the magazines. 

When I had my daughter, Filippa, I had just been named COO. She was born with a disease in her heart, and we had to operate. That tore me apart, but I still needed to be all together for my team. I have always been a fighter: this is part of life, you need to continue. And I was in all the magazines, saying, “She’s the new COO.” 

My sister’s death was totally unexpected, a stroke from one day to the next. It was December, and two weeks later I was in the office, preparing for the earnings call. The first day I stepped in, I was afraid of people asking me, and I started crying. I said, “Please don’t ask me.” To the people who wanted to ask, I said, “Give me a couple of weeks. Now we need to focus on what we need to focus on.” 

We did the earnings calls. Then I sat down with all the teams and told them what I needed: support.  

“I prefer that you be next to me and help me be a better version of myself.”  

That is what the team did. Everybody jumped into my areas. When the CTO was struggling with a personal issue, I jumped in to help him organize the technology team. It wasn’t a threat to him because we’re a team. It helps a lot when you are not just the machine leading a project. You are just a human. 

The decision nobody understood

Sometimes success can be saying no. When I decided to step down, and everybody asked me, “Why? You’re in the place everybody wants to be.” It was a very hard decision. We thought about it a lot with the CEO, and I believe it was good for the company, the team and me. I was needing a new conversation. The team is amazing, and we built it together, but I felt that something else was missing. It wasn’t against the company: before I left, I did the last big reorganization of Globant, into verticals and AI. The company was ready, and I was ready. 

After eight or nine years in a speed life, with everybody calling you 24/7, you sit in your place and think, okay, now what? 

I’m taking my time. 

My family was less sure. Where I come from, you need to work to achieve things in life. When I said I would take a year off, they said, “You’re not working?” I said, I have worked for 22, 23 years, in very high-intensity roles. Now they’re happy, because I call them more and make trips with them. It wasn’t that one day I woke up and said I don’t want to be here anymore. It was: let’s plan this. 

As a child, I was very curious, very savage and very close to my family. Now I’m more patient, and I’ve learned to be more empathetic because of the last couple of years. Life sometimes isn’t what you’re planning. But I’m still really curious. 

“Nobody is ready for the next challenge. That is why it’s the next challenge.” 

While you are doing it, you get ready.