Describe A Time When You Take A Great Risk?

3. Describe a time when you took a great risk. What was the outcome?

The heat baffled me when I left the plane in Jeddah airport after a 10 hours’ travel. I met the company driver to embark in drive in a desert area, punctuated by a few police check points along the trip. We reached our destination after an hour and a half, and once passing the armed guards looking for potential bombs under the car, we finally reached the base camp where I was going to spend the next months. Completely out of my comfort zone, I was about to start for real a new challenging job, which outcome was at best uncertain.

A few months earlier, I was working in the cold winter of Canada for a French blue chip aerospace company, using computer software for designing
I felt like a fish out of water and started to question myself: am I really able to cope with this? Do I have what it takes? But rather than introspecting, I decided to embrace the job and do my best, spending many hours at night in my container to learn how to do it better, reading manuals and asking advice and mentoring to my teammates on the field. Quickly I started to grip the essence of it, getting improving results, and was being promoted after a few months as leader of a small team, confirming my good performance.

Commissioning is an incredible function, a bit considered as the “A-Team” of a construction site, which gave me a solid technical basis and credibility in my career evolution. This success was highly rewarding from personal and professional point of view, ensuring myself of my capacity to adapt to new environments and to a variety of functions, even the ones I would not have considered myself suitable for initially: “the sky’s the
Developing a similar prospect in Brazil, I also led the development of this project, coordinating the specialists from different areas in a typical matrix structure. Levering the best expertise available in the company, the team members were located in all parts of the world. We developed our bid in an intense period of 7 months, coordinating legal advisors, technical consultants, potential subcontractors and future partners in order to cover all the pieces of the puzzle in an integrated and coherent way. We also developed innovative solutions to make our bid more competitive, like developing the largest floating storage and regasification unit ever. By enhancing transparency, organizing regular team meetings with clear action lists and responsibilities, setting-up dedicated workshops, listening constantly to the different parties to ensure that the needs and comments were properly addressed, I could foster a real team spirit focused on results, and prepare a solid investment file. This was as well a very intense personal period as I got married in March 2013, in the middle of the company internal approval process. Our project was awarded in May, the first win of the Rio de Janeiro office since 2008, and the final terms of the contract were agreed 3 months