"The CEO as Head Coach” Kobe Verdonck on Trust, Feedback and Building Winning Teams

“The CEO as Head Coach” Kobe Verdonck on Trust, Feedback and Building Winning Teams 

• How do you build a team that keeps growing as your business grows? 
• What does it take to create a culture where people challenge each other and still trust one another? 
• And why should every leader learn to let go? 

In this episode of Boardroom Conversations, Bruce Fecheyr-Lippens, Chief People Officer at SD Worx and co-author of Join the Club, sits down with Kobe Verdonck, CEO of SD Worx, to explore what it takes to build high-performing teams and future-ready organisations. 

From fostering a culture of open feedback to empowering teams with ownership and accountability, Kobe offers practical lessons on leading through change while staying true to your values. He also reflects on scaling SD Worx across Europe, developing future leaders and creating clarity in complex organisations. 

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• Why trust is the foundation of sustainable performance 
• How honest feedback helps teams grow stronger together 
•  Why empowering people leads to better and faster decisions 
• How clear frameworks create space for ownership and innovation 
• Why leadership is about developing people, not controlling them 

This edition of Boardroom Conversations is a conversation about people, performance and purposeful leadership, offering valuable insights for business leaders and HR professionals looking to build resilient teams and organisations that thrive in a changing world. 

Transcript

0:05

Welcome, Kobe Verdonck in our Boardroom Conversations. It's an honor to have you. We always start with the same question. Who is Kobe? What drives you in life and at work? I'm Kobe Verdonck. I'm 55 years old, married, and passionate about building winning teams in businesses. Both in startups and in developing businesses. And I'm doing that for the last 30 years. And I'm becoming more and more passionate about it — putting a team together. Because ultimately, a winning team with a strong spirit, a clear focus, a purpose, a strategy to execute on — doing that together is truly What drives me in life. And in my private life it's the same — I love sports, and it's the same there. It's about teams, about innovation, working together. Setting goals and going for a win. But also we lose a lot. And it's really about making sure you get something out of it. Always trying to improve— that 1% better every day. So you touch on a lot of things. Sports firstly. What are the team sports that drive you in life that you're passionate about? I'm most passionate about football and cycling. Those are the sports that really drive me, and a lot of it comes down to— take football, for example. It's a sport that's very much about tactics, but of course you also have to You have to be a very good player. have the physical side. But above all, it's about working together. You can have the 11 best players in the world and put them together, but without a game plan, you will never get there. There has to be a team effort. And I think it's exactly the same in business. Leadership is really about setting the scene — making sure you have the right frameworks, building on them, and communicating them very clearly to your team — or your players. And making sure that everybody understands their role in it. But on the other side, you also need to give them a lot of freedom. On the football pitch, you don't want to pre-discuss every action with the players. They have to be able to decide on the spot what to do — and they have to be trained for that. They need the confidence to make those decisions. Sometimes it's the wrong decision, but you can learn from it. A mistake is not the end of the world. Failure is something that happens. As long as we learn from it and come back stronger.

I always compare it to this: 3:05

a CEO is like a coach in a professional sports team. Interesting — you are CEO of SD Worx, and you were CEO Of Raet, two different companies. And before that, you also built a lot of teams. You say that as a CEO, you're the real coach of the team. If you look back at your career over the last 10, 15, 20 years, working with and creating great teams — you've already hinted at a lot. You need to give freedom, you need the right people. But give us a bit more of the secret sauce — how have you been building those teams? I'm sure great teams don't appear overnight. Even strong football teams take years to develop. What do you do to make that happen? I think there are a few key ingredients, and to be honest, I've evolved enormously in this myself.

The first question is: 4:09

are you ready to be a coach, or do you still want to be a player? I think many people struggle with this in the beginning, because when people give you the trust to become a coach, it's often because you were a very good player. But it's a completely different job. And in the beginning, that transition is very hard. It helps to have support in making that shift, but someone also has to give you the trust to do it. In my career, I was lucky enough to bump into the right people who trusted me and gave me the chance to step up and build those teams. The second ingredient, once you're ready, is having a vision. You need to be able to clearly articulate where you want to go, communicate that, and have a strategy behind it — underpinned by the values you truly want to live, not just on paper, but something you embody every single day. You need to be very clear about this. And then you start to truly look after people. For me — and maybe this is personal — skills are important. They're the basics you need to have. But I look much more at the person behind those skills — what drives someone? How will they fit into the team? I really believe also in diversity. A team needs different characters. The easiest thing is to put all your friends together, but you actually need people who will challenge you, people who are different. Once you have the players in place, it's about building. The magic happens when these people — these different characters — start to work together. And that means trust. It's all about building a culture of trust. And how do you do that? How do you build that? What's the magic recipe for trust? How do you build that? First of all, it takes time. But you also have to actively invest in it. It doesn't happen by itself. If you just sit next to each other and stay polite, it's not going to happen. You can accelerate the process by building a clear culture of mutual support. For us, that's very much about feedback. Not just being nice to each other, but daring to say what's really happening— giving honest feedback. Again, back to sports — teams that improve the fastest do so through constant, direct feedback."You didn't do this well. How can I help you move to the next level?" Always in a trusted atmosphere, not one of criticism. You build that by being very explicit about it and actively working on it. Coaching can also play a role. And on the other side, creating an environment where we are just normal people. We all fail. We have good days and bad days. Spending time together matters. For me, off-sites are not just about eating in starred restaurants or staying in five-star hotels. Or going to the spa. It's about getting back to basics. Going to a house, doing the grocery shopping, cooking together, doing the dishes together. Creating a normal, human environment — something we try to do four times a year, spending a couple of days together and having fun. Recently, for example, I went with my team to a chalet for three or four days. We worked, went skiing one day, cooked together, laughed and danced. It's something that evolves, but one thing is clear: it's a team. And like in sports, everyone has an end date. Myself included. At some point, it will be time to pass the baton. That doesn't mean you've failed. It's like having a great player in football, and a talented young player coming through. With only 11 positions, someone has to make way. That's painful, of course, but it's necessary. It's about renewal, and people need to understand that it's part of the framework. Just because you join at 40 doesn't mean you'll still be there at 65 in that same team. You'll do great things in your career, but a team also needs to renew itself so it never becomes static. Being very explicit about this — not hiding it and only confronting people when it's too late — makes everything a lot easier. You touch on so many things. You said early on that selecting the right people is essential."I need to know the real person— not just the professional." I want to go back to that. Is that intuition? Is it intuition, or rational thinking? When you say you want different characters together — is that experience that lets you see who has potential and will click? How do you build that? For me, it comes down to drivers. Especially in leadership positions, you're going to inspire people because they look at you. Leadership is something you sometimes want to make seem less important than it is. But ultimately, an organization looks to its leadership. And how you show up matters enormously. For me, it's a lot about energy. What intrinsic energy do you have? How do you communicate? What is your level of empathy towards others? Those things are truly important. Of course, you can be technically brilliant. But being a real leader— and you can work on it — is also about diversity. One person is stronger in empathy. Another is stronger in something else. Bringing those together makes a great team. The team also needs to know that one person is better at this, another at that. It makes it easier to lean on each other's strengths and to work around each other's weaknesses. It really helps. That's what I'm looking for in the person behind the CV. I want to understand how someone truly functions. And I'm very open about myself, because I have many weaknesses — far more than strengths. Being open about that and being able to talk about it is important. Another key aspect is being open to change. In every business I've worked in, things move so fast that being rigid makes it very difficult to move forward. Certainly in SD Worx, things are moving incredibly fast. Our business is evolving rapidly, and you need to embrace that spirit. Some people don't like that, and there's no shame in that. But it won't work for us, and that's what I look for. You want people with energy and open minds. In every business, yes. Change is a constant, and those are the kinds of businesses I love, honestly. Businesses that are truly evolving, where you learn something new every day. You need to feel the action and the momentum.

Final question on teams: 12:08

how do you make sure the team itself — not just you one-on-one with your direct reports — creates the space to share who they are, what gives them energy, and what their weaknesses are? Do you create enough space for team members to build that magic and trust among themselves? Does that take time, or can it happen in a day? I think it's really important. What you don't want is to be the spider in the web — where everything flows through the CEO. And there are moments when it is like that. You have to be honest about it. When you start an organisation, you want to move fast. You start in a more commanding mode."This is what we're doing. And this. And this." But it's important that stops at some point. Because it's not healthy for a business. It's crucial to build something built on trust, and you need to push your teams to talk to each other directly. Not through you — but directly with each other. And that they trust each other and are critical friends to one another. Real peers who challenge each other. Absolutely. You can accelerate that by being explicit that this is what you want. Spend time on it. Work on it. Make it intentional. Business reviews are important, but sometimes you really need to spend a day or two purely focused on culture. On the team. On alignment. And when these sessions are positive, people come out so much stronger— and bigger as individuals. And that reflects enormously in the organisation. And it doesn't stop at the top, because that's just the top of the organisation. You need to make sure it spreads throughout. First of all, communicate clearly what you expect from the culture. And invest in it — make sure all of your leadership is moving in the same direction. You mentioned critical friends? Tell us more. It's a great concept. It's very un-European, I think, because in Europe — and this is probably one of the things that holds us back — we want to be too nice to each other. We don't want to be direct. We're often implicit. Things are said at the coffee machine instead of in the meeting itself. I learned a lot through this. Also through failure, because I was originally much more implicit than explicit. We don't want to hurt people. We're too soft — also with ourselves. We take so much on ourselves that we don't dare to deliver the real message. Working in the Netherlands, where the culture is much stronger in this regard, really helped me. People just say directly what they need to say, they give feedback immediately. And it's not seen as something bad. It's seen as something good. And I think we brought that culture into SD Worx as well — this concept of being very open. I will always tell you things you might not want to hear, but it's a gift. I'm giving you something — this feedback. You do with it what you want, but I will always try to help you. And honestly, I love it when people give me feedback. Positive feedback is nice, but things you can improve on are even better, because they help you reach the next level. Being explicit that this is critical but friendly — those two words that truly belong together — helps both in private and in business. It really helps everywhere— with customers too. Just avoid the implicit.

Just say it: 16:30

"I'll give you some critical-friend advice." It really helps. Because if you're critical and people shut down, nothing is gained. By framing it this way, people are much more open. And I've seen it clearly— Belgium is probably one of the most implicit cultures in Europe. When I see it in our organisation, in the Belgian part of the business — we're a European company — but in the Belgian part specifically, seeing how this has helped us evolve and move forward has been truly remarkable. And it really helps people grow. And how important is that? Knowing you, I know speed matters. SD Worx is a large company, but in many ways also a big scale-up. You've done many acquisitions, growing from seven to now more than 20 countries. That's quite a journey. Speed is essential, and you say it's a world that's moving fast — AI, digital transformation. How do you make sure you keep that speed? You already mentioned critical friends — that makes things explicit faster. Are there other concepts that have been important for creating or maintaining that speed? The larger your organisation becomes, the more you have to let go. Because if you keep doing everything yourself — and this is common in startups and scale-ups — you have the charismatic founder who built the company with two or three people, the founding father or mother, and everything sits with them. People look to that person. But at a certain size, that no longer works, because you become the bottleneck of the entire organisation. And that's where it gets really difficult. At SD Worx, we're present in almost 30 countries across Europe. We are 10,000 people. It's impossible to try to manage everything yourself. At a certain point, we had to be honest with ourselves. That was post-COVID. I was close to collapse because everything came to me. To a handful of people. We went through an exhausting period. The team did fantastic work. Our results were incredible. We were growing very fast. But at some point, you have to let go. And we did. We developed it together with the executive committee — a real concept for how to move forward. How can we build something that is clear, built on frameworks, while remaining a deeply integrated company? We want a consistent customer experience everywhere. And a consistent employee experience across all our markets, while still giving significant freedom in how they implement it locally. Again, like the football pitch — if you see the players as your businesses, you give them freedom, but clearly within a defined framework. And we came up with what we call the airport model. Why airport? We're an HR company — it has nothing to do with airports.

But the idea is: 20:02

as leadership, you're in a control tower. You set the framework. Think of it as the security rules — who lands where, who takes off, and how. On the other side, you have the airport itself. There's a lot of operational support to get those planes in the air and get the passengers on board. And then you have the planes themselves. Big ones, small ones — each with a crew on board who are responsible for bringing those passengers safely from A to B. That's the comparison. Leadership is the control tower. Support functions — finance, HR, IT — are the ground operations. And then we have our businesses in each market, which need to make decisions quickly because they are responsible for the customers in front of them. They need to make fast, good decisions. But if things go wrong, we can still step in from the control tower and make sure we adapt the framework if needed. We landed on that concept, rolled it out, and I have to say — it's given us another boost. It gives a lot of peace of mind, especially for me personally. Now I can focus on strategy again, instead of being involved in every decision, and can act where it truly matters —

or look ahead: 21:35

where is the business going in two or three years? More time for acquisitions, for strategy. It also helped enormously in developing our teams. With 10,000 people, we elevated that leadership — mostly internal people who stepped up, which gives an incredible boost of energy. Someone gave us that trust at some point — to start, to step up. And that first moment when you get that trust, you get a huge boost of energy. And that's what you see in the organisation. It's a very interesting concept for the listener, in whatever role they're in. A matrix structure — you report to two people. That leads to decision paralysis. Then there's agile — what I call the agile trap Suddenly you have agile coaches and everyone's doing a little bit of everything. But here it's very clear. You have pilots, you have ground operations. And you have the control tower. Three distinct roles. People know what to do. They know where to decide. They know who can decide. And you gain speed. It's applicable in large companies, but also in smaller scale-ups. At any scale, really. And the same applies to our M&A activity. We acquire a lot of companies. For us, that's always values-driven. We won't acquire a company that doesn't fit with SD Worx. If we can't integrate it, there's no point in buying it.

But that means: 23:08

how do we quickly integrate them and show them what the model is and how to move forward? Like you said, matrix structures and so on. That works up to a point, but ultimately, people want to know who is responsible, who makes decisions, and who can fail. It doesn't matter as long as decisions are made. And if you fail, you learn and move forward. And that's the beauty of it. Because that's just how humans are wired. We don't want to be stuck in a paradox between dotted lines, full lines, two bosses, three bosses. That's good for consultants, but not for people. Exactly — it's just not the reality. Kobe, as CEO of SD Worx, CEO of Raet, and other senior roles — what is success for you? Is it creating a culture of ownership and impact? Is it selling a company? Both? How do you define lasting success? Lasting success — that's also why I joined SD Worx. It's a very stable company. 80 years, same majority shareholders. We now also have minority shareholders, but the stability is there. For me, I want to be the custodian of this company.

That is the responsibility: 24:32

to pass on this company to the next CEO better than I received it. That is truly my goal. Not leaving a personal legacy, but a legacy that I can look back on with pride — what we built — and knowing we did it as a team. That's what I love, and I think we should all aspire to this in business. As a CEO, you should always look forward. Of course, companies do get sold. There are other stakeholders, shareholders and so on. But I've been on the other side — in companies more in the private equity world — where the purpose was almost entirely to sell, even if as a better company. But very often, you feel those companies become a plaything, passed from one investor to another. Having a real long-term vision and stability — while still fully focusing on innovation and change — creates so much more value. In the long term. And it's important for society too. In Belgium, most companies have always been sold — our tax system doesn't really help — but it feels like the ultimate goal is "I sold my company" and now I'm done. Whereas building strong European companies for the long term is far more valuable. And it's about passing it on. You don't need to lead them forever. I won't be doing this at 65 or 70. At some point, it's right to pass on and do other things. That doesn't mean I'll stop completely, but there's a right time for everything. You can still be a shareholder. And if you truly believe in the business, why should it suddenly collapse? It's about building European powerhouses. And that means showing the world: maybe we don't talk like Americans or act like the Chinese, but we can be very proud of Europe.

And the message is: 26:46

let's build real powerhouses in Europe. And I believe we absolutely can. Europe is fantastic. It's the most beautiful continent in the world. We have incredible people. There is capital available. We have a strong governance framework. We always complain about it, but on the other hand, we can be very proud of it — it gives us enormous opportunity. So let's be proud of that and build these powerhouses for the next generations who will build the future of Europe. I can feel your energy and your drive. You're clearly driven by creating something, building a shared vision and rallying people behind it. That is clearly one of your great strengths. And it's beautiful to hear. Let's pause for a moment. You're around 55 now. If you look back at the 40 or 45-year-old Kobe, what advice would you give yourself? I think there was a more bullish culture back then. Were you asking for help? Were you in the Netherlands then? No, actually, I was in a global role — Europe, LATAM. And then five years as CEO, travelling everywhere, in the Netherlands, more of a local business. But looking back 10 or 15 years,

what I'd say is: 28:29

asking for help — that culture didn't exist. We've evolved a lot since then. Today, you can show vulnerability, and ask for help. Look for help as well. Set up strong governance without it becoming something that blocks the organisation. From the smallest company, and you see this with startups today — they have advisors. Immediately, they create a network of mentors. Which is fantastic. In the past, we didn't do that enough. And I think that's been an enormous step forward. I would really encourage everyone to do that.

And to ask for feedback: 29:11

What did I do wrong? How can I improve? How can I help you better? That kind of culture exists today, and some people say it means we're not strong anymore, that it's not real leadership. But let's be honest — the world

is telling us: 29:31

we don't want these Trumps, these Putins. Nobody wants that, and they bring no real value. They may look strong, but ultimately it's the culture of working together, evolving step by step, that truly matters. And having a real feedback culture — because a leader can be dangerous. Power can be dangerous. You need to make sure there is governance around it — to ensure that people don't go off track. What I'm hearing is an interesting mix for leading a company as CEO. You want speed, but sometimes it's good to pause and

have mentors and advisors ask: 30:14

"Are we going in the right direction?" Before running too fast. Is that a fair summary? Speed can blind you. You think you're really in the thick of it, but you can take a lot of unnecessary — even foolish — actions, which really hurts an organisation and kills all the energy. Sometimes it's better to take a step back, pause, and then move forward. And look — I'm impatient. But having the right discussions and being aligned upfront is always worth it. You can get addicted to quick decision-making."I made a lot of decisions today." But sometimes it's better to pause, reflect, and two days later, the decision will be much wiser. Maybe it won't even be necessary anymore because the issue will have resolved itself. Maybe it's also part of getting older, but you see it in leadership too — it's a very positive evolution. Wonderful. Thank you, Kobe. Is there a final message you'd like to share with other leaders, the 25, 30 or 35-year-olds out there? You've shared so many concrete tips and ideas. Is there anything else you'd still want to share with the audience? Go for it. Follow your passion. It all starts with building a team around you and making sure that team continues to grow — and so do you. Don't stand still. Keep moving. Don't stand still. We'll leave it on that note. Thank you so much, Kobe. Thank you, Bruce.