Piotr Galiński runs Fortaco’s IT department with a philosophy of family—one that produces results so good it’s won accolades from SAP.

He was gobsmacked by the cake. “On my very first day at Fortaco, I found that my colleague Ewelina Klimkiewicz had brought a cake for me,” says Mateusz Janiszewski, Fortaco IT Manager. “She had baked the cake, not bought it! I had never experienced anything like that before.” Janiszewski had worked in IT roles at four companies in Poland before he arrived at Fortaco. He knew immediately this was not your standard IT department.

Just like ‘family’?

The Fortaco IT team is, by design, a lean department. Led by Piotr Galiński, it is a team of 13 people who work closely together, so closely that they often find they are a part of each other’s lives. It’s how Janiszewski found himself at Galiński’s home, celebrating his boss’s 40th birthday. “I’d only been at Fortaco one year, and it’s pretty uncommon in Poland for a worker to visit the boss’s house. This is very different than any other IT group I’ve been a part of.”

Galiński has a clear philosophy when it comes to employees: hire only true experts he can place his trust in, and then give them broad responsibility. This approach is a direct result of his personal experience. “I’ve had good bosses and bad bosses. Once I was part of a good team, and then the boss came and started hiring people who weren’t very good for a variety of reasons. Once we took on inferior hires, people started to see the company was moving in the wrong direction. I’m always comparing our team to the army. I don’t want to go to battle with soldiers I can’t trust, who aren’t skilled, who can’t drive the tanks. I want to be surrounded by the people I trust and leave decisions to them. I once thought of myself as only a technical person with an IT and mechanical engineering background, but I committed myself to learning soft skills. What I’ve learned is that if I try new techniques, if I trust my intuition, then I get better results than I expect.”

Galiński’s team members often use the word “family” to describe their relationships. Does this come from higher up in the Fortaco organization? “I’ve never said ‘build a family,’” says Lars Hellberg, who built Fortaco Group and served as the organization’s CEO until December 2024 and is now a member of the Supervisory Board. “But we’ve seen it can become that. We emphasize and empower engagement among our people. And when people are working closely together, if they’re engaged, then a family-like environment can happen. I think the IT department has grown into that approach. Our Narva, Estonia business site is another example of where people have become very close.”

Sticking together

“But a family approach can also mean that you’re too family like,” cautions Hellberg. “There’s the risk that you might not fully listen to your customers, and so it has to be balanced.”

Striking that balance is something that is constantly on Galiński’s mind. “Yes, it is like a family, where everyone is comfortable together and we support one another. But this ‘family’ is embedded in a professional environment. Families release frustrations on each other, and so you have to have some clear boundaries, as well as give feedback to keep your team from becoming unproductive.”

His team members agree. “The close relationships help us in difficult situations,” says Aneta Szczepańska-Rybka, Finance Business Process Owner, who until recently was part of Galiński’s team, and continues to support Fortaco’s SAP S/4HANA implementation. “But families fight, as well. Not every moment is harmonious bliss!” Galiński’s personality and approach somehow combine to allow him to diffuse tensions. “It’s easy to give good feedback,” she says. “But when Piotr gives negative feedback, he has the ability to do it in a way that motivates you. After the meeting you’re more motivated and not in a bad mood.”

“When a boundary is crossed,” Galiński says, “I don’t ask someone why he said or did this, I ask what’s up with their private life. If I know what’s behind the behavior then I can provide support. I want to address the root cause of the problem, not the symptoms. Otherwise, the problem may persist.”

Still, it’s not an approach that every manager is capable of using. But for Galiński it produces results. “The advice from my superiors has often been that, because of the risk of having to fire someone, creating a family environment isn’t a good idea. They would not build relationships like I’ve done. Are they right? I have thought a lot about this, and I’ve concluded that because you never know when you might have to let someone go, I’m willing to risk the bad emotions. I want to live in an environment where we have these good relationships. Also, my team is not too big. If I ever had to release a person, it would mean I’d have to get rid of one of the critical processes.”

But the risk of releasing someone isn’t something often on the minds of the team, and they say it’s dwarfed by the positive aspects of the culture. “Piotr built his team in a way that this style really works,” says Szczepańska-Rybka.

No excuses

Where does the motivator turn for his motivation? One source for Galiński is Nick Vujicic, who’s been called “the happiest man in the world.” Vujicic was born with Tetra-amelia syndrome, a rare disability characterized by the absence of arms and legs. Vujicic, who calls his ministry “Life Without Limb,” travels widely and speaks about his faith.

Galiński sometimes invokes Vujicic when attempting to solve a problem with his team. “There are always problems but there is a solution to every one of them, and I challenge my team to find it. My job is to guide them in the right direction, and push them to focus on what we’d like to achieve, instead of why we can’t achieve it, which only produces barriers that cause your brain to be blocked before you start thinking. Nick Vujicic surfs, he dives, but he’s got no legs or arms. Nick’s not looking for excuses, so why should we!”

The taste of failure

There is no mould for a Fortaco IT worker, but Galiński says one commonality is an interest in sports. “This is critical for me. How do they release stress? If you’re a sportsman then you know the taste of failure. You know how much energy you have to put in to improve. You know about sacrifice. Whatever the sport, I’m curious about how much time a potential employee spent to prepare and whether they tasted failure. Success doesn’t usually come after the first attempt. If it does, then it can make you lazy.”

For a period of five years, Galiński practiced karate five times a week for two hours a day. It enabled him to beat an opponent who was 25 kilos heavier and place third in the open division. Now he likes to climb mountains. To climb Mont Blanc he practiced in Poland’s mountains with a heavy pack. Would he summit? He was more interested in challenging himself: “I looked at it this way: Every step I took from Chamonix, I was beating my old record.”

Pioneers?

Another commonality of Fortaco IT team members is an affinity for new technology. “We’re a brave team,” says Galiński. “When it comes to picking solutions, we’ll go for the new technology.”

“We try a lot of new stuff and sometimes we fail,” says Mateusz Janiszewski. “But we’re discovering some really cool stuff, as well. For example, we’re one of the first companies using Cloud ALM to manage changes in the SAP system. ‘Pioneers’ is a big word, but we’re one of the first. We know it’s at an early stage, but we can try it out. It’s not about being comfortable—it’s about making progress. Yeah, sometimes you get into some trouble. But if you’re not in trouble, you’re not learning. When you fail, you learn how to not do it. And you don’t repeat that same mistake twice.”

Sometimes “pioneers” is precisely the right word. In 2024, Fortaco Group was selected as the Gold Winner of the SAP Innovation Awards in the Migration to Cloud category. “It’s not easy to convince customers to think about tomorrow,” says Radoslaw Mierzejewski, SAP Delivery Manager responsible for Poland, discussing why Fortaco received the honor. “But Piotr’s team is always trying to predict what might happen next and how to be prepared for it. It’s just their mentality to be open to change.”

What made Fortaco’s IT situation particularly challenging was the fact that not everyone was familiar with SAP. “Fortaco had many years’ experience with SAP, but they bought companies that weren’t familiar with it,” says Marek Gałuszewski, Head of SAP Consulting Poland. “It can be treated as a problem or barrier, but Piotr decided to use this situation as opportunity for today and tomorrow. The idea was to avoid the complicated integration of different systems and processes, how to efficiently use time, and how to optimize the cost of the future maintenance. By making this decision standardize, Piotr made the solution more flexible for the future, and the Fortaco team also decided to use SAP Partner and use SAP as quality assurance in the project.” In other words, Fortaco making the brave decision to standardize processes across the entire Fortaco Group.

‘We’re all IT’

Though the IT department’s culture is somewhat different, Agnieszka Koziara, SVP People & HR, says many of the traits found in the IT department can be found widely in Fortaco, as well. “Even though we’re international, we’re still relatively small. Fortaco needs people who are doers, who are hungry to learn new things, because there isn’t an army of people behind you. You’ve got to be a self-motivator. But if you like to learn things, then Fortaco is a great place for you.”

Koziara herself is one example. “I’m not an expert on AI or IT, but I’m part of the AI team because I like to learn. I see the development. I see that AI is growing so fast you can’t avoid it. She views Fortaco’s IT team as both strategy and teacher. “All of us have to be part of IT development, whether we’re in production, the office, or management. If we want to survive as an organization, we have to invest money, time, and ourselves to be part of IT. This is a must. In this way, we’re all IT at Fortaco.”