Meet the mentor: Michael Tomaszewski (2005)
Jesus College has an innovative Careers and Mentoring Programme matching current students and recent alumni with experienced alumni and leaders in their fields. One of our mentors, Michael Tomaszewski (2005), tells us more about his career, his mentoring experience, and his experience of being diagnosed as neurodivergent at the age of 42.
Can you tell us more about yourself?
I graduated from the Judge Business School’s MPhil ISO program in 2005, I have worked for 20 years in energy, innovation, and international organisations. I have worked for the European Investment Bank, LuxInnovation, KPMG and StateStreet Bank, but spent the bulk of my career in the energy sector, first working for Urenco in the UK and later for the Encevo Group in Luxembourg. I am Deputy Head for Strategy, Innovation & Acquisition at Encevo S.A. and my responsibilities include mergers & acquisitions, valuation, corporate venture investments into startups, innovation projects, as well as the identification of megatrends and strategic foresight. My background is international – if clearly eurocentric. For most of my life I have communicated in three languages on any given day, sometimes even during the same meeting. In multinational/-cultural environments you almost automatically develop cultural awareness skills over time, provided you demonstrate a certain behavioural flexibility, openness, respect, and a degree of empathy. I find that drawing upon this knowledge helps me to achieve good outcomes in diverse teams. Once you are tuned into cultural and linguistical differences, you begin anticipating them and you adjust your tone, your argumentative and even negotiating strategies, in order to ensure everyone in a team perceives themselves to be in their optimal place and pulls their weight. Putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes is key in international organisations and culturally diverse corporates. It’s also a key skill, when reading between the lines of job ads, finding a good fit and tailoring your CV and cover letter towards it.
What are the major challenges facing the energy sector?
There is little time left to implement the shift to renewable energy & sustainable storage, electrification, and heightened energy efficiency standards in the run up to the decarbonisation deadlines. In that context, I see a rising demand for new talent: We only hear of exploding energy costs, but we need narrators who communicate on everything a rapid energy transition entails and why it’s without alternative. They also need to develop an understanding for which technological, social and behavioural adjustments are key to create a coherent, reliable decarbonised energy mix - and then go on to brainstorm with product developers on new business models. But we also need natscis - passionate scientists, engineers and techies - to deliver the building blocks of an energy mix, from which coal- and gas-fired baseload power generation is absent. Engineers and coders are needed to work on hard- & software for platforms that manage demand & supply automatically or forecast renewables production. Last but not least, we also need architects, building developers and urban planners to include energy (saving) technologies as integral part of the construction process and buildings’ environmental control systems. The energy sector has gone from stable, boring and steady state to a real “tour de force”: it’s now highly political, the achievement of its objectives unbelievably urgent and the technology has yet to rise to the occasion.
What unique perspective can you offer as a mentor?
Having been diagnosed as neurodivergent at the ripe old age of 42, has been transformative, and I think it's so important to be open about mental health in one’s career. Many of my peers chose to grin and bear corporate cultures, where mental health is seen as a distraction from business and mentioning it too often is viewed as detrimental to a successful career. The opposite is true: when you are diagnosed with ADHD early on, you can effectively mitigate its downsides, while uncovering and boosting the hidden advantages the disorder also harbours. ADHD randomly and negatively affects your ability to focus, your executive function, memory, the perception of time (!) and messes with your motivational mechanisms, as well as the consistency in one’s output. It is known to mask behind other symptoms and can be compensated by ambition, intelligence or a strong work ethic over long periods of time. If this “camouflage” decompensates, as it often does, things can go awry shockingly quickly. The ADHD comorbidity list is… scary. I wished I had known, what I know now about ADHD during my time at Jesus; about how my motivational dynamics are different, about how my brain links and stores information differently (associatively, instead of in a linear fashion, hierarchically and/or by category) and that I tend to lose focus or forget things without noticing it. What I then thought was a case of quite typical Oxbridge “anxiety”, an inability to deal with information overload effectively, procrastination, or perhaps simply laziness, incompetence and tiredness, was actually a range of manifestations of the dopamine and norepinephrine malfunction in my prefrontal cortex - and the rest of my brain trying to react and compensate for that. And while, on some days, nothing rhymed – on other days, working on topics which I liked caused flurries of productivity. I studied much faster due to intense, prolonged focus and was able to get large amounts of studying done in a short time. The (few) ADHD advantages materialised: hyperfocus, photographic memory, very fast uptake of information, neophilia and creativity. But this wasn’t reassuring in the slightest, as it was that inconsistency between a good and a bad day that caused me to feel confused and alienated. I now know that an ADHD brain is like a sports car, only with bicycle brakes… ADHD fatigue, memory lapses and executive paralysis are therefore a very real thing, when that brake overheats – and it does so regularly. I enjoyed my time at Jesus and in Cambridge – but I think I could’ve enjoyed it so much more, had I known about ADHD then and tackled it head-on. Counterintuitively perhaps, knowing and accepting it as a given can be an asset to your career. It’s important that neurodivergent and neurotypical humans take responsibility, be it to seek treatment or to recognise that ADHD brains are wired differently. I’ve heard about neurotypicals responsible for the smooth running of organisations (e.g. universities, companies, public authorities) despairing over unreliable ADHDers – almost as often, as I’ve heard of undiagnosed ADHDers developing anxiety disorders or depression, when they don’t cope with linearly organised, routine-based work places. Finding ways to meet in the middle is actually quite similar to the extra effort and attention needed to reconcile cultural differences in international organisations!
Michael is available to be contacted about any or all of the abovementioned topics via Jesus Connect the College's mentoring and networking platform.
The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to Michael Tomaszewski (2005).
