William Ast: What If the Best Leaders Were Chief Congruence Officers?

Drawing on the Taoist approach to leadership he had just studied with Véronique Nguyen, Affiliated Professor of Leadership and Strategy at HEC Paris, he chose to step back. Not to retreat, but to redirect.

“Where I might have blown up in the past [...] I managed, by pushing back 'softly,' to hold people accountable, to have them make a decision that was truly theirs, and to move forward in a shared direction”.

The contract closed. His leadership praised his approach. And something shifted in how he chose to act on it. 

SIXTEEN YEARS AT ALTITUDE: A CAREER BUILT THROUGH ACTION

William Ast joined Embraer as an analyst intern. That was sixteen years ago. He never  left. Today, he serves as Regional Vice President of Sales for Europe, overseeing the commercial strategy for smallshort narrow-body aircraft - the sub-150-seat segment in the aircraft manufacturing world.

The career path reads like a textbook progression: market analyst, sales director in the Netherlands, vice president in France - but the method behind it is anything but formulaic: William sells planes the way he leads people: by listening first. “Trust is not something you can fake”, he says. “You have to bring the right attitude and genuinely care about the other person's problems.”

In 2025, that approach helped Embraer capture 75% market share in its segment - its strongest commercial year in a decade. A collective result, William insists, “the fruit of years of work, resilience, and persistence in the face of successive crises.”

THE PROBLEM WITH INFLUENCE WITHOUT AUTHORITY

On paper, William had everything: experience, results, recognition. In practice, he was hitting a friction point that no amount of commercial success could resolve. Aircraft sales are truly cross-functional wins, involving matrix-based organizational structures. On any given day, he works with analysts, marketing teams, legal, contract and finance departments - none of whom directly report to him. Getting things done meant persuading without commanding, aligning without controlling.

“The critical challenge I had identified is that you often have to get people moving without being their direct manager. It's comfortable in some ways — no HR headaches — but it requires a different set of skills. I needed tools to maximize my impact and make it happen.”

That tension, between informal influence and real accountability, is what brought him to HEC Paris’s Executive Education Leadership for Executives program. Not to learn something new from scratch, but to give structure to what he already sensed it was true.
 

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER AT HEC PARIS

The program, a four-day immersive designed for senior executives preparing to take on broader leadership responsibilities, worked on William at two levels. First, as a rare space for deceleration.

“We find it harder and harder to make time for time itself. Losing time can help you gain it later. That concept had been presented to me before, but here it took on its full meaning.”

Then, as a place where scattered intuitions suddenly cohered.

The DISC behavioral profiling model helped him map his human environment with greater precision -  understanding not just his own instincts, but the communication patterns of the people around him. The “bamboo framework” developed by Véronique Nguyen, Affiliated Professor of Leadership and Strategy at HEC Paris, offered a model of flexibility-as-strength. The “Taoist approach” reframed the very notion of control.

What surprised him most was the cumulative effect. “There was an enormous amount of common sense in everything we did. But once brought together, written down, shared with others, it took on a whole new dimension. And you realized you weren't alone in having these ideas — they are recognized leadership principles from around the world!”

As an unexpected bonus his cohort was largely composed of Saudi participants. William came away genuinely impressed. “It was certainly a different culture, which clearly pushed me out of my comfort zone, but I discovered a country in total explosion, with a business mindset of rare intensity and a long-term vision that commands respect.”