TPC Leadership develops leaders with a heart for leaders AND their organisations. They are engaged and passionate in what they do. They focus on the individual, but will always keep the vision and objectives of the organisation into account.
Janna Kramer, Learning & Talent Development Leader
EY – NETHERLANDS
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A CEO should be the guiding light of their organization. They should be a strong voice that’s able to steer crucial discussions and bring an end to debate when it’s time for a decision to be made. But an equally essential element of being a CEO is knowing when you don’t have all the answers – when it’s time to bring in new voices to fill the gaps in your insight, or even pass the reins over to someone better suited to lead the company in the years to come.
In this series of blogs, we’re exploring the idea of humanization – the fundamental role of the human factor in how businesses perform, and the need to do right by your people as well as your bottom line. Humanization applies to all areas of a business, from mergers and acquisitions to creating synergy at board level, and it is a vital focus for CEOs looking to their own succession.
To learn more about how CEOs can ask the brave questions about their role and prepare for when it’s time to step down, we spoke to Eelco van Eijck, Managing Partner at Amrop, as well as CEO and Partner of TPC Leadership Netherlands, Annelieke Jense.
What a successful CEO looks like in a humanized future
In a humanized business, the human factor is at the heart of everything an organization does. CEOs still need to think about financial performance and lead on decisions, but they will also need to dedicate as much time and attention towards being good to their people.
For CEOs, embracing humanization in business will also mean embracing a willingness to be vulnerable. A core element in humanization is appreciating the value in each human being who makes up an organization – not just their productivity or performance, but also their unique experiences and perspectives. And when you’re the leader of a company, that means appreciating when others know more than you about a given situation.
Take a topic like AI, for example. Almost every company is talking about how to work with AI, but not every CEO is going to be an expert in this new, rapidly evolving technology. Eelco recalls working recently with the CEO of a global business as they asked this very question. To find an answer, they organized a roundtable with employees from different generations to gather a richer set of viewpoints than just their own.
This kind of vulnerability can be difficult when an organization looks to a CEO for leadership and decision-making. But a humanized leader should see it as a strength – it shows how much they value the voices of the people they lead, and that their priority is finding the best solution for the business, not their ego.
“Emotional and societal intelligence are also crucial,” Annelieke says. “You need to have a sensitivity to what’s going on in society, especially if you lead an international company. Everyone wants a better world, and they want brave leaders who are ready to make bold contributions to their community or to the climate.”
Letting go isn’t easy – but purpose can ease the pain
It’s a fact of life that CEOs thrive when they’re in control – you wouldn’t seek a position at the top of a company if you didn’t enjoy being the one who steers the ship.
But for many CEOs, that quality is precisely what makes it so hard to step down, even if you have realized you’re no longer the right person to lead the company. If there’s no strong sense of purpose or direction in the wider company, leaders fear that momentum will falter when they relinquish control. Often that leads to autocratic leaders, who believe they need to stay on at the reins in order to keep the organization pointing to its true north.
Purpose is the best antidote to the fear of letting go. If the company’s mission statement is so deeply embedded in each employee that everyone knows what their contribution is, then CEOs can feel more reassured that their hands aren’t the only ones that can guide the organization.
Eelco recalls one example of seeing this kind of embedded purpose when he visited a global stroopwafel brand recently. “Their purpose is simple: to make the best stroopwafels in the world,” Eelco says. “It’s understandable for everyone, and even the newest person on the production line knows how important it is to make exceptional stroopwafels, day in and day out.”
Why succession should be part of a CEO’s vocabulary
Great CEOs don’t just lead well in the present. They also constantly look to the future, so that they can anticipate when to take the initiative on finding a successor.
Although every company wants stable leadership, change is inevitable for CEOs. We were happy to read the results of a 2018 PwC study that found the average CEO stays in their role for just five years before handing over to their successor.
However, the study also showed that 19% of CEOs stay in their position for 10 years or more. While it’s possible some of those will continue to be effective leaders in that time, it shows that CEOs need to spend more time reflecting on how long they will be the right one for the job. It takes a substantial amount of energy to lead a business, and it’s impossible to sustain that performance indefinitely.
The natural evolution of a company also plays a part. CEOs naturally have their own areas of expertise – some are cool heads to help navigate a crisis, some are natural ideas generators, and some have the diplomatic skills to manage tricky M&A integrations. As an organization moves through each phase of its life, it needs different leaders whose abilities are in line with its next ambition.
For instance, earlier this year, the US guitar brand Gibson underwent a CEO transition. The previous CEO had been appointed in 2018 with two very specific goals: to recover the company from a bankruptcy filing that year, and restore consumer trust after a series of controversial product decisions. By 2023 those goals had been achieved, and so the company has appointed a new CEO to lead their new growth strategy.
If you create a culture that values the contributions of individual people, that respects diverse experiences and that doesn’t depend on one voice to inform every decision – in other words, a humanized culture – then you create a culture that’s comfortable with change. “Successful organizations are always re-evaluating their business model,” says Annelieke. “They’re looking at the way they’re operating, the way they’re set up and asking if it’s future-proof.”
That culture needs to be present throughout the organization, but it also needs to be led by the CEO. The more a leader recognises when they don’t have all the answers, the more they instill a sense of purpose in those they ask to speak up, so their organization is prepared for when it’s time to transition to someone new.
To learn more, see our other articles on how humanization impacts every aspect of running a business, from M&A due diligence to the role of a CHRO.
If you’d like to see how TPC Leadership can support you with mentoring, get in touch.
Leadership is a vital part of any mergers and acquisitions process. Whether a company’s leadership team stays the same during a merger, integrates with that of the merging company or steps down during and/or after the process, their impact on the organization thus far will continue to be felt, and may shape the success of the integration phase.
In most mergers and acquisitions, the focus of the due diligence process is often on the financial, legal, tax and operational aspects of an organization. But while those elements are important, focusing only on assets and balance sheets leaves the crucial questions of culture and leadership unexplored.
People make a company’s results after all. In our last article we discussed why cultural due diligence is vital to a successful M&A and now we’re going to explore how leadership plays a similarly crucial role.
To understand more about the role of leadership due diligence and humanization in mergers and acquisitions, we spoke with Annelieke Jense, Partner of TPC Leadership BeNeLux, Laurent Jacquet, Partner at TPCL Belgium, and executive coach and board advisor Kirsten Bradley.
Why leadership can be such a stumbling block for M&A
When leadership isn’t factored into the due diligence process, it can severely hamper the successful integration of an acquisition. When leaders are so responsible for setting the culture of an organization and inspiring its people, overlooking them during the M&A process can lead to discovering unseen issues with productivity or communication.
Assessing an organization’s leadership isn’t always immediately obvious – there aren’t clear KPIs or metrics that can tell you the current state of a company’s leaders. Looking at the bottom line might give you some indication of a leadership team’s effectiveness, but those don’t give the full picture. For example, a company might be performing well financially, but those results might be driven by leaders who prioritize revenue over protecting their people from burnout.
We need to ask, is a leader the right person to get the most value out of the combination of both companies? Is the ‘obvious’ leader the right person with the right style to set the tone for the culture in the combined company? However, this is not a simple question to answer.
It might be possible to go into the acquired company and gather firsthand reports of what the leadership is like. But employees might not have enough contact with leaders to give relevant information, and the leadership team might not have an accurate view of how things are on the factory floor.
If you ignore leadership due diligence, you’re ignoring problems
While leadership might not be easy to put a number on directly, that’s no reason to avoid doing leadership due diligence. In fact, there’s no way to really prepare for a successful integration without assessing what kind of leadership an organization has and what is needed.
For example, if an acquired company has been run so far with a highly directive leadership style, that’s information you need to know before giving the green light to acquisition. If that directive leader is no longer in their position post-merger, what will happen to the productivity of the team? Will they be able to engage in creative decision making or open feedback when they’re used to only taking instructions? Have they developed essential leadership skills of their own? The time to ask those questions is before the M&A process begins, not while you’re in the thick of trying to make the new company structure work.
Kirsten recalls being involved in an M&A process that was originally intended to be a merger of equals, with an even split of leaders from both companies. But what happened in reality was that the acquired company didn’t have enough people to fill the necessary leadership roles, and the acquiring company ended up being more dominant as only their people were able to fill those positions.
“People from both companies became demotivated when they realized the structure and culture wasn’t what they were expecting,” Kirsten says. “Productivity dropped as a result, and several well-qualified employees left to join competitors.”
How to approach leadership due diligence effectively
Leadership is a game of people and relationships, and the key to carrying out successful leadership due diligence is to always keep the people factor of a business top of mind during the M&A process. When people are the most important asset a company can have, leadership due diligence is critical for humanized businesses.
Sometimes effective leadership due diligence means being courageous enough to recognize when changes need to be made. Leaders are often culture carriers in an organization, and the incumbent CEO might not be best suited to lead the organization through its post-M&A vision, even if they’re succeeding at the moment.
While there’s always a degree of loyalty felt towards long-term leaders, it’s critical not to let that blind you in deciding if they’re still the right CEO for the business. This requires leaders to embrace the really tough discussions about whether they’re the right team to make the integration a success.
If you neglect the human element of a potential M&A target, you risk butting heads with your new partners when you should be lifting each other to new heights. And while leadership due diligence might not be as straightforward as measuring tangible metrics, TPCL has the tools and experience to support the process, both ahead of a merger and during the integration phase.
To learn more, see our other articles on how humanization impacts every aspect of running a business, from handling a change in leadership to finding board synergy.
If you’d like to see how TPC Leadership can help you bring the human factor of your organization into focus, get in touch.
Due diligence is an essential part of any mergers and acquisitions process. But in most processes, the focus is often on the financial, legal, tax and operational aspects of the business being acquired. What equipment do they have? What contracts do they have in place? What are the risks on the legal and tax side?
Those answers need to be found, but there’s one equally important question that’s often left on the table: what kind of culture does the organization have? What values and behaviors drive the success of the organization?
For better or worse, people make a company’s results, and those people are influenced in part by who leads them, as well as the culture of the organization. Too many mergers and acquisitions have faltered either due to a lack of leadership due diligence or because company culture hasn’t been taken into account. In this article, we’re going to focus on the latter.
To understand more about the role of cultural due diligence and humanization in mergers and acquisitions, we spoke with Annelieke Jense, Partner of TPC Leadership BeNeLux, Laurent Jacquet, Partner at TPCL Belgium, and executive coach and board advisor Kirsten Bradley.
Why mergers and acquisitions stumble when it comes to culture
When a company’s culture and leadership isn’t included in the due diligence process, it can end up becoming arguably the biggest unseen obstacle for the successful integration of an acquisition. What looks like a strong fit strategically and financially can end up being hobbled by productivity and communication issues that either weren’t present in either company previously, or weren’t identified early on.
So what makes culture such a tricky stumbling block for the M&A process?
One of the reasons is that the cultural differences between companies are difficult to measure by nature. “You can’t determine a company’s culture with KPIs and metrics,” Kirsten says. “What actually is culture? It’s a difficult topic to grasp for people used to evaluating something tangible like profit and loss.”
There’s also the fact that no two companies will have the same culture, and in many cases the gap between them can be substantial. That can be especially true in situations like a large corporate acquisition of a small family-owned business. When there’s such a difference in size between the two companies, you’ll likely find a clash in how each party handles hierarchy, decision-making, and policies and procedures.
You can’t ignore the symptoms of poor cultural due diligence
While culture can’t always be measured with KPIs and metrics, the effects of poor cultural due diligence certainly can. If two companies are culturally incompatible, it can be a hammer blow to their productivity and employee wellbeing. And if you fail to identify red flags in a company – such as a highly directive leadership style, lack of entrepreneurial empowerment or an unsafe culture for women, people of color or members of the LGBT+ community – going ahead with a merger will severely harm your own reputation.
Those impacts aren’t only a concern for large corporations acquiring small companies, however. Amazon discovered this when they acquired the Whole Foods brand for $13.7 billion in 2017, and by immediately tried to shake up how the company operated rolling out new technology in stores – such as palm-scanning checkouts – and raising demands on employees.
“Amazon’s culture was very tight, with lots of reporting along a rigid structure,” Laurent says. “But Whole Foods was almost the opposite, with a loose culture that emphasized freedom and creativity.
“For a while, the culture clash caused Whole Foods’ profits to drop and employees to leave in large numbers. They’ve been able to make the situation right since, but it cost Amazon a lot of money to get there.”
Cultural due diligence means more than gathering metrics
The key to doing cultural and leadership due diligence right is to always be sure your M&A process is keeping the people factor fully in sight. Companies are made up of human beings, after all, not numbers on a balance sheet, and this is what makes culture so critical for humanized businesses – in fact for any business.
“Culture decides whether people thrive or not, how connected they feel to the company and whether they decide to stay or leave,” Annelieke says. “You can’t always fully predict what will result in failure or success. But you do have the responsibility to make and execute a plan around cultural integration, to avoid the risk of a mass exodus after a couple of months.”
Think about your vision for the company post-M&A. If you’re targeting a rapid expansion or a renewed push for innovation, that will inform what kind of culture you need in place, as well as give you a better grounding to evaluate the company’s existing culture. Effective cultural due diligence might mean being more flexible to accommodate the acquired company – such as by giving established subcultures the freedom to continue if they help employees to perform at their best.
This also isn’t a process leaders have to figure out by themselves. TPCL has the tools and experience to support leadership teams through due diligence, both ahead of an acquisition and during the integration phase. For example, Barrett’s Personal Values Assessment can help an organization get a 360 degree view of culture, and identify a wealth of data to help bridge the difference during integration.
To learn more, see our other articles on how humanization impacts every aspect of running a business, from handling a change in leadership to finding board synergy.
If you’d like to see how TPC Leadership can help you bring the human factor of your organization into focus, get in touch.
HR’s place in the boardroom is often debated. While some will argue that CHROs and HR directors are non-negotiable ingredients of any board, you’ll find just as many saying that the boardroom is for strategic decisions only, in which HR has no part to play.
So, do boards always need to keep a seat at the table for an HR leader? Or are CHROs and HR directors unnecessary voices in boardroom discussions?
As part of our series on humanization as the future of business, we sat down to speak with Frouke Horstmann, Managing Partner for TPC Leadership Netherlands, and Deva Param, Representative for TPCL South East Asia, to gather their insights on whether it’s time to say goodbye to CHROs after all.
How HR made it to the boardroom in the first place
The evolution of HR isn’t a sudden, modern phenomenon. HR’s role – as well as how it is seen by the rest of the company and board – has been changing for decades.
In the past, HR usually represented a trade-off for businesses. While the board evaluated proposals from the perspective of the customer and the costs involved, HR had to work to make sure the employee element wasn’t lost in the mix. It was rare for the employee perspective to be seen as complementary, not contradictory, to bottom-line results – as a result, HR was treated as administrative rather than strategic.
However, today’s perception of HR could not be more different. You only have to look at the startup world, for example, where companies are more likely to have a “Head of People” than a head of HR. But in businesses of any age and size, there’s a movement away from thinking of people as human resources and towards thinking of them as human beings.
“The change has been stimulated by our more complex world and increased globalization,” Deva says. “Leaders have changed their mindset around the importance of people, while HR has become more active in telling the business what needs to be done for its people.”
If you think HR is about structure, think again
Simply adding a HR leader to the boardroom isn’t enough to ensure employees are kept in the spotlight. Large and scaling companies have had CHROs for some time, but their focus is often turned towards finding the optimal structure for the organization, which can easily blind them to deeper issues that need to be addressed first.
Frouke recalls encountering just such an attitude when working with a scale-up, who had asked for a culture assessment to find out why a high percentage of their people were leaving. “When the founder saw the results, they said it underlined why they needed to restructure,” Frouke says. “But what it actually showed was that they needed to listen more to their people.”
While structure is important to get right, focusing too much on it is no substitute for listening to your people and putting their needs first. Structure won’t change a person’s mindset or capabilities, at least not on the scale needed to affect a company-wide transformation.
Part of humanization is recognising that HR shouldn’t only be involved in discussions about restructuring. How a company treats its employees is fundamentally a strategic question, and has a direct impact on the health of an organization overall.
That’s clear in examples like the one above, where a failure to truly take the human element of business into consideration leads to employees leaving en masse. But humanization isn’t only about how to resolve a crisis. When you keep your people at the forefront of every decision you make, you ensure your employees are more engaged in their work, better able to adapt to changes in the market, and become more committed advocates of your mission.
“Business needs to agree that people are an organization’s only sustainable and competitive advantage,” Deva says. “It’s not tech, it’s not money, it’s not property. Everything revolves around how you treat your people and unlock their full potential.”
The CHRO can only go if the board is prepared to take their place
If the people factor is so fundamental to the health of a business, why are we saying that boards don’t need a CHRO anymore?
The answer is simple. At the moment, a CHRO’s role on the board is to constantly remind everyone else of the need to focus on people and enshrine that in every policy. But the people factor is so fundamental that in a humanized business, it should be represented by each and every board member, whether they’re the CHRO or the COO.
If the entire board isn’t approaching decisions from a people-first perspective, matters like employee engagement, wellbeing and unleashing potential simply won’t be on the agenda, whether there is a CHRO there to champion them or not.
Deva recalls working with a company whose customer service team was burned out from receiving a high volume of customer complaints. As a result, the customer service director proposed a new telephone and billing system that would improve customer experience and satisfaction, and cut the number of complaints that the customer service team faced.
However, when the board heard the customer service director’s proposal, they said that there wasn’t room in the budget for implementing the new system. Although they were aware of the problem the employees in the sales team were facing, they saw it only as a question of funding.
“To get them to change their perspective, I suggested the team spend an hour a week listening to customer service calls,” Deva says. “After one month they understood just how bad the situation was for the customer service team and why so many people were burned out, and were much more open to implementing a solution.”
Ultimately, the talent in your organization has to be seen as sacred and not just a resource. But for that way of thinking to prevail, it can’t just be driven by a single HR director. When people are so fundamental to the success of any business, they have to be a fundamental factor in the minds of each board member and each strategic decision they make.
When businesses look to secure their success for the future, there are many factors at play – diversifying their products, watching their competitors and keeping ahead of new technologies. But there’s one element that’s often overlooked – the human factor, or what we call humanization.
In a nutshell, humanization is about moving the focus away from profit and loss and towards the people in an organization. While the bottom line is still important, people are essential to the success of an organization – and treating them as human beings rather than human resources is critical to attracting and retaining talent, adapting to change and elevating performance in a sustainable way.
To learn more about the importance of humanization for future-proofing businesses, we spoke to Piet Decuypere, CEO of food brands Danerolles and Magioni, and Annelieke Jense, Partner at TPC Leadership Netherlands.
Treat your employees like you would treat your loved ones
You’ve probably heard the saying that diamonds form under pressure. But while that might be scientifically accurate, it doesn’t always apply to employees. Company performance doesn’t come from burying employees under demands – it comes from treating them as human beings and listening to their needs and ideas.
Annelieke recalls working at a law firm where the pressure to perform led to employees adopting a “hang your coat” attitude, where they would make sure their coat was always hanging on their desk chair as evidence that they were still present in the office. “They had an attitude that working crazy hours was prestigious,” Annelieke says. “Every few minutes, you were under pressure to prove if you were a fee earner or a fee burner.”
Seeing people only in terms of profit doesn’t elevate their performance over the long term. If your employees don’t feel like they’re listened to enough as human beings, they’ll quickly become disillusioned. And while this is damaging enough to a company’s performance at the best of times, it can prove fatal if you’re facing a crisis.
Piet saw this firsthand in his role as general manager of Danone in the Netherlands. When he took the position, the company was facing a significant challenge – their probiotic products were being heavily scrutinized by European regulators, and the business had shrunk by 25% as a result.
To make matters worse, some of the board felt that they’d anticipated this difficulty coming but that their warnings had been ignored. Before any solution to the business model problem could be found, Piet first had to get the board members trusting each other again and pulling in the same direction.
“I spent my first 100 days just listening to the board members,” Piet says. “It wasn’t easy because the problem facing the business was urgent, but it gave the whole team confidence that we would make the right decisions.”
Humanization is the answer to the talent crisis
Historically, careers have followed a mostly linear path. Employees went to university to get their degree, then did internships and made connections, then got their foot in the door and a large company and worked their way up.
But today, it’s clear where that approach falls short. Especially in a talent crisis, if you only look for employees who have made nothing but “right” educational and career choices since they were 18, you’ll inevitably be leaving exceptional talent on the table. The answer to this is humanization – looking at potential employees as human beings, not a collection of qualifications and experience, and judging them by their passions and potential.
That’s the approach Piet takes when hiring for Danerolles and Magioni, even for senior positions. “My innovation manager’s education is as a hairdresser,” Piet says. “But she’s my innovation manager because she has such a passion for healthy food, and every day she’s experimenting at home with new ingredients she can bring to the company. She’s also committed to continuously developing herself, and she studied the business side of how funnels work to bring innovation to the market.”
But humanization isn’t only a way to attract more diverse talent – it’s also the answer to keeping it. Early in Annelieke’s career, she worked for an HR consultancy that put flexibility at the center of employee contracts. Every employee was seen as the human being they are, able to reconfigure their contract to make it fit with the changing needs of their lives.
“Everyone was allowed to have their own contract,” Annelieke says. “When I had my first child, I could choose the hours and number of days I worked, and whether I wanted to work from the office or from home.
“That was in 1999, and today they still have the most loyal employee alumni network you could imagine.”
Where does the C-Suite fit in a humanized future?
If a business is going to truly embrace humanization, it needs to be embodied at the very top – and that means C-Suite leaders will have to be prepared to ask difficult questions about the way they currently operate.
Saying what your company stands for isn’t good enough anymore. Humanization demands real commitment, put into practice in your organization in an authentic way. Leaders need to be asking their employees whether they’re happy, comfortable and fulfilled in their roles, and work on creating synergy between boardroom discussions and the people they impact.
Diversity in the boardroom is an obvious element of humanization – the more different voices and perspectives you have around the table, the better you’ll be able to see the full human picture of your organization. That will also mean being honest about which board members are still the right people to lead the company, and laying the groundwork for leadership changes before they happen.
And while humanization has significant implications for financial results and attracting talent, the most important thing to remember is that it should start from a place of human decency, not as a strategic shortcut. When leaders recognize the fundamental contribution every employee makes, when they say “we’re in it together” and truly mean it, they weave the fabric of a successful, future-proof organization.
“It’s not a given that you’ll still be around in 50 years’ time if you keep doing things the way you always have,” Piet says. “Reality has forced us to change the way we look at people in our companies. If you want to still be here in the future, you need to always be reviewing the way you treat people.”
Historically, managers and business leaders have held financial results as the highest priority. But that attitude is changing, replaced in part by a trend of humanization – a focus on the human factor of an organization, and the idea that doing right by your people is as important, if not more so, than chasing bottom line results.
In this piece we speak to Piet Decuypere, CEO of food brands Danerolles and Magioni, to learn about how he’s seen the rise of humanization throughout his career, and how he embeds its principles into how his own companies operate.
The sudden shockwave of humanization
Piet’s first exposure to the idea of a people-first business came when he left Unilever in his native Belgium – where he’d worked since graduating from university – and joined the company’s Swedish branch as a business retail manager. There he found a stark difference in how the company openly addressed issues like gender equality, maternity and work/life balance, treating them as core strategic topics.
“We even had space in the boardroom for a playground,” Piet says. “If one of the parents couldn’t take their children to daycare, they could just bring them into the office. I had several professional board meetings with children playing in the same room.”
Piet’s experiences in Sweden opened his eyes to a different way for companies to run, and left him more responsive to the idea that results were the product of human behavior, not just strategy. After leaving Unilever, Piet moved to Danone – first as a sales director in Belgium and then as general manager for the company’s operations in the Netherlands – and was drawn specifically by Danone’s commitment to doing right by their people.
That commitment is one that’s deeply embedded into Danone’s culture. They launched their “dual project” vision for the company – which sees economic results and human social impact as interdependent goals – back in 1972.
In 2012, after six years of learning from Danone’s humanized approach, Piet bought the Danerolles brand. “I’d been dreaming about owning my own company for a long time,” Piet says. “I wanted to be able to fully roll out my vision of how to deal with employees and get the maximum out of them in a humanized way.”
Humanization won’t be a new concept for long
“When I joined Unilever in the ‘90s, it was strange for companies to put the focus onto their people,” Piet says. “HR strategies would say a company was people-driven, but in reality they rarely were.”
The turn towards humanization has been accelerated by companies realizing the tangible value of listening to their people – and the dangers when they don’t.
Take the current strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union, for example. Pay isn’t the only reason behind the strikes – both unions are also protesting against studios putting profit margins above their employees, particularly when it comes to generative AI threatening their job security. The failure to listen to those concerns has led to the biggest industry disruption since the Covid pandemic.
But this isn’t something that only exists in Hollywood. Businesses everywhere are feeling the effects of the talent shortage. Companies need loyalty in order to grow sustainably and maintain success in the long term, but employees won’t stay and build their career at one company if they’re made to feel like a number.
It’s worth noting that the rise of humanization comes with a degree of Western bias, while other parts of the world might not see people and results in the same way. But while there’s currently a global disparity in how companies and employees view humanization, that won’t always be the case.
With every new generation – not to mention with increased globalization and technology – more and more employees from all over the world are talking to each other, sharing their experiences and ideas. Priorities change fast, and businesses in every country are going to have to keep up or risk a decline.
Leaders, carry your responsibility!
When a business commits to humanization, it becomes more than a philosophy – it becomes an approach that has a clear, practical impact on how well a company performs. But in order for that to happen, leaders have to become advocates themselves and model humanization for the rest of the organization.
When Piet hires for Danerolles and Magioni, he doesn’t ask to see a candidate’s CV. Instead, he asks for a “motivation letter” to learn more about what drives a candidate and why they want to work for his business.
The effect on Piet’s companies is twofold. Firstly, it ensures the business only takes on people who share in its ambition and understand their role in fulfilling it. But it also creates more opportunities for candidates without a traditional university education or the “right” career background, and makes Danerolles and Magioni more sustainable in the face of a talent crisis.
Nor are Piet’s companies the only examples of this. We know of one IT company that recruits school dropouts, as the CEO believes an attitude that doesn’t comply with the established system is the perfect fit for his business. Rather than being assessed by their qualifications – or judged for their lack of them – these employees are appreciated for the unique qualities they do bring and have the chance to develop and excel.
In Danerolles and Magioni, Piet also ensures that his involvement with employees doesn’t end after they’re hired. For him, there’s no sense in trying to keep a barrier between the private and the professional. If an employee is struggling with something in their personal life – such as their mental health, or a difficult family situation – it will inevitably impact their work regardless of whether they try to leave it at the door or not.
As CEO, he sees it as his duty to spend time with his employees and understand the whole picture of their life, both in work and out. “If we don’t listen, we’re not doing our job as leaders,” Piet says. “For a lot of CEOs, it’s still a new thing to say they put people before results. But I strongly believe that if we put people first, results will come automatically.”
Piet mentors other business owners, CEOs and boards around enshrining humanization in their companies and leadership teams. If you’d like to see how TPC Leadership can help you bring the human factor of your organization into focus, get in touch.
