Creating an Open Door Policy

How do you think about culture and setting culture, in an organization?

That was the biggest task that I had to deal with, in Nordzucker, when I changed from Toepfer to Nordzucker. In Toepfer Trading Company, there was very open communication. Sometimes, a bit too rough, but it was a trading environment. Then I came to Nordzucker and Nordzucker was so formal. If you are CEO, you would, of course, talk to your fellow members of the management board, but anyone ranked below, sometimes you would talk to them, sometimes not. They were a bit in an ivory tower. They were on the fifth floor, the top floor of the building and on that floor, there were just the offices of the board members. Huge floor; just five offices.

I thought, that makes no sense. It’s really complete isolation. You have three secretaries; you have five board members and nobody comes up to visit you and you don’t get any input from those in the organization. You cut yourself off from what is really going on there. I said, guys, we have to change that. This doesn’t work for me.

So we reduced the size of our own offices and we had split on the floor plan, different layout. Then some people from the top 20, we got them up to our floor. Then the next thing is, of course, those doors are to be open. Whenever someone has something to say, come to my office but also, if I have something, I come to your office. Let’s make it very open, we can move around and talk to everyone. I can say, that after eight years – and it took us eight years – we really achieved that. We had people from all over the office building, coming up with issues, or coming up with whatever they had in mind. If the CEO’s door is closed or he’s travelling, I talk to somebody else on the management board, if it’s really urgent. It really worked well, but it took a long time to abandon this very formalistic approach – I can only talk to him if I’ve been given a slot and I have to check that with his secretary, four weeks ahead of time. This is all nonsense. You need to have a living organism – your kidneys need to have constant communication with your brain. If they don’t have that, then your whole-body system fails.