CEO: Building a New Senior Team

How did you approach building that team, when you stepped into the role of the CEO?

When I was appointed CEO, people already knew me, so basically, there were a lot of people that said, this is really great; we’re excited about it. He’s young, he knows the business, he knows us; this is really great. At the same time, they were, of course, a little bit nervous about what was going to change. For example, when I came to Nordzucker AG, as the CEO, we had significant issues, at that time. We had very high debt. We had equity that was really low; we were burning cash, which we all know is a death sentence, to any kind of corporation. We had to do some drastic things.

Again, I had interviews with the key staff, in my very first week. Every hour, I had one person come to my office. I just wanted to get to know them, talk to them for half an hour, make my own notes and, after that week, I very quickly, in a good way, decided which people I could work with and which people I should say, look, sorry, that doesn’t make any sense, anymore, for what we have in mind. That’s what I did. In four weeks, I had a 28-person, so-called leading team, being told, by me personally, that sorry, I don’t want to work with you here; I don’t think you are up to it. Nothing personal, but that’s just what it is. I replaced them, both with people from the outside, as well as from the inside.

What it did was, people realized that I was not going to waste any time. I was not going to talk too much about things over too long a period, but I would do things rather quickly. But also what they looked at was, oh, he’s also looking at people inside the company, who suddenly got promoted and being told, look, you can do better than what you are doing right now. Suddenly, for everyone, there was also opportunity. That’s the old lesson of running a corporation, isn’t it? If you take one or two people, at the top out, you make something like 20 people happy. Because 20 people, within the organization, have a chance to be promoted. This is something that also helps the whole process, quite a bit. Those are the really motivated people, the people that follow you, that really go along with you decided as being the right way. That is how it works.

So actually being critical and taking out some of the old guard of management, actually drove motivation for the team and, potentially, drove some credibility, for you, as a leader?

Yes, it created both. Suddenly, people realized that something is moving here. Some of the old chaps are being kicked out because, obviously, the new CEO doesn’t think that he can work with them. Fair enough. But it means for me, personally, that I have a chance to be promoted because, in front of me, some people are going to be promoted. At the same time, they realized that I talked the real thing. It’s not that we need to change things but it’s more like, okay, we are changing things. That was the most important thing.

I can give you one little example. We had an open position as the leader of the HR department, which was pretty important, pretty big. We had 18 factories so the head of the HR department was a pretty important position. That guy had left and they left before I came on board so we had a big, open position there. My predecessor had checked with some head hunters for people from the outside and I stopped that process because I had identified two people, within that department, that could, over time, probably fill that position. So what I did was, I promoted one of them, a lady, to take care of the HR department, for at least six months. I openly communicated that with her and with the entire company that if was on a provisional basis, until we decided what to do next. But I told her, if it works, you get the job. If it doesn’t work, it’s not going to hurt you, because we communicated, right from the start, that this is a provisional thing right now. So if it doesn’t work, I will tell you openly why it doesn’t work and then you slide back into your old position and no damage is done. That’s how we did it.

Of course, what happened was, after six months, she took that position permanently, because she was quite a discovery and she did a hell of a job there.