Ilja Rijnen « PROFILE but also bottom-up from the employees back to the strategy. Each employee had sessions with the leadership team in order to start understanding his or her unique contribution to the business. The point of doing this is to ensure we don’t just cascade our business objectives down to the employees. Rather, we give our people an overview of our strategy of the region, and people start understanding and taking ownership of what they’re uniquely contributing to the strategy. We really try to get ownership from the individual, on how they’re going to deliver on our strategy. That means everyone has three to five unique objectives in delivering this strategy. These are reviewed on a quarterly basis for every individual, in which we decide how confident we are about whether this person will be able to deliver on their objectives in the next three to five months.
Q Speaking of the future, what’s the
approach you take to ensure your leadership pipelines are full to lead the organisation in the future? If you think about the landscape we operate in, with around 90% of our
competitors also operating in Singapore and our other main markets in the region, we are all competing for the same talent. Because the business that we have here today won’t be the same five years down the line, to ensure we remain at the forefront, we begin by identifying the critical capabilities needed to lead this business in the future. We also regularly review our engagement plans to ensure our organisation is irresistible and engaging for our people – like a magnet. We also identify what is unique in our business, and set up our business accordingly. In addition, we give people the opportunity to be very entrepreneurial in their roles. We allow freedom and growth in the jobs we offer.
Q Do you have any initiatives in place
for the development of your staff? When it comes to leadership development, we have the Edrington leadership programme for senior leaders and the emerging talent programme, which is for emerging talent. Our other development initiative revolves around overcoming a challenge. Regionally, around two thirds of
the people in our business currently don’t speak English. So what I’m focusing on is regional and local talent programmes – so looking at basic line manager skills to ensure you have good leadership skills, and also looking at successors and developing them. We also look at developing the technical skills and commercial skills of our employees. We acknowledge that we need to invest more in developing local leaders. There is room for improvement when it comes to leadership skills – especially with regards to communication skills, and how leaders engage, connect and inspire people around them. But we don’t want a perfect leader, we want one with a high sense of integrity and one who trusts his or her people and has a genuine purpose. If leaders are authentic, know what drives and stops them, understand how they are connected to the organisation and can inspire and coach others around them, then their employees will automatically gravitate towards them. It creates the irresistible organisation that I want to build with my team every day.
July 2016 « Human Resources « 17