Is DEI Leadership Enough to Transform Corporate Culture?
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In this week's episode of the 'All Inclusive Podcast,' Natasha speaks with Hermann Trepesch, Global Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Sanofi.
Hermann Trepesch, with a rich background blending Zimbabwean and German heritage, embarked on a transformative journey from serving over 18 years in the UK police force to becoming a beacon of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) at Sanofi. At the heart of his work lies a deep-seated drive for equity, shaped by his experiences of institutional racism and a desire to enact change from within. As Sanofi's Global Director of DE&I, Hermann pioneers the integration of equitable practices across diverse global sectors, from R&D to procurement, in over 65 countries. His role is pivotal in embedding DE&I into the fabric of Sanofi, ensuring it leads as an equitable, socially responsible entity. Hermann's passion for justice and human-centric approach underline his success, advocating for DE&I as a key driver of commercial momentum and creativity in the workplace.
Episode Highlights:
The Catalyst of Change: From Policing to Corporate DEI (01:32)
The Importance of Love-Based Leadership in DEI (09:00)
Addressing Clinical Trial Diversity at Sanofi (15:09)
Boosting ERG Membership and Global DEI Strategy (22:03)
Challenges and Learning in Global DEI Implementation (26:25)
Leveraging Law and Culture in DEI Strategies (31:45)
Final Thoughts: Staying the Course in DEI (35:32)
Connect with Hermann Trepesch on LinkedIn to follow his impactful work in the DEI space.
Transcript
Natasha: Hi, Hermann.
Hermann: Hi, Natasha. How are you?
Natasha: Good. Thank you. How are you today?
Hermann: Well, thank you. Looking forward to the weekend.
Natasha: Oh, yes, I know. It's Friday. Yay. I don't have much planned, actually, to be fair. I don't know why I'm so excited. But, yeah, it's raining and we're probably going to be stuck indoors. How about you?
Hermann: Much the same. Got a bit of traveling next week. I'm going to Hungary with our team. So a couple of days of rest and then off on travels again.
Natasha: Oh, lovely, lovely. Well, for all of our lovely listeners out there, let's kick things off. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you became involved in DEI leadership?
Hermann: Yeah, cool. It's a pleasure. So thanks for having me on your podcast. I appreciate it. Yes, I'm Hermann Trepesch. I'm the global director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Sanofi, which is one of the world's biggest health care companies.
And how did I get involved in DEI? It started a long, long time ago. I joined Surrey Police in 2001. I was a police officer for nearly 20 years in total. And I joined what became a very big employee resource group, all the Black Police Association. And I was one of the youngsters who joined off the back of. I'm an immigrant, I come into the UK for work, an economic migrant or an ex-bact. Maybe I should reframe how I think of myself. But I came here for work and a mixed race. And I found that when I joined the police service, it was a very difficult place for people like me, for Black and brown people. And, you know, for anyone who can't see me, if I describe myself to you, I'm sitting down at the moment, but I'm quite a big guy. I'm six foot four and I'm quite pale skinned. I've got green eyes and curly, sort of brownish hair.
And some people don't see that I'm mixed. People who know, know. But for a lot of people, they don't see it. They think to begin with them, probably a white South African. So it was a bit of a struggle for me at times, because people would sometimes think that was a license to say and do things that were potentially inappropriate because they thought, maybe I came from a place where that was OK. Right. I spent a lot of my early years correcting people. And then I found a group of people who understood where I came from and understood my journey and were able to support me and help develop me. And that was the Black Police Association.
So years and years of being a member of the ERG allowed me to learn and grow, gave me that psychological safety where I could challenge things and learn how to challenge things within business in the right kind of way. But at the same time, I'm policing diverse communities who don't necessarily trust the police service because of all sorts of stuff. And there's tons of evidence by minority communities shouldn't trust the police. And a bunch of us who joined going, OK, we want to be part of how we change that.
So quite a challenging environment. Years and years of being an ERG leader. And then after a while, I thought, you know, I don't want to just be the conscience of the organisation, the person who's constantly saying what's wrong and pointing out stuff that isn't right. I thought let's take part in actually helping to solve some of these systemic problems. So I ended up becoming one of the diversity and inclusion consultants in Surrey Police full time, working with colleagues from HR, brilliant DEI people, but as a serving cop. So bridging that gap between the police officers on the ground and that HR function, which was trying to help make the place more diverse and a bit more culturally inclusive. So I did that for quite a while to some, you know, some degree of success.
And then after a while, I thought, you know, I don't have to be one thing. My passions have changed. I did 20 years of policing and I was really proud of my time. And I loved every minute of it. But I thought, you know, my passions have changed and my focus in life needs to change with it. So I left policing in 2019, October of 2019, just before sort of the first lockdown.
And I went out in the corporate world to try and do the full time and see if this was really something for me. And it turns out that that was probably one of the best decisions I've made. And four years later, I'm loving it.
Natasha: Oh, I mean, it's truly inspiring your journey. And it's definitely a unique one. It's not one that I've heard before going from working within the police service to now working in corporate, but still doing that people focused career path, which is amazing. So how have your experiences within the police force? I think you touched upon it a little bit already. How has it really influenced the way that you work and approach the eye in the corporate workplace?
Hermann: Yeah, sure. So, you know, I think I became a cop when I was about 12 or 13, at least in my head.
And then in 1993, I think it was in April of 1993, Stephen Lawrence was murdered. And I can really remember it because I was not not even 13 yet. I was like 12 years old. And I had been brought up to understand that the Met and the British way of policing was the modern way of policing. It was Scotland Yard. It was all the great detectives, Morse and Inspector Frost and stuff that I grew up watching on TV and thinking that this was the pinnacle of policing. Right. And then someone who looks like you could have been a member of my family gets murdered and the police don't help.
The police help the murderers. Corruption gets away and all this stuff goes wrong. And I can really remember this point in my brain where I was like, how can that be? How can it be that this place that I idolized is actually what's wrong? So that set me on a path, I think, which has become kind of my life journey, which is to find justice for people wherever they are and equity for people. And so the murder of Stephen was definitely a catalyst to me becoming a police officer many years later, of course. And when I joined Surrey Police, I not long got out of training school.
In fact, when I found myself sitting next to Doreen Lawrence, when we launched the Surrey Black Police Association, which was in late 2001, like December or January of 2002, something like that. And Doreen Lawrence came and opened what was inaugurated, the Surrey Black Police Association. I found myself sitting next to her. So in my head, it felt like, you know, fate had brought me where I was meant to be. Because I can remember what happened to Stephen and I watched all that unfolding. And then years later, here I am sitting next to Stephen's mum, launching the Black Police Association. So that's what set me on this path. So it's always been a part of me, I think, to be a DEI person.
And I truly believe you can be a DEI person and have another job, have other jobs. You can be a tax accountant, you can be an investigator, you can be a minor down in a mine. You're still a DEI person. You don't have to have it in your title. But if you care about people and you want to be kind and build people up, not break them down, then you're a DEI person. We call it allyship, I guess. But for me, that was that journey.
So, you know, coming out into corporate. I had all these sort of forensic ideas in my brain. So one of the things we used to teach our I used to be a trainer for a while. And one of the things we used to teach our probationary officers is this idea that in forensics, every touch leaves a trace. Right. So the criminal goes into commits a crime and they touch it. They've left a trace of themselves. Whether that's the DNA or a fingerprint or a bit of their hair or whatever it is. So you train your investigators with this idea that every touch leaves a trace.
So when I left policing, I thought, how can I take this with me? What does it mean outside in corporate? And I thought, well, if every touch leaves a trace, I've got to make sure that every touch, every trace that I leave is a good, kind, positive one that builds someone up.
Doesn't break them down. Right. So this idea of leading with love, like a love based leadership style. And I don't mean that in a smoochy way.
Natasha: No, no, yeah, yeah. I mean, I love it. I can see where you're going with this. This is great.
The positive is from saying love based leadership. What does that mean? It means you can challenge someone, you can educate them, you can grow them without hurting them, breaking them down, making them feel inadequate or less.
So that was my ethos for a long time. I didn't come up with the idea of love based leadership. In my mind, that comes from an incredible person, person called Yatunde Hoffman.
If you don't know who she is, look her up. She's got a wonderful book. And Yatunde is the person who planted the seed in my brain about love based leadership when I was still a serving police officer. So coming out into corporate, I've tried to take those ideas of how you can create cohesive communities to create better outcomes for people, because if people have better outcomes, the work they do is better and then you can drive commercial momentum more. So everything that I do now is focused on behaviors and symbols. What looks really good. How do we behave ourselves correctly? How do we channel this love based leadership style and then solving the systems and processes that might not be built for people like me and you?
To get rid of that institutional racism that allowed Stephen Lawrence's murderers to get away with it for all those years. So I think, you know, we're the sum of many moving parts, right? It's not one thing or one moment.
All of those experiences helped me to be the DEI guy that I am now.
Natasha: Oh, I love it. That's great, Herm. And we know that DEI initiatives do face a lot of challenges. There's a lot of work to be done and those challenges are usually faced when you have limited resources as many leaders do. So what strategies have you found to be effective in sustaining that momentum that you said for the initiatives that you're trying to create where you may well have some limited resources available?
Hermann: Yeah. So look, I came from the public sector, right? So we never had money in sorry police. Our department, what we did have was a lot of people who cared, a lot of allies in the business from the most junior people right through to the chief constables who understood that what we were trying to do was make the place better and by making the place better, we would make the business better. So we made do with a lot of money, but we filled that gap with a ton of passion, which DEI people never lack.
But what we had to learn was the art of persuasion and the art of having a presence that actually translates into action. Because I think if you don't do that, if you can't really translate that passion into action that drives the business, then people will always think of DEI as a nice to have rather than something that's really important and intrinsic to the way the business gets done. So I think for us, it was like learning how and for me specifically,
I'm like a deep red activist most of the time, but I've learned to be a bit more blue and analytical and focused on how to do things and build it out in a slow measured way and treat it like you would any other part of the business.
So what's the outcome that you're trying to find? You know, what's the ROI that you hope to get to that return on your investment?
What is the data tell you? I'm a cop deep down, right? So I still I still care about evidence. What is the evidence telling me? And then what's the problem we're trying to solve?
Because if you can answer all those questions, then even people who might not care about the with the same passion that you and I do will go, oh, OK, so this is good for business. I can now see the rationale that drives it. It's unfortunate in this world that just doing the right thing is not always enough. Yeah, I mean, I think I think we've now learned that, yeah, it's it's it's not going to be enough, unfortunately. But I think also in showing the numbers as well, sometimes it's a good source of of motivation, encouragement, keeping people still wanting to do this work and wanting to, because when you're facing some knockback, sometimes when you're seeing the numbers, even recognizing that small progress can be enough to keep propelling you forward.
Look, I'm a firm believer in that. I'd rather take small incremental steps that create a long lasting change or a legacy of change than put on some big show where people turn up for 30 minutes or an hour and they clap their hands and they go, this was amazing. And then they go back to their desk and they do exactly the same things that they've always done and will always do. So I talked about that culture change triangle, this idea that if you get people's behaviors right and you have great symbols of what good looks like and you sort out the systems and the processes that underpin it in the middle of that triangle, you should find a happy human being who can be authentic, bring their whole self to work, feel psychologically safe, challenge if they have to contribute to the mission.
And if they hear no, they understand that that no is because a decision has been made, not because they are undervalued. And for some of us, when you're brought up to believe that you're not important, that you're not special, that your opinion doesn't count because you're different, you sometimes your own worst enemy.
Every time you hear a no, you take it as a personal insult, you take it as a knockback. And there are times when it absolutely is. So we mustn't forget that. But there's also some times where we just don't see. That that the no is about business. And maybe if we had articulated slightly differently, we might have got the result. So I'm not putting the responsibility here on each one of us to be perfect. But I think as a team, if we all try and learn and grow together and be resilient, right, you've got to just keep on going.
Natasha: Oh, yeah, definitely. So Sanofi is one of the largest organizations within the health sector and clinical trial diversity comes up and time and time again when when I'm speaking with leaders that are working within this industry. So can you tell us a little bit more about how Sanofi is addressing that challenge with with clinical trial diversity? What are you seeing that's working?
Hermann: Look, I come from a community that doesn't really trust. Big health care, big pharma. And so, even with my siblings, like when I left policing, I came into pharma they're like, oh, my God, you're going from policing to pharma, it's like, you know, are you attracted to places that are bad for black and brown people? Yeah, I was like, I was like, people like us have to go to those places to show people that actually it's not all bad because clinical trial diversity is the edge of science, right? It's the very best science that the world has got. And because we don't trust it and we think we hear the word trial, sometimes people from our communities don't take part in the trials and therefore they lose that access to amazing health care that no one else in the world has. So I think a little bit about this is about educating ourselves about what these opportunities actually look like. But it's also about big pharma, about health care and big companies like ours be much more transparent about who we are, what we stand for and what we're trying to do. So to answer your question about clinical trial diversity, I'm by no means an expert. I'm not a clinical person. I'm not a scientist.
So what we do is we're going to find incredibly talented people who understand how clinical trial diversity works and we give them the time, space, money to build a wonderful team that can go out into the communities and really connect with health care workers and connect with the communities of the people that we're trying to talk to and help to give them that transparency, to help them understand the value that's been offered with clinical trial diversity. So at Sanofi, we've got a wonderful team led by a lady called Monique Adams and Monique is wonderful.
And, you know, she's building an incredible strategy to go out into the world and piece by piece start working in countries where it's allowed.
Pharma industry is heavily regulated for all the right reasons. We can't just go everywhere and just start offering out loads of trials. Right. So there's a ton of rules around that, but what you can do and what you can't. And that's why we've got this incredible expertise in the team. So for us, we we're in the US very heavily. So this is where a great deal of our clinical trial diversity work is done. And at the moment, 100 percent of all US studies was planned first person into the first person in means a minute trial starts. We've got diversity plans that take into account all the types of diversity that a human can be. So we're making sure that straight at the start, we've got a diversity plan and it's been kept to it. So we're starting to spread out now into Brazil and the UK as well.
One piece at a time, one country at a time. Small concrete steps with a lot of talented people channeling this incredible medicine, these miracles of science that we're trying to find to people who really need the help.
And then bridging that gap for communities who might not trust it to say, hey, you need to understand what you're getting is tomorrow's medicine. You're getting stuff and nobody has. You can't go to your doctor and get this because no one's got it. And that means now you're winning the race, right? You're stepping way above everybody else. So it's a challenge. Great responsibility sits on the team to do that work. We trust them. We care about them. And and we hope that they know that they're getting the best of what our incredible scientists can do. But for the customer and the patient on the other end, the only way you start trusting stuff is if the person who's offering it to you is being transparent and has an open hand and explains what's going on. Why is this happening? What's the potential for you? What are the potential side effects? Right.
Just to help bridge that gap. And I think, you know, we started to see some real success and. I can't do, you know, I applaud them all the time because that's the bit that matters. I come from a country where there's no national health service. I'm a Zimbabwean by birth.
You know, unfortunately, in Zim and other countries, like where I come from, if you fall down on the street and you're ill, you're in trouble. Unless you've got a lot of money in your pocket.
You could have a problem. So, you know, love your NHS, wherever you are in the world listening to this. Love your national health services. You've got one. Because yes, it is tough for them. But here, where I live in the UK, if I get ill and I call an ambulance, it'll come. Sooner or later, if I meet. It's not always easy, right?
Natasha: I agree with you. I think putting everything into perspective, sometimes we do need to understand like where we are when it comes to accessible health care. And we will always want to strive for better, of course. But we should always never forget that we are a lot further ahead than than others. And so we need to kind of give that grace and for the actual individuals that are on the front line as well. So I totally agree.
Hermann: That's our privilege, though, right? Is that we're the lucky to happen to be here in the West and we've got access to the stuff. But even here, even for the both, even for us who are privileged here in the West, our health outcomes for black and brown women are still worse than their count apart from white communities. And we're the lucky ones. So imagine those who come from countries where there's none of this. And this is what intersectionality is all about, right? It's not just a virtue which says I am many things.
It's about gender identity and it's about lack of access. It's about it's basically about a lack of privilege. And every time you strip away a piece of privilege, the person at the end of that has less and less of a good opportunity at life and a worse outcome in life. And that's where intersectionality comes from, is this idea that the person who struggles most is actually going to be a black woman because all of her privilege has been stripped away piece by piece. That study was originally done in the States. But you can extrapolate it out. And in most countries, that's the person who struggles most. And it's often why black women are so powerful in DE.I. is because they are the people who lack privilege the most. So, you know, people like me have to call it out to help our allies understand what intersectionality is. It's not just this new thing that people talk about.
It's like, oh, I am many things. I'm intersectional. Like, OK, but before you talk about that bit, can you please work back and understand where this comes from? And who is ultimately the person who is deserving of equity in this conversation?
Natasha: I agree. Obviously, I'm biased as a black woman. But no, I totally agree. I think it's important that we understand the origin story behind everything that we're doing here, because that's the way that we're able to really, really create sustainable change and impact.
Just slightly switching gears just a bit, I want to circle back to your commentary regarding employee resource groups. It's something that you have kind of early on in your career exposure to worked in. You're now at Sanofi. So what does that look like at Sanofi? Because I know that more recently, you guys have remarkably boosted your membership of employee resource groups to about twelve thousand, I think. So I'd love to hear a little bit more on that and kind of what strategies have you found effective in doing this?
Hermann: Yeah, sure. So when I arrived at Sanofi nearly three years ago, we had ERGs all over the world. But what we didn't have was a coherent sort of single point of focus. We weren't all speaking the same language, which is impossible in a company that's in sixty five countries and nearly a hundred thousand people. But having that sense of purpose and sense of direction was really important. So we created one overarching strategy, one strategy, many plans.
The next step was then to was to take all the knowledge that we had in ERGs around our world and bring those people together to co-create a new framework. So that's one of the first projects I did at Sanofi was to create an employee resource group framework that everybody could deploy around the world no matter where you were. So for our colleagues in North America, who's super advanced, the UK, Brazil, super advanced versus countries like I'll just pick one randomly, Vietnam, where people have never heard of the employee resource groups before, but wanted them because they recognize the value that these things bring.
How do we get all of those people moving in the same direction at their own pace and with their own local context in mind? How do you do that and keep people moving and feeling like they are still progressing, but they're pulling others along with them? So we created that framework. We then launched five big global ERGs, these umbrella organizations that everybody could funnel up to. So no matter what you call your ERG in the world, our colleagues in the UK and Britain and in the US might talk about racial ones by using, you know, the titles like the Black Association, bold, rich race, race and ethnicity organizations, things like that, much more clearly aligned with race and ethnicity. But in France, where you can't talk about race and ethnicity, you can only talk about culture and origins. You thought, well, how do we title these things in a way that no matter where you are, you can funnel up or down, but you can always remain connected to this core purpose, which is to make the place better for people. Yeah. We launched those five. We had a senior sponsorship from members of our executive committee. And I think most companies will say the same things I'm saying. You get five members or six members of your executive committee to agree to be sponsors.
And then, you know, people join. It's like, is it that easy?
Natasha: Yeah. I mean, I was going to say, like, how was it getting those participants from the executive committee to support?
Hermann: That was the easiest bit of all. Look, we're blessed that every member of our excom has got a job in DEI, an extra job, another job on top of their whatever other job they do. So five of them sit on our DEI board. The other five are sponsors to the five global ERGs.
The five sponsors to the global ERGs have a partner in my team who access that DEI consultant, the person that everything spins off and around. We've then got ERG leaders and their committees selected from our global chapters around the world. Right. So that you can go back to your region, back to your country, talk about what's happening at the center, but then localize it for your local community, local problems, local laws, et cetera, et cetera. So we've got probably 60 ERGs around the world funneling up to one of those five global ERGs. In every country or multi-country organization, we mirror what happens with our excom.
So in the UK, we've got a country council, a leadership group of five or 10 senior executives who run the UK business.
Five of those people have to be sponsors for the local ERGs.
So we've got this replicated over and over again. So you've always got senior sponsorship. You've always got local ERGs. You've always got a DEI professional helping to pivot people around this incredible topic to build a great culture for the business. And in our last survey, end of last year, employee survey, nearly 12,500 people identified as members of ERGs. You know, in less than two years, it's pretty incredible. Did you face any challenges that you weren't expecting?
Yeah, because I brought a little bit of my UK centric, the DEI head to the job. And I thought everyone knows what an ERG is. I mean, who in the world doesn't know what an ERG is? It turns out a hell of a lot of people don't know what an ERG is. Right. Yeah. And you get a little bubble. I mean, some people use like affinity groups, don't they? Or employee resource groups. I mean, there's all different names. Not even that. Some people were associating with union membership. They get employee resource people. Do you mean like a union? And I'm like, oh, wow. Okay. So we've got a big educational piece to do here to help our people understand the difference. What is this thing? What is its value? How does it drive the business? How does it help people grow cultural competence?
Do you have to identify as from that community to be a member? All this simple, basic stuff that ERG is all, you know, that you've got to do. Imagine multiplying that across 65 countries, different languages, different cultural contexts. And when we talk about minorities or underrepresented people, I'm sitting in the UK. So that means black and brown people.
That means disabled people. But what happens if you're in South Africa, where the vast majority of people are black?
They're not the minority, but they're underrepresented and they lack equity because of historical reasons.
So it's like, how do we reframe the language that we use to talk about this conversation? Because the word minority is actually sometimes quite inaccurate.
Being a minority does not necessarily mean that you're going to lack equity because there are plenty countries in the world where the minority are in power. The minority have all the access. They've got all the economic power.
So the word minority then loses its meaning in the way that we understand it here in the UK.
So it's a big journey of learning for me as a DEI professional, going from doing DEI in one country, where I understood my local context, I understand the Equality Act. I know how to work with it because I've been brought up as an adult in this country in the UK. And then suddenly I'm doing DEI across 65 countries where people are like, but I'm not a minority. And yet I still lack access. So there's words, do I have a space in this conversation? And then allies who for whom DEI means nothing. They're like, I'm a white guy. Like, where's my space in this? Does this mean I don't have a career anymore?
So there's a lot of that complexity that has to be worked out and nothing I'm saying is unique to what any other DEI professional has to go through. But for me, making that jump from a one country type DEI person to one who's doing it globally. Yeah, it takes a bit of time. You've got to be kind to yourself and learn as well.
Natasha: Where did you, where do you gain all this knowledge? So I know obviously whilst you're doing the work, of course, boots on the ground, you're going to, you're going to pick up, you're going to learn as you work. But I'm interested to hear from you any kind of external resources that you used or reached out to, to help you gather more knowledge from a global perspective on how to do this work.
Hermann: Yeah. So look, I'm in a way, like you said, I'm a bit unique because I was blessed to be a police officer of 20 years and I was on the streets for a lot of that time. So I was exposed to diversity in its truest form, which is just human beings living their lives in communities where things are really going wrong at times.
I learned how to create cohesive communities by being in communities that needed help. So for me, I just learned how to speak to people, how to really engage and connect. But I think if you're in a company learning how to do this, you can't do any worse than by starting to get to know people. So in your ERGs, I know it feels like the most obvious thing, but get to know people. I did a hell of a lot of networking and I'm a bit of a voracious reader.
So the AI has become a bit of an cottage industry, right? There's a lot of people who are now in this space talking about it and writing books and stuff. So a lot of that kind of learning, a lot of listening to podcasts and different opinions and different ways of doing things.
And because I am who I am, a lot of figuring out what the law says about the stuff. What can I do in the UK? I know that. What can I do in the States? Is it the same? They've got affirmative action. We've got the Equality Act. Is it the same? No, it's not. It might surprise some people to find out that actually the powers that we have in the UK, I think, are stronger than affirmative action, legally. And sometimes when I talk to people, like they don't get, I'm like, you don't understand in the UK what I can do with the Equality Act is actually more powerful than what someone can do with affirmative action. And Brazil, which is just incredible, where the powers are so strong and you can do so many things. It's just wonderful. The AI in Brazil is incredible.
And then other countries where they go, oh no, this is forbidden.
I went and learned the law. What does the EU say about this work? What's the law in France say about this work? So that when I started working here, I could go, no, that's an opinion, a cultural norm. It's not the law.
The law says XYZ.
Natasha: And I think you make a valid point. And I will probably, I feel like that's a whole conversation. It's like another half an hour and hours worth in talking about the legalities regarding the kind of DEI initiatives and progressing forward in that sense. But I do just want to highlight the point that you made in that it's being able to differentiate. It's important in doing this work that you differentiate what is law and based on that particular region or country and what is a cultural norm.
Because sometimes the cultural norm will overpower what is law. If you can't kind of just simply be like, oh, well, no, but the law allows us to do this. If you want to be successful, you need to understand the both.
So, yeah, I just wanted to highlight that for our listeners.
Hermann: You know that thing, right? You may have heard it before, culture eats policy for breakfast. But you can have the best policy in the world if the prevailing culture of the place doesn't buy into it, doesn't care, doesn't want to do it. It makes no you could have wonderful policies. The culture will just be like, that's rubbish. And you just won't do it. So there's that say there's a saying, you know, culture eats policy for breakfast. It's like no matter how great your policies are, if you can't change the behaviors. So I'm going to talk about behaviors and symbols.
I can fix the systems and processes all day long to be perfectly fair and equitable. But if the people at the top, the culture, the people who drive the organization don't care about those policies and no one's going to care.
So that's why you need all three. And also look, evidence, right? I'm evidence based in metrics driven in all things.
Natasha: Yeah, definitely. Before you do leave us, I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today. I thought I could talk to you for so much longer. It's incredible. Your journey is absolutely inspiring.
And for all of those that are listening to this podcast today, what would you what would be like your parting piece of advice that you would want to give to the leaders, your fellow leaders?
Hermann: Yeah, please stay the course. I know it's hard. I'm seeing colleagues in the US, especially people losing their jobs. The DEI teams are being cut, right? I tried to stay out of the politics and I think as much as possible, we need to. But politics affect everything.
And in the States, we can see what's happening to the first victim of this shift.
So be resilient. I know it's not easy. You're meant to prioritize your mental health and know that you have got brothers and sisters who will be there for you if you need to talk. So there's always people like me who are on we're on LinkedIn. We're all over the place. Reach out. Let's have a conversation. Regain some of that psychological safety. Find somewhere that some people that you can trust to be able to vent a little bit to be able to ideate, be creative.
Try and find that resilience and prioritize your mental health. And I would say number two, start speaking the language of the business.
What's keeping your CEO awake at night? And I bet if you work back a few steps, it comes back to people. And part of that will be diversity of the teams because a high performing team is a diverse team. And I can almost guarantee you that teams that are really struggling are not diverse.
Because and that's why they're not high performing and because they're not high performing, they're not innovating. They're not driving to emotional momentum. So work backwards and focus on the things that are keeping your big bosses awake at night. I bet you find a way to connect the dots between the engagement of your people, the eye of your team, the culture of the organization to high performance. And if you can do that, then you're cooking on gas, right? Because then people go, OK, so these small tweaks, these small changes create happier, healthier and more engaged people.
That creates higher performance, that creates commercial momentum. You can't do it. You just got to be relentless. I'm like that mosquito in the tent, right? Never let someone tell you that a small person, one person can't change or keep you awake at night. If you've ever slept in a tent with a mosquito, let me tell you that you're awake the whole night. And a little bit, that's kind of what people are like. We have to be relentless and we never we never quit. It can be exhausting, though. So, you know, find some help for sure. Just reach out because there's plenty of us who will be there for you.
Natasha: I love that. Thank you once again, Hermann, for sharing your remarkable journey and insights with us today. It's been a thoroughly enjoyable conversation with you. I wish you all the best in the future. I appreciate the work that you're doing. Keep going. It's fantastic. And until we speak again.
Hermann: Anytime. I loved it. Thank you so much for your time and for the platform.