Sven Sommerlatte: Strategies to Build a Successful Career

Claire  

This morning on the Disrupt Your Career podcast, we’re very lucky to have with us Sven Sommerlatte who is the Chief Human Resources Officer at Boehringer Ingelheim. He’s had a really long and varied career in HR – sorry, that makes you sound really old, I didn’t mean it that way –, but a very valuable, important and rich career in HR. He’s passionate about leadership, personal and career development. And that passion is one which he expresses in a really rather public way – more about that later. We’re extremely pleased and honored that you made the time to join us today, Sven, welcome.

Sven

Thank you very much. I’m honored to be here.

Claire

Good. Well, I think this is going to be fun. I’m really looking forward to it. So let’s get started with some basics. Why don’t you tell us about your own career journey? What are the key decisions that you’ve made along the way? This will be of particular interest to quite a big segment of our listeners. How and why did you make the move from consulting to HR? And beyond that, tell us a bit about the key events and experiences that have shaped the HR leader that you are today.

Sven

It’s a great question, Claire, because indeed, I have developed a passion for career counseling and career strategy, which is something I have been publishing about. But I must say it is very much driven first by my own experience, because I started my career, following a bit what society was expecting from me, specifically, my family. At the beginning, I wasn’t in the driving seat, and I was being trained to become, let’s say, a general manager, going down that business leadership route. I ended up in a high potential program of a big corporation and everything was going in that direction, until the moment where I understood this is not matching what I really want to do with my life. And I had understood that the passion is people. And that’s when I redirected my career. And I must really tell you, that is the moment when it started to become more fulfilling as a matter of fact.

Claire

Of course, it’s the classic gap between ability and capacity, and actual taste and passion and fulfillment. And the expectations of society and others in general, weight far too heavy on people, don’t they?

Sven

You can be blind to your own deeper needs. As a matter of fact, connecting to your deeper desire isn’t easy. It’s a very important part of a career strategy to first really connect to that, which was my own experience. Another important moment in my career, which I’d be so happy to share is when I then had started the HR career. To be honest, I moved up the career ladder extremely rapidly and at some moment I was at a young age Vice President HR for all emerging markets of that large organization – there with 50,000 people in this geography. But suddenly, I understood that I had missed a very important step. I had never been an operational HR leader in a country. Fortunately I got good career advice and I made a radical decision to move away from my prestigious position – three hierarchy levels down. People thought it was a career accident, and they were wondering what was going on. And then for two years, I was in UK in Ireland, confronted to two very tough situations. We had to close two factories, one in Dagenham, one in Fawdon, 1,000s of people, and with our social partners, it was very tough at the beginning. It was a big learning for me. And then fortunately, we found great solutions also for all people concerned. But for me, that was massive learning and I think that gave me the legitimacy that I needed to one day become a CHRO. So my message really, for me and then for many people I have been able to provide career advice to, is to really make sure that you have the experience base you need in order to be able to reach your career target. And there was a big piece missing in my experience base, and it needed a radical career decision to actually get it.

Claire   

Absolutely, it’s so important. I think one of the big challenges anyone faces at the beginning of a career, and this was granted quite a few years in, is finding that space and time and sometimes the listening ear to reflect on not only what’s missing, but also what’s important and all those things. So, thankfully, people like you and us get involved in helping people to find that space and time and openness to reflect and really look at what’s going to make for a fulfilling career both now in any given moment, and in the long-term future when one knows more clearly what one’s aims are. And of course, you are now CHRO for Boehringer, and you’ve been there for a little under a year. Tell us about your first 100 days. I mean, you’ve written about this topic, obviously a few others have written about it too. But what sort of priorities have you set for talent and career management and anything else that you want to talk about for the company.

Sven

You know, Claire, it is very interesting: when you read that literature, there are really two schools. There is the one school that says any action you haven’t taken in the first 90 or 100 days, you will never take. And the other says, if you do not just listen, and there no action, then this is information you will never ever get. It’s exactly opposite, and as always, I think there is no right and wrong, but you need to be aware of those schools of thought and then make your own decision. My decision was to go into the listening mode as much as I could, and as long as I could. You need to blend, of course, because in the end reality is such that you cannot just do nothing but listen for 100 days.

Claire

Yes, you’d probably find that the third paycheck didn’t arrive, right!?

Sven   

It is true. But still, I really have spent enormous time, lots and lots of discussions, to also understand the culture of that organization, because you can’t be the head of HR without having reached some level of intimacy with the culture of the organization. You can understand only through observation and listening and getting deeper and deeper into the spheres of culture, which as we all know, are deep below the surface of the water in the iceberg analogy. But then action had to be done as well. And we defined a clear roadmap for HR, a strategic plan, I think that is really important. We have taken a very pragmatic approach. It is a five-year plan. It is addressing the most critical aspects, but with meaty projects, including the creation of a Boehringer Ingelheim University, total budget of above 60 million euros. I mean, we’re talking big bucks here, and a big meaty projects, plus many others. So, we got our hands dirty already.

Claire

Fantastic. That sounds wonderful. We’ll look forward to hearing about how you build that university. And whether we can whether we can do some brainstorming with you to help you make sure that within that, that diamond of individual career management gets its place, and I’m sure with you at the helm, it’s likely to. Let’s talk a little bit about that. You’ve been in business now for 25 years or so including most of that time, 20 years or so in HR roles. What do you observe about how organizations manage careers? And what sort of changes, if any, have you seen taking place? Apart from obviously the companies in which you’re leading people functions, what other companies do this better? And where does everybody still need to improve? And if you’ve got some examples of good or innovative practice in the field of career management, it would be really nice if you could share that.

Sven

Happy to do so Claire. First of all, what I would really say, it is a little bit cruel, but we lack of human capital management in most organizations. But now that the job market toughens up, suddenly, that resource – human capital – is moving up on the priority list, and that is very interesting to observe.

Claire 

Yes, as its availability moves down the priority moves up.

Sven

Exactly, and in a way that is, of course, very good. But I believe that there is a very big gap. Some organizations have been maybe leading, and maybe better and sources for learning but I think all in all, the vast majority have not yet reached that level, and managers are not yet sufficiently aware of the responsibility they have to develop the human capital in their teams. And that goes through their career counseling, responsibility, their responsibility to engage with people in the team, and help them to make the best out of the talents that they have. I believe that the best tool for talent management is succession planning. I am not a big fan of high potential definitions and ranking and so on and so forth. I believe that assessing potential is an incredibly complex task, which managers cannot be expected to do at the level of sophistication and professionalism that would be required, so that they would have the right then also to bid careers and make decisions on that basis. It is not something that I think is robust enough. Yes, experts in HR or external assessment firms that can master that, but I am in favor of not using these kinds of definitions when it comes to human capital management more broadly in the organization. What managers have to own and have to be good at is making people decisions in the sense of recruitment decisions, selecting candidates for specific roles, and the tool is succession planning. I believe that we need to put succession planning at the core of our talent strategy. It should be a two-way street, and that is, to answer your question, where most organizations are not yet good at. We’re good at top down, looking at our talent base and checking who can move up the ranks. The great companies are transparent with their employees about these kinds of decisions. Many are reluctant to even share that information. But where we are all still on a development pathway is to allow talent proactively within the organization to actually position themselves within future positions, and to have a top down or an employee driven succession planning, that is then matching the management and HR planning. I believe that this richness, this transparency of the internal job market as well, that ability for people to engage with current incumbents and understand their jobs, get their advice on how to develop and grow into the jobs, and maybe even to get their mentoring and support and sponsorship for that. This is where I think the direction of travel should go.

Claire

It’s a wonderful confirmation of something that one of my CHRO coaching clients recently expressed to me. I thought it was beautifully simple. What she said was: We have to stop talking about talent, and start talking to talent and with talent.

Sven

Yes, absolutely. My message to my HR business partners in Boehringer Ingelheim is, I expect that you spend 50% of your time talking to talents. It is the core of our business. We’re not process people, we are people people. And our rallying cry now is “Passion for people”. We need to put people and talents absolutely back into the center of everything that we care about.

Claire

Indeed. Let’s move slightly on not very far. But let’s develop a bit more into this current challenge of the great resignation and growing labor shortages. We both know, we all know that as the job market heats up, then companies are more and more frantic to hire to reskill, to upskill, whatever it might be. What we’re really curious about, because it’s at the heart of what we do, is this question of openness that companies have or generally don’t have to the sort of profiles that we get excited about – those people who have accumulated the benefits of multiple and disruptive career transitions, and yet who may not tick all the boxes on experience of the field or the function.

Sven

Well, in a way, I cannot agree more: yes, we need to have broad careers and not narrow careers. I spoke about the experience base that is really important. Now it doesn’t mean that just broadening the experience base is sufficient. You need to establish an experience base that is fit for purpose, suited to reach your career target. That’s how broad it could be. But yes, much more transversal moves are critical. I think that in the scarcity of the talent situation that we’re now confronted to, which is in reality, in a way, great news, because it will require much more professional work and much more approaches. Coming back to the essence, which is great people assessments skills, I keep saying in my organization, if we make eight out of 10 great people decisions be it internal promotions, be it internal recruitments. And if our competitors make only seven great people decisions, we generate the competitive advantage, which over the years becomes really significant. And if we have been able to recruit great talent, and they have been able to recruit good talent, but not great, these are the things, and we are coming to that stage, where it really matters even much more, because it becomes so much more critical. But the last point here, Claire, that I think is important, is the constatation (recognition), that we’re not leveraging on our internal talent base a lot, or not enough, because a big part of the population, the senior leaders and the senior talents, who I have experienced one social plan after the other where we have sent people into pre-retirement, who would have been very happy to continue to contribute, and it is costing a fortune, and you’re destroying very valuable experience. But we need of course, I think to adjust to our career planning and career management to changing needs. We have focused on adjusting our offer to new generations, but we are completely forgetting to reflect simply about what we may be also wish to have as an environment where we are maybe less in the operational and maybe more in a coaching mode, and where we have maybe more flexibility, but we have maybe even willing to give up on a bit of compensation in order to have more time. That kind of flexibility that will allow us to tap into a talent base that is still there that is neglected, and I believe that is part of what we will need to do better in the future.

Claire

Wonderful. That openness is refreshing to hear on a cold and frosty morning. Let’s now turn the direction of what we’re talking about and move into all the questions around advising individual talent that you’ve been thinking about and that we think about a lot. This idea that, in any equation about somebody’s career, there’s an individual who is needing to manage his or her own career, and functioning within the organizations. So we’ve talked a lot about your organizational work. Now let’s talk about Otium. About four years ago, you started to write and publish videos on YouTube, you were a pioneer, I would say just about, and created a channel named Otium, which is a Latin word that means using leisure time for reflection and introspection. Sounds absolutely beautiful. I guess one of the key challenges is to make sure we have leisure time. With Otium, you want to encourage people to use their time to learn more about personal development to improve their career strategy, or indeed to become a better leader. What led you initially to create the channel? And what was the main motivation for you?

Sven

Well, Claire, it was a moment where in my previous organization, we said we need to focus on digital and as head of HR for my entity at the time, I was preaching this to everyone and I was setting the expectation and then I simply set the expectation for myself. I put myself onto a digital learning journey. The aha moment was when I understood from a consultant who had spent the day with us with our management team. I understood that the digital was not about cables and transferring information, big data, but it that it was at the heart all about content. And here suddenly I thought, okay, if it is about content, I can actually get involved. I mean, I can contribute, because there are things that matter to me, why should I not try and share it. And I published the very first video. I thought 10 people would watch it, and then hundreds and later 1,000s of people, because social media, of course, also extremely efficient, which became an amazing experience, and sharing and engaging with people on the topic that you feel passionate about was just a super experience.

Claire

And indeed, you’ve continued to do it pretty regularly over those four years. So congratulations,

Sven

Indeed. But it is very tough work. It is very rewarding, but it is tough work.

Claire

It is. And it’s an addition to your very demanding day job. So I feel in great admiration of you’re doing so. Now, as you say, you’ve grown your audience, it was never just 10, but you’ve now got 1,000s of followers. What have you learned over the journey, in terms of what you might find are the key topics for professionals? What surprises or examples or anecdotes have you heard from listeners and an audience in general that you’ve engaged with? And could you share any of your top secrets about how to grow a YouTube channel?

Sven

Well, yes, I think I can share some of that experience. The first point, again, it’s all about content. So what matters is that you put yourself onto this journey of exploring, of thinking. It was fascinating, because I was constantly trying to observe what are relevant topics, and I used all my interactions, I had a fifth or seventh sensor to capture. And when there was a good idea suddenly coming up in the conversation, it was a thread, because that’s what you need, at the core of it. But then, really, making sure that you have a nice story within four to five minutes opening, development, closing. It requires work. The fascinating thing is, at the beginning, nothing else is required than just your iPhone, which democratizes also that work, amazingly. The finding was, these tools, there social media in general, and then you can decide which ones to use. I decided indeed, to establish a channel on YouTube, but also to leverage on LinkedIn and other social media. They have really amazing power. I came then to a point after two years, and a bit, and many, many videos that I wanted to bring it together. And then so suddenly, social media was no longer enough, just a video wasn’t enough. And I started a new journey, I started to write a book about career strategy. I’ve sent this book a couple of days ago, in the final, final version to my publishing firm.

Claire

Congratulations, no wonder your smile is so big today.

Sven

It is, it was an amazing relief. But again, hard work, but so incredibly rewarding. This creative work of writing or thinking of sharing, whether it is in a book or in a channel, is just something that is truly fulfilling.

Claire

Well, we can certainly relate to that. We’ve been there, we also know what that end bit when you really do submit it feels like, much pain and sweat comes before that too. But enjoyable pain and sweat. Now, let’s think about some of the individuals that you’ve advised and coached and informed and inspired about managing their own careers, probably hundreds, if not 1,000s of people. When you think about all of them, what’s the biggest mistake that you believe people make, or that sort of trap or pitfall that they fall into when it comes to careers?

Sven

It is this observation, which I’ve really found extremely surprising that leaders, for example, spent a lot of time, a big part of their working time to work on the company’s strategy, on their product strategy. I mean, anyone would say, as a leader, you need to define the strategy for the entity your support and so on. We have sophisticated tools and we spend a lot of time and we invest a lot into that. And how much time do they invest into their own career strategy? Very often, no time at all. I mean, how many leaders haven’t I had in career counseling, who ended up basically admitting that they never had even taken an hour out of their time to really reflect in a strategic way, about their own career. And I think that is really the essence. You ought to define a strategy for your career, you ought to have that longer-term thinking. And you ought also to actually start it with what we discussed at the very beginning of our conversation, Claire, the deep desire. What is it that I truly want, instead of opportunistically, or by expectation from the outside, stepping, stumbling into one step after the other, and then suddenly, at some moment in time you turn back and you wonder, why did I do that, and where do I want to go, but then it is too late. That because you need time to build a career and to move in the direction of your dream job, your career aspiration. You cannot lose that time. And I think that would be my main message. Make sure you establish your career strategy.

Claire

I love the expression “stumbling”. Again, how many of my clients show up having stumbled through, brilliant careers, which never inspired them. So we’re absolutely on the same page. I wonder if there’s anything else that you could go into in greater depth? When you think about beyond this, really thinking about what you want, who it is, you are how you want to show up in your career. If you think about the different stages of career early, mid and late career stages, what other advice do you find yourself giving again, and again, and again, beyond the sort of deep purpose and meaning?

Sven

Well, Claire, it is what I would describe as the diamond principle of career management. A diamond has that shape where it is broadening, and then it is focusing. That’s a diamond shape, going from the bottom part to the middle part, and then focusing on the top part – that’s how a diamond looks like. And I believe (that’s) how a career strategy should be structured. What do I mean by that? At the beginning, you should ensure that you broaden up your experience base. We discussed that also at the beginning, I shared my own experience, where I knew that I needed to have the country HR experience, it was the broadening. But then comes a turning point, and that’s when you then need to completely focus because then you need to build on the experience base that you have established, and be very, very targeted in ensuring that you can achieve your career target. It is all about achieving the career target. But there are two different phases: the broadening, and then the complete focusing. Why is it important? For two reasons. First of all, indeed, the choices of jobs that you will make are different. But secondly, the communication that you will have with senior management, with HR, with recruiters and so on and so forth is completely different. And you need to have the right messages at the right stage of your career in order to be to be efficient.

Claire

Okay, so crafting those messages, reflecting on them, taking the time to be sure that they’re in coherence and alignment with who you are and what you want is something that is clearly needed, and that probably most people are not thinking about until they get the warning, the signal from you that that will help them.

Sven

Absolutely, and as head of HR when you meet with people, and you ask, well, what is what is your plan? What do you want to achieve now? What is the next step? And why is it important for you in the bigger picture of your career? When people say, “Well, I’m quite open”…

Claire

Yeah, that’s just lazy, isn’t it?

Sven

…. When you know that they have crossed the line of where the turning point, you can’t say, at any specific age, it depends on the individuals, on the context, but there is a moment when they must have crossed that turning point. So just being open to everything is no longer a very good idea. Besides the fact that even when you’re open, you need to know what you’re open for. But it is also not a very good signal I must really say because someone who isn’t strategic about their own career is probably also not going to be the best leader for the areas they support, I think

Claire

Absolutely. Now, as a final question, let’s get wishful and have a big vision. As we come to the close of this year, what are your wishes for 2022 in the field of talent?

Sven

First of all, I look forward to the publication of that book that I mentioned.

Claire

I bet you do. When exactly will it be published and can we have a title?

Sven

The title is going to be “A Successful Career Strategy, and a Practical Guide”, and it is expected to be published in the first semester of next year.

Claire

Very nice. Well, we will look forward to your announcement of that and we’ll do everything we can to promote it and make that people are coming and getting your rich advice.

Sven

Yes, and I look forward to engaging with people. But, the second topic that I think I look forward – I mentioned it – was building the Boehringer University. I can’t wait to stand in front of the first group that will come together and I just look forward to that very exciting project. But more broadly speaking, because of the pandemic situation, cross moves have slowed down. Actually, career development has been inhibited to some extent, because a lot of that was not really possible, or at least not optimal, and I really hope very much that 2022 will allow us to go back into the mode of allowing talent to have international experience, cross-cultural experience, and to be able to leverage again on the full potential of talent management.

Claire

That’s a wonderful wish, and one that I’m sure many listeners will share. Sven, it’s been an absolute delight to have you on here today. I know that we could go on for hours – I often find myself saying this at the end of a podcast – but we’ll respect the listeners and keep it to about this time. We’ll be looking forward to all the great news about your book and the university and all the other initiatives that you’re bound to be taking on, and in the meantime, I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for having shared so openly and freely this morning with us.

Sven

Many thanks, Claire. It has been a great pleasure to talk to you.