Louisa Stead is VP, Human Resources North America for skincare company Beiersdorf. She previously held major roles at Pfizer and British Airways.
Starting in public relations communications, Stead found herself increasingly drawn to helping solve people’s problems. She began her career in HR proper at a law firm and has never looked back: “I had a deep interest in business the businesses, but I really was interested in it from a people perspective,” Stead says. “How do you get the best out of your people?”
Stead says she’s been drawn to the companies that she’s worked for in HR positions due to those companies’ basic reputations in terms of solving people’s problems: “British Airways ultimately is a transportation company, but it’s about selling access to your leisure time. It’s getting you to different places. It’s got a human functionality to it.” As for Pfizer, she says, “I’ve always had a strong interest in working for an organization that helps people lead better lives.”
The companies Stead prefers working for are the ones that fulfill, she says, “her personal purpose of wanting to be connected to something that does something good for people.”
This lifelong quest eventually pointed her towards Beiersdorf, the international skincare company with a number of major brands in its portfolio. The relatively smaller size of the company intrigued Stead, because she knew that enabled every individual to leave a bigger footprint.
“One of the reasons I wanted to shift to Beiersdorf was I wanted to have total impact. I wanted to be able to put in place some of my own ideas, and to try things out,” she says of the company’s appeal to her at that point in her career. “The opportunity to have a global influence and to work with people from very different diverse backgrounds and different ways of thinking always interested me as well.”
BEIERSDORF VALUES
Pointing to the company’s steadfast values, Stead says that while they perhaps aren’t unique or wildly different from the values at other organizations, it’s the effort to keep those values simple that makes them so effective. They are:
- Courage – “We talk a lot about the courage involved in building relationships.”
- Care – “This is very rooted in our legacy. As a German-based company, we were the first in the country to offer child care to the workers there,” Stead adds.
- Simplicity – “We can’t innovate and we can’t move forward if we don’t keep things simple,” she says.
- Trust – “It’s foundational. With trust, people and companies really thrive”.
“Like any organization, we can’t say that we’ve got all the core values down pat, but they are aspirational and they give us our guiding light and our focus,” she says. “We keep coming back to them when it’s time to make tough decisions.”
Those values could be seen in action especially during Beiersdorf’s transition to a fully remote workforce, a forced reaction to the pandemic outbreak that Stead says surprised even her in its seamlessness.
“It came down to not just technology but to adhering to those core values,” she says of the company’s COVID response. “We needed to care for our people first. We needed to make sure they knew we had their health and safety as our number one priority. And then since the move, we’ve made sure they have avenues for mental health issues,” she says, adding that the company has also become highly flexible so that employees can tend to their own top priorities – their lives – when needed during this extraordinary moment in history.
The company is also working hard on another of its core values – trust – which Stead says has been somewhat harder to come by for workers beginning their careers with Beiersdorf remotely.
“You just have to keep evolving and being flexible, because what you were doing two months ago honestly is not necessarily what’s working now for people. They’re going through their own personal journeys,” she adds.
Stead says those core values will continue to guide Beiersdorf as they consider an eventual return to office work.
“We’re not going to go back to the workplace in the old way because that doesn’t exist anymore,” she says pragmatically, noting that people have shifted their expectations to working at home all the time versus working in the office.
“We want to shift it to somewhere in between,” she says of Beiersdorf’s eventual work plan. “I’m sure many organizations are in the same place in terms of wanting to care for their employees’ needs and wants, but also still having the courage to say ‘We are a consumer goods company and we need to spend some time together in the office collaborating.’”
Always, it seems, the core values apply.
SIMPLIFICATION
Stead says the key to simplification of processes is, perhaps counter-intuitively, first acknowledging that the world is not at all simple. The important thing we can do is make sure we’re not making it more complex unnecessarily.
“There are a lot of things we don’t have control over in terms of their complexity. But what do we have control over? And how do we help people navigate that complexity as smoothly as possible to get done?” she asks. “How about the things that are in our control, like meetings that most people don’t need to go to but are asked to attend anyway? We make decisions like that all the time without really thinking about them.”
Stead says simplicity is truly a behavioral decision: “We can break down the constructs, the complexity of the world we live in, but we can also think about our end behaviors and how we try and not add additional complexity to the mix. Simplicity is about behavior and the choices you make every day to pare your life down and make it more simple for yourself.”
CARING
Caring itself, it turns out, is central to Beiersdorf’s reason for being. The company’s recent acquisition of Coppertone from Bayer further strengthens its identity as a producer of items linked by their use in caring for one’s skin.
“We don’t also do dog food, toilet paper, or anything else. We’re a skincare company. That’s what we do,” she says, adding that the company is always looking to venture into new categories and add new portfolio items under the skincare banner. With such a focus on such a palpable mission, and with several consecutive years of year-over-year growth, the company’s confidence and sense of purpose are being realized extraordinarily well.
The company has also put quite a bit of care into its thinking on DE&I: “How does our diversity and inclusion journey get reflected in our products? Are the product themselves inclusive? Is the packaging inclusive?”
“We really want to look as much like our consumer base internally as possible. And as that shifts and changes, we want to make sure that we’re constantly,” she adds.
ADVICE FOR TALENT
Stead points to the following traits that Beiersdorf consistently looks for in new talent they hire:
- Be resourceful problem solvers: “We’re a small organization, which means you get to touch a lot of different things and have a lot of experiences you would normally have to wait a few years to do at other companies. But that means you need to be resourceful and have a strong creative thinking component.”
- Have the requisite energy and passion: “You’ll need to keep driving, as there are a lot of things going on here at once. You need to be ready for a dynamic environment with a fast pace.”
- Be ready to collaborate: “We’re also a very networked culture, and we’re very collaborative. Those relationships are very important.”
As for women, in particular, Stead – as a female leader – has specific thoughts on how they can keep career momentum as they’re just starting out. Networking has taken on more importance than ever.
“You have to have a strong network, and you have to think about your work as a portfolio you’re building for your total career. Let people know what your strengths are, and know what you’re good at. Then people will advocate for you.”
Making sure people understand just where you can add value is key, she says.
“Young women need to have key capabilities such as critical thinking and problem-solving in their tool kits so they can be adaptable and take those opportunities when they present themselves,’ she adds.
“GIVE IT A GO”
It’s been her connection to personal purpose that Stead credits with as one of the keys to her success. The native Australian also can credit a particular strain of fearlessness.
“I’m not necessarily worried about something that I’ve never done before. I really like experimenting. I’ve moved country several times from Australia to the US and then to London and back again,” she says. “If it sounds interesting, I’m just going to give it a go and not be concerned so much about where it’s going to take me, as long as I’m learning something along the way. I feel like I can bring all those other experiences to bear. I might not know exactly how to do it but I’m prepared to give it a go.”
“I’ll try it and if it doesn’t work out, what’s the worst thing that can happen?” Stead says of her general nature. “But give it a go or you’ll be left wondering, ‘what if?’.”