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VOLUME 36/ISSUE 4 — 2014 7
perspectives – counterpoint
organization, driving cultural alignment by
pulling four strategic “levers”: Company
Strategy, Leaders & Organization, Symbols
& Rituals, and People Processes.
Creating clarity around our Company
Strategy was the first step toward engaging
employees in the evolution of our high-
performance culture. We articulated our
desired outcome — “to drive sustainable,
profitable net sales growth” — and what we
needed to do to get there: strengthen our
core business and expand into higher-
growth spaces.
We also needed to have the right people in
the right roles, not only to deliver results,
but to lead others. Strengthening our mar-
keting function by hiring our first Chief
Marketing Officer in 2012 is just one of the
changes we’ve made to Campbell’s Leaders
& Organization, and it directly supports
one of the focal points of our strategy: put-
ting our consumer first in everything we do.
The “Consumer First” mindset was brought
to the center of a revised Campbell Leader-
ship Model, which was also updated to sup-
port decision making and owning results.
The evolution of our Symbols & Rituals
— key cultural elements that act as behav-
ioral anchors at Campbell — also included
adding “courage” as a core company value.
Finally, we’ve changed important People
Processes to emphasize our employees’
focus on our business success. One such
change is a new performance management
approach, designed to give employees a
framework and the motivation to set ambi-
tious objectives and deliver more meaning-
ful outcomes.
Our cultural evolution at Campbell has
required agility, innovation and creativity
by rethinking the way we deliver Human
Resources services. We still have much
more work to do, but I’m encouraged by our
progress.
Bob Morrissey is Senior Vice President
& Chief Human Resources Officer of
Campbell Soup Company. bob_mor-
rissey@campbellsoup.com
The Role of Leadership in
a VUCA World
By Alison Horner
I
t is obvious to see but harder to copy how
winning organizations — soccer teams,
gangs, or global corporations — tend to
have at least one thing in common. For me
this is the overlap between the goals and
values of the organization, those of its mem-
bers and often other stakeholders too. Some-
times the team comes together by bringing
in new players, but more often it is the result
of leading existing players better.
For a business like Tesco, with 525,000 col-
leagues across 12 countries connecting with
millions of customers everyday, shared
advocacy of our brand is our biggest prize;
and as Personnel Director my purpose is to
help 5,000 leaders improve the business for
customers, live the values and take people
with them. We’ve seen rapid growth of
some organizations to become giants in
their sectors like Tesco, IBM, Apple and
Microsoft because everyone marches to the
same tune to get results, and everyone is
pointing in the same direction.
At the same time, in Tesco we recognize
ourselves to be in a time of elevated risk as
we navigate from bricks and mortar to mul-
tichannel retailing. This awareness has led
to the introduction of Blinkbox, our digital
media business, and of Hudl, through
which we share scale and knowhow with
partners (sometimes ours and sometimes
theirs) as in China with CRE, or in coffee
with Harris and Hoole. Ongoing innova-
tion such as this requires widespread lead-
ership to ensure execution.
In a VUCA world we need leaders who not
only share the “commanders intent”, but
can also make sense of it in the context of
their changing environment. For Tesco this
means leaders who have their eyes wide
open — not waiting to be told what to do.
This is a big cultural change for traditional
management hierarchies like ours. It will
take years, not months, and starts with us
as leaders. To help we’ve introduced 5 new
leadership skills — collaboration, empathy,
responsiveness, resilience and innovation.
Rather than “teach” in the normal way,
we’ve asked leaders to make sense of these
skills for themselves. They also need to
leverage social and digital communication
for connecting and sharing what they learn.
Increasingly success will be more about
teams and leaders coming together as coali-
tions outside traditional hierarchies, either
within organizations, outside them or
across their boundaries. They need to find
common problems and co-create solutions.
The big successful businesses of tomorrow
will have to find the time and space to seed
new businesses from within and equip their
leaders to do it
.
Alison Horner is Group Head, Human
Resources for Tesco. alison.horner
@uk.tesco.com
Can Anyone Really Have
All The Leadership Skills
Needed?
By Mary Tilley
L
eadership skills have been debated
and discussed for decades. What’s
really changing in this increasingly
VUCA world and how will we deal with it?
It is difficult to find and develop leaders with
all the skills we need today. This will be even
more difficult in the future as skills need to
sharpen and new skills need to be developed.
We will less and less be able to rely on an ➤

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