"HR is about understanding the context and the environment that you are in," says Trevor.
Trevor Kunda, HR Executive at Tiger Brands, went into HR after being encouraged to take on an HR role by his mentor while he was at FMCG company Unilever. Before then, he had only learned about the profession when he took an elective course in HR during his tertiary studies. It was only in that first HR role when he was overseeing sales personnel at Unilever that his interest in people, and how their relationship with the organisation shows up in business performance, was piqued.
CHRO executive Didi Sehume, on Tuesday, met with Trevor, who was involved in developing a learning programme that sought to build line manager commitment to leading the talent development process. This programme was particularly relevant for Unilever’s key emerging markets where there was an over reliance on expatriate talent. He had been seconded to the global leadership development team to work on an organisation solution to solve the problem of talent supply in emerging markets.
“We quickly realised that line managers in key markets like China, Vietnam and Thailand, were not equipped to develop talent and we had to constantly send expatriates to occupy the management and leadership roles in those countries,” said Trevor, adding that talent was in such short supply and attrition levels, particularly in China, were very high.
“It was such a hot employee market that, upon appointing someone, the candidate could literally get a new offer the following day and leave the company within a month.”
Unilever then developed a leadership development model and programme that put learning and development at the centre of its people strategy. Eventually, Unilever China became a net exporter of talent as opposed to net importer a few years earlier.
The red thread in Trevor’s experiences across the different functions of HR is leadership development and change. Whilst the disciplines of leadership development and business partnering both have a different focus, there are similarities in how you analyse the problem before you move to developing the right solution. What makes a great HR professional is how well you tune into the context to understand the problem before you offer a solution. You can only have an impact if the solution fits the context.
“For me, the biggest challenge facing HR is how to equip leaders to deal with current pressures of difficult market conditions but more importantly, how to develop leaders that will be able to deal with the challenges of the future because the pace of change is accelerating,” said Trevor.
