Interview with Ivan Mazzei

Citation

Mazzei, I. (2012), "Interview with Ivan Mazzei", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2012.13619baa.002

Interview with Ivan Mazzei

Article Type: Executive Corner From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 19, Issue 2

About the author

Ivan Mazzei is Human Resources Director Biscuits, Kraft Foods Europe. Initiated his career in Italy in the retail sector within the LaRinascente Group, he joined Kraft Foods in 1996. Since 2002 he has being working abroad covering several HR roles both in the Supply Chain and Commercial areas in UK, USA, France and Switzerland being part of several Change Management Projects.

Appointed in 2009 in his current position, he has managed the European Integration of the Biscuit Business as part of a recent acquisition of the Group. He lives now in Milan, Italy, working between Paris and Zurich.

What are some of the current cross cultural management challenges within your organization or industry?

In order to avoid easy generalization, before starting to talk about the cross-cultural challenges is important to understand the specific context I am going to refer to. Kraft Foods is probably well known today as an approximately 49 billion revenue company, with operations in 75 countries, sales in 170 countries and with approximately 127,000 employees. This by itself would make the group dealing with cross-cultural management topics. However, even more interesting is to look at what happened to us in the last ten years. Kraft Foods became a public company in 2001, the Group went through three big acquisitions: Nabisco in 2000, Lu Biscuits in 2007 and Cadbury in 2010. These acquisitions on top of changing the portfolio of the company have considerably changed the “centre of gravity” of the company: from a North American organization we are now a very balanced organization across the globe. In parallel to that the organization went through significant business processes harmonization fostered by the development of common ERP systems and by the creation of global or regional functional expertise and the development of specific Centre of Excellence. It is clear that the impact has been different in each region but in general nowadays we work more and more across boundaries.

In a nut shell I joined in 1996 an organization that was very country specific, where the region was playing a coordination role; we are now part of a true multinational environment where the country borders are not significant anymore and where the employees are part of a larger community.

Coming back to your question, it is clear that all these changes have impacted also how we work. To be extremely banal while in the past I was used to have my manager close by and spending my time supporting the business of the country where I was based, today I can be based in a country, but at the same time working for a international function and be part of a business run at regional category.

What are the implications?

Now we work in a total different way. Just to give you some examples: English has become the working language for everybody while years ago English was just “the presentation” language; international remote management – either managing people based in other countries or dealing with a manager based abroad – is becoming obviousness for a large part of us; conference calls are a key part of our daily live. Simple changes but strongly impacting employees.

Moving from a multi-country to a multinational company has a lot of implications from an HR point of view. One of the first challenge to address was the development of an international management, leaders able to work internationally in different environment/culture or able to lead international teams. The company invested a lot in the early 2000 in “expatriation”. Working abroad in the nineties was an opportunity given to few top managers. We have encouraged that kind of development across all the functions. At the same time we have increased the possibility to get an international experience: from the classical expatriation in a different country for at least three years we have added other opportunities like short term assignment, project assignment, international team management. Having an international experience is now possible for a large part of the employees and is considered also as a key step in our Talent Development Strategy.

More in general as HR we have supported the development of our organization implementing same approaches everywhere in term of hiring, training, leadership programs, performance evaluation and compensation. The harmonization has then moved from the programmes into the processes and tools.

How much the evolution of the organization has impacted the cross-cultural management?

I truly think that this is an additional dimension that should be part of the debate. If traditionally cross-cultural management was focused on challenges coming from managing people with different country background (values, behaviours, language, etc.) now we are adding another level of complexity. Coming back to my previous example of an employee based in a country (Spain) but working for a global function (procurement) and supporting a European Category (biscuit), it is clear that he/she belongs at the same time to several communities.

Cross-cultural management goes well beyond the geographical borders. On top of the classical country community we are adding the functional and/or the category community. We are all part of a big spider where the links are only partially defined by the classical organization reporting lines. That is why competencies like organizational agility, learning agility, dealing with ambiguity, influencing are more and more important. The ability of each employee to network with a large number of employees is a key success factor for him and for the company.

Having said that, I am not suggesting that the traditional cross-cultural management topics are not relevant anymore; however for sure people are more and more equipped to deal with it as in general the society is more open than before; again, referring to Europe, the school system offers international curricula, people tend to speak more and more foreign languages and in general the awareness of the traditional cross-cultural dimension is higher than years ago.

Belonging to several communities open up new challenges. Let’s just think about the talent development, compensation, communication. Does it work by country, function, category? Who is responsible for it?

From an employee perspective being part of multiple communities is for sure enriching in term of experience but at the same time some people suffer for the lack of clear points of reference, they feel lost.

How do you answer to these questions?

Ivan Mazzei – As usual I think that there is a tactical and more strategic answer. From a pure tactical point of view for all processes you need to define clear roles and responsibility. But this is not enough as you need in parallel to develop across the organization a different way of working.

That is why a leader in such large organization with a strong matrix structure are today requested to lead employees even though they don’t belong to your own organization but are working close by. There is also a behavioural aspect to be considered; management and reporting lines are not anymore strongly linked together. This is what we called leadership/partnership, a fascinating topic that is becoming central in our discussions and where we need more focus.

Multiple communities and “sense of belonging”, this seems to be a real interesting challenge

For sure there is an healthy balance that need to be found. In that perspective the harmonization of our practices and processes is playing an important role; let’s think, for example, at our talent development and by the learning and development approaches. In term of development we strongly support cross-functional and category moves not only to strengthen the managerial and functional capabilities but also to increase the awareness of the importance of being able to get and understand the differences perspectives. There is nothing better than learning directly from your experience and stretching your own flexibility and diversity consciousness. In term of training an interesting example in Europe is “Campus”. Campus is a training experience lasting 1 week during which several training programs are run in parallel in one location. Breaks and evenings are utilized to get to know each other and to meet company leaders. You can work in a different country, category or function but you share the same opportunities and experiences.

In the “sense of belonging” topic there is certainly another aspect that is playing an important role, what I call “the human touch” element.

For sure today we can work from distance leveraging a lot of technologies. However, it is very challenging to develop true relationships without building a real connection; meeting one time per year your team is not enough in order to have an engaged work-force. That is also why I think it is extremely important when you are leading an international team to dedicate enough time to travelling.

At the same time each employee must feel fully comfortable in the company where he/she works. Comfortable means to be able to express yourself at work, to feel appreciated because of what you are bringing to the team, in a nut shell to “be yourself”. In that perspective the informality could also provide a good ground to further reinforce the sense of belonging especially if that behaviour is role-modelled by the leaders.

All in all in large and complex organizations, where we all belong to multiple communities, the informality is helping each of us to find our place (sense of belonging) and consequently to foster a cross-cultural environment.

Is it still possible to maintain a company culture in organization with multiple communities?

As you can imagine the Culture has been central in our discussion in the last years. Following the acquisitions and more in general the transformation of the organization we were forced to re-think what I would call the “what we stand for”. That is why a couple of years ago we engaged the whole organization around the definition of the higher purpose and the values of the company. Leveraging the technology all employees had the possibility to participate and contribute to the debate. It is natural that the debate has been influenced by the country, category, function each employee belonged to. The result is a sort of “common denominator”.

Please share an interesting anecdote or case you have experienced in managing your company across cultures

There are many.

In 2001 a European Project team joined the Italian organization for the implementation of the first common ERP system. Their role was to analyse with the support of the local team the Italian business processes and try to harmonize them to a common European model. After a couple of weeks the European project lead, an English, came to me (at that time I was in charge of the Italian Change Management Team) complaining about the attitude of the local team. He was referring to unacceptable and even rude behaviours in the meetings. I decided to participate to some discussions but didn’t find anything unusual; only later on I realized that what was disturbing from his perspective was the development of the meeting: in other words the fact that all participants had the tendency to speak up loudly and that the consensus usually was reached only after long discussions. This was the first time I was exposed to cross cultural topics. I never thought that the way of conducting a meeting, the duration, the way of reaching the consensus could have been so different depending on the culture of the participants. We all realized that for the success of the project it was extremely important to increase the awareness of all team members on such topics. In the following years the company increased its awareness around the impact of cross-cultural management and started to develop specific training modules.

Another example is related to the literal translation. Even today after having spent several years abroad I am still fascinated by the translation of local expressions that are sometimes done in international settings. My favourite one is the translation of the Italian saying “conosco i miei polli” into the English “I know my chicken”; it is so funny to look at the face of the listeners

In your opinion, what are some of the major cross cultural challenges will face in the future?

I think that the debate around cross-cultural management will be more and more influenced by how people communicate and interact. Social networks are an additional dimension to the multi-communities debate. Cross-cultural management will go well beyond any company borders and organization structure.