Our Solutions
Leadership Programs
Leadership Retreats
Transformation
Compassionate Leadership
Leading in Age of AI
Human Leader
About Us
Our Story
Locations
Leadership Team
Our People
Our Clients
Join Us
Insights & Research
26
Insights & Research
Published Articles
Our Blog
Research and Tools
Resources
Book a Speaker
Compassionate Leadership Book
Events
Books
In The News
Audio Practices
Contact Us
More Human Book
Choose your language:
English
right arrow
Spanish
right arrow
French
right arrow
EN
facebook iconLinkedIn logo
Mindsets
Leadership Programs
Transformation
Leadership Retreats
Human Leader
Leading in Age of AI
About Us
Our Story
Locations
Leadership Team
Our People
Our Clients
Join Us
Insights & Research
Published Articles
Our Blog
Research and Tools
Wise Compassionate Leadership
Resources
Books
Compassionate Leadership Book
Apps
In The News
Events
Book a Speaker
Audio Practices
Contact Us
More Human Book
Terms & Conditions
Privacy
Home
right arrow icon
Insights
right arrow icon
How Unilever Develops Leaders To Be A Force For Good

How Unilever Develops Leaders To Be A Force For Good

By
Rasmus Hougaard
,
Image ©Licensed to i-Images Picture Agency. 23/02/2018. London, United Kingdom. Leena Nair Portraits. Leena Nair Picture by Andrew Parsons / i-Images

This article was originally published in Forbes.

As a global company whose products reach 2.5 billion people every day, Unilever has the potential to make a monumental impact on the world. It is using this power to be a force for good by delivering on a bold and game-changing sustainability plan and creating a workplace where 150,000 employees can discover and live their purpose. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Unilever’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Leena Nair, to learn more.

Rasmus Hougaard: Unilever has a vision for doing business in a new way, to deliver growth by serving its people and the planet. As Chief Human Resources Officer and a member of the Unilever executive team, how does that make you feel?

Leena Nair: It inspires me that we are trying to be a different kind of business. As a leadership team, we’ve made the central question of our strategy, how do we make sustainable living commonplace? That's our purpose at Unilever.

To bring that purpose to life, there are three things we want to be known for. First, we want to be the business that demonstrates to the world that sustainability makes great business sense, that high performance and high purpose go hand in hand. The second is to be a beacon for diversity and inclusion, and the third is to have a stable full of purposeful brands. Those three beliefs guide our every action.

Hougaard: If you had to pick one recent initiative that makes you particularly proud, what would it be?

Nair: There are so many to choose from, but with our new Positive Beauty strategy, we will stop using the word normal on all of our beauty and personal care brands’ packaging and advertising. This is just one of many steps we are taking to challenge narrow beauty ideals, as we work towards helping to end discrimination and advocate for a more inclusive vision of beauty. We are all unique. We are all beautiful. And we want to celebrate that. To support this, our brands are also banning digital alterations in brand advertising. It’s about creating an equitable, inclusive, and sustainable picture of beauty.

Hougaard: Potential Project and Unilever are partnering together to bring new standards of leadership to Unilever. Alan Jope, Unilever’s CEO, talks about this new approach to leadership when he says, “Now is the time to master the inner game so you can access the outer game.” Can you explain what this means?

Nair: Your inner game is your sense of purpose and service. It teaches you resilience and gives you the confidence that you will learn whatever comes your way. When the world is uncertain, it's really your inner game that allows you to be agile, to be flexible, and to say, what's needed in this moment?

Your outer game is your passion for high performance, business acumen, and results orientation. The inner game is what fuels the outer game. And the more you invest in your inner game, the more you get limitless resources to fuel your growth, limitless ideas, and limitless flexibility to do things differently.

Hougaard: The work we do together on leadership focuses on strengths like presence, compassion, curiosity, courage, agility, purpose and personal mastery. Why is this type of leadership critical for Unilever?

Nair: Leadership is central to achieving business goals. Leaders create the culture of a company. You can put whatever strategy you want on a piece of paper, but it's not going to get executed unless the leaders model the right behaviors.

I'm so thrilled to have words like “compassion” and “empathy” take center stage. Who would have thought that? You have introduced the concept of wise compassion, which is a beautiful way to say that you really need the wisdom of your intuition. You need the compassion that comes from your heart. I am really delighted to see these words becoming more mainstream in leadership, and more leaders recognizing why this is so important.

We must ensure that we are supporting leaders to be a force for good. When you build better leaders, you build better businesses. When you build better businesses, you build a better world.

Hougaard: How does Unilever’s purpose to make sustainable living commonplace fit with the many challenges we are facing in the world right now?

Nair: From my perspective, the two biggest challenges of our time are climate change and social inequality. On climate change, we’ve begun to see the tipping point. More and more businesses, more and more governments, have come out with commitments and pledges to address climate change. So, I do think people recognize the seriousness. They’re beginning to lean in.

But on social inequality, the same tipping point hasn't yet happened. We can all see the data. During and post-COVID, we know that the gap and social divide are only going to increase, but social inequality has not yet received the same level of focus as climate change. That's why I am pleased that as a company, we have made a wide-ranging set of commitments in this area.

And this, to me, is how it’s all related. When your inner game is strong and you have compassion and empathy for the people around you, you will reflect a sensibility for the entire ecosystem with your business decisions. You will realize that the planet is a shared resource, and that we have a shared responsibility to look out for the people around us. That's why we have recently made commitments to support the ecosystem in which we operate. For example, we have committed to ensure everyone who directly provides goods and services to Unilever earns at least a living wage or income by 2030, and to spend €2 billion annually with suppliers owned and managed by people from under-represented groups by 2025. We don’t even know how to count the people in our ecosystem. It could be 5 million or it could be 10 million. But that's the level of impact you can have on the people across your ecosystem when you make bold commitments like this.

Bringing humanity to the business is what a focus on the inner game does. And when you make it okay to bring your humanity to the workplace, it makes it much easier for people to acknowledge their strengths, their vulnerabilities, and their challenges.

Hougaard: What advice would you give your counterparts in other companies who want to cultivate courage and compassion in their organizations, like Unilever is doing?

Nair: There's not a company I know that hasn't created a purpose statement and put it up on their walls. But putting it up on the wall and making posters out of it is not the same as living it. So as a first step, I would encourage them to make sure the purpose is being lived by the people in their business. At Unilever, all 150,000 of our people are going through workshops to discover their purpose. And we’re encouraging our people to bring their passions, their causes, and the things they really care about to the workplace and their work.

And you've got to stay the course. We set some of our sustainability goals 10 years ago without being sure how we would achieve them, but we committed to them. You must be relentless. You have to expose your leaders to what it means to be a more human company. Leaders have to think about it, reflect on it, discover their purpose, stay the course, make bold commitments, and reach out to each other for support.

We’re all on this journey together. This is not a competition. This is our planet and everybody on this planet needs to lean in — all businesses, all institutions, governments, NGOs — to create a movement to create better leaders, better businesses, and a better world.

‍

left arrow
right arrow

More Insights

March 2025
AI is not the silver bullet: How smart leaders drive lasting transformation
Read more
right arrow
March 2025
Women Leaders Do Hard Things in a Human Way
Read more
right arrow
February 2025
Using AI to Make You a More Compassionate Leader
Read more
right arrow
February 2025
How Artificial Intelligence will Redefine Leadership
Read more
right arrow
June 2024
How AI Can Make Us Better Leaders
Read more
right arrow
April 2024
To Succeed with AI, Adopt a Beginner’s Mindset
Read more
right arrow
January 2024
The Best Leaders Can’t Be Replaced by AI
Read more
right arrow
January 2024
You’re not locked into being one kind of leader. Here are the mindset shifts to make.
Read more
right arrow
December 2023
To AI or Not to AI: The Question is When, Not If
Read more
right arrow
October 2023
Leaders, Are You Supporting Mental Health at Work?
Read more
right arrow
Read more Insights
Get the latest insights on creating a more human world of work.
Subscribe to stay up-to-date on insights, events and new solutions.
You can unsubscribe at any time.
Subscribe
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
AI in Leadership

Learn more about Potential Project research and the value of human leadership in an AI-driven world.

Read more
right arrow icon
Leadership Programs

Learn how Potential Project helps leaders to adopt a new playbook for more impactful leadership.

Read more
right arrow icon
Transformation

Learn how Potential Project helps organizations achieve complex transformations.

Read more
right arrow icon
Leadership Retreats

Learn how Potential Project offers unique experiences to help you connect more deeply with your best self.

Read more
right arrow icon
How can we help you?
Start Here

© – Potential Project

Terms & Conditions
PrivacyImpressum