On June 10, 2011 the supplement”Diversity as a Chance”, published by inpact media Verlag and distributed by Financial Times Germany, was released. One part of this supplement is the story about Maria Xenidou, one of our top leadership women in the Adhesives business. Here you can read about her personal Diversity success story:

Diversity as such is no success guarantor. But one possible way how to leverage the Diversity potential as a success factor shows Maria Xenidou who manages an international development team in the business unit Adhesives and Technology at Henkel in Düsseldorf, Germany.

  For Maria Xenidou Diversity is definitely an advantage – if you manage the Diversity in an appropriate way. Since 2010 the Greek manages a multinational team. Her colleagues work in Düsseldorf, Milan and Headfield, and they come from Germany, the UK, Italy, India, Poland, and Greece. Some of them have been working at Henkel for two years, some of them since twenty-six years.

“Diversity as such is no success guarantor”, says Xenidou. “Many people underestimate the energy which is needed to transform a diverse team into a successful team.”  A great leap forward related to the productivity shows that the engineer succeeded. In the past, the development of a specific adhesive could have lasted one year or longer. Lately the procedure was finished after three months.

The success? An interaction between experiences and cultures. The market knowledge came from England. One of the colleagues is an expert for the details of product requirements. Creative German chemists engineered the technology based on a mixture of curious experimentiveness and long lasting experience. Colleagues from Italy knew about the customer preferences.

For Xenidou this is internalized Diversity – different ways of thinking, different experiences, and different qualifications complement one another, and raise the creativity and efficiency of the whole team. But: “People from all over the world don’t become a team overnight”, knows the manager. This teamwork needs a lot of trust and exchange. She always recalls at quote of Kasper Rorsted, Henkel’s CEO, who said: “If you are talking to people from different backgrounds, try to understand what they want to say and not how they express.”

In addition, it is important for Xenidou that the team has not only contact during their daily telephone conference, but also meet regularly in person. “You can feel how everybody is getting more and more flexible and take each other more seriously”, describes Xenidou the changes of her team.

This team is one example for a multinational teamwork at Henkel. The company has subsidiaries in 125 different countries. At Henkel’s headquarters in Düsseldorf/Germany work people from more than fifty different countries. Over 80 percent of the employees are working outside Germany and about the half in the developing countries. “We want to participate successfully in the development of the relevant markets “, says Kasper Rorsted. “Therefore wee need the best teams at the right place.”

For this reason Rorsted gave top priority to Diversity. “The business of executive managers is to compose the best teams. And these are mixed teams of women and men, different nationalities and experiences”, says the Henkel-Boss. “For us Diversity is an important success factor.” His  belief is that heterogeneous teams advance the economic, creative and innovative potentials of all employees and thereby support to reach better results for the entire company. Because if people always act and think in the same way, they will never create new ideas. [DE]

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