CEO Carlos Ghosn on the art of recruitment: Hire the best, and challenge them

For multinational businesses, leadership development is never-ending. Global organizations need executives with international experience, cross-cultural communication skills, management savvy and multiple language fluency.

 

At the Renault-Nissan Alliance, we have teams working all over the world, from Paris to Tokyo and points in between. The ability to inspire and lead diverse teams – unifying people in different time zones, who speak different native languages, come from different cultures, who often have different objectives and report into different hierarchies – is a prerequisite.

 

Renault-Nissan is not alone in the search for leaders with global business acumen. In the American tech sector, 75 percent of companies founded by U.S. venture capitalists have at least one foreign-born CEO, CTO or head engineer. Among Fortune Global 500 CEOs today, 14 percent lead companies headquartered outside of their country of birth – a percentage that will continue to rise in the coming decades. The next generation of senior executives will follow in the footsteps of Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, Novartis’ Joseph Jimenez, Deutsche Bank’s Anshu Jain, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

 

Globally savvy executives are in high demand, and major multinationals and their recruiters are in fierce competition to identify and hire them.

 

At the same time, the newest entrants in the international workforce – the millennial generation – expect challenging and diverse career paths. They want to move from company to company, country to country, and they look forward to several career transitions. For many millennials, the concept of a “job for life” is a quaint anachronism, like opting to using a typewriter instead of a computer.

 

Given these labor market trends, how do we recruit and retain the best and brightest? The Renault-Nissan Alliance has three Golden Rules:

 

Hire the best, and challenge them: Last month, Roland Krüger began his new job as head of Infiniti. Most recently a senior vice president at BMW Group, Roland has a demonstrated track record in global, European and Asian markets. He will be responsible for achieving Infiniti’s target of 10 percent worldwide market share in the premium segment. We expect him to hire other highly effective performers to help achieve this goal

 

Leverage your partners to ensure a broad and deep talent pool: Recently, Philippe Klein, who had been head of the Planning Group at Renault, was named chief planning officer at Nissan. This will be the third assignment at Nissan for the French native, who knows Nissan’s product lineup as well as anyone. Thanks to Renault-Nissan’s global talent-management program, many of our high potential managers expect similarly diverse and challenging career opportunities.

 

Most important, shatter the glass ceiling: High performers should rise to the top. Never limit their ability to succeed based on antiquated or irrelevant factors, such as gender, age, race or nationality. At Renault, we have made notable progress in promoting high-performing women: 22 percent of the company’s 2,000 key global positions were held by women last year. Renault has five women on his management committee, including Marie-Françoise Damesin. Her career has included leadership positions at both Nissan and Renault; today she leads Alliance and Renault Human Resources.

 

At many large manufacturing companies, those who are promoted into the C-suite must be the same nationality as the company. That’s definitely not the case at the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

 

Nissan is based in Japan, a country not known for its management diversity, yet 48 of Nissan’s top 100 positions are held by non-Japanese executives who come from 17 different countries.

 

In the late 20th century, observers sometimes described the working environment in the auto industry as a “velvet coffin”: Once executives reached a certain status and salary, they rarely considered leaving.

 

Ultimately, this tended to create stagnation – a lack of innovation and competition that stifled the industry’s progress and made it a less appealing for ambitious professionals.

 

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