Why Most New HR Leaders Fail in Their First 90 Days
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with Sarah Stary, Vice President Global Head of People and Organisation and Internal Communications at Swisslog Healthcare.
Sarah breaks down what it really takes to lead transformation in a complex global business. She explains why standardizing the basics, especially onboarding and recruiting, became a high-impact priority, how her team built global consistency with local nuance, and why too many leaders still get distracted by innovation before fixing the fundamentals.
Sarah also shares a more important leadership lesson.
Do not rush to prove your value in the first 90 days.
Instead, she argues that credibility is built by listening, traveling, understanding culture, and making changes that fit the business you are actually in, not the one you just left.
The conversation also explores clear communication, trust-building, team autonomy, shared services, AI adoption, and culture integration inside the broader KUKA group.
🎓 In this episode, Sarah discusses:
Why new HR leaders lose credibility when they move too fast before understanding culture
How clear communication, in-person trust-building, and local dialogue accelerated buy-in for change
How to balance global process consistency with local market realities, customs, and business needs
Why standardizing onboarding and recruiting created outsized impact across a fragmented global organization
How Swisslog Healthcare is thinking about shared services, AI adoption, product capability building, and values integration with KUKA
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00:00
I feel like a mistake that many new leaders in organizations, P&O or other functions make is that they come in and they want to change things quickly to show their value to the organization. To show, look, this is what I've done in my three months, in my first three months, in my first six months, et cetera. And I wouldn't say that that was not on my mind, but to me, it was important for him to understand that what I was trying to achieve was actually going to have real value for the organization, for this organization and not something that might have worked in the previous organization I worked for. And for that, I needed some time to meet people, to speak to people, to travel, to understand the culture and then start executing.
00:58
Sarah, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you. It's been a great year. My first year with Swisslock Healthcare coming to an end in February. I'm celebrating my anniversary and it's been great. We've accomplished a lot and
01:13
have recharged as well so that we're ready to go for the new year. What was it about the organization, obviously you're a year in now, expectations going in versus reality now? Give me some insight.
01:30
Good question. So I expected a challenging environment, a very international environment, lots of opportunities to shape things. small and big, and all of that was met.
01:44
Perhaps more change than I had expected with, you know, a couple of additional, you know, changes on a group level, etc.
01:56
But really a good year. So spent quite some time getting to know our different locations, our colleagues, our teams, and also
02:05
What has been really rewarding a couple of our global projects that were kicked off last year came to closure. We were able to deliver successfully on a couple of them and actually all that we wanted to accomplish.
02:19
We did. So it was good. It was good. Amazing. Well, let's be honest, the pace of change and transformation right now is just accelerating as well. So if you didn't say that, I'd probably think you'd be lying.
02:38
Nearly constant is constant change. Yes, exactly. I remember like years back when I heard the term VUCA, this is the VUCA world, right? And I didn't really, now I feel like I really understand it.
02:54
That's how it feels like. Yeah. But now it's like that used to be like in small sprints. Now it's like that's the constant. And part of the challenge that we face is how do we help our employees and our organizations succeed and thrive in times of uncertainty? Absolutely. Which is just continuous at this point. Yes.
03:21
as well. So you mentioned quite a few of these projects. Let's just jump straight in.
03:27
Let's start with one of them. What was the one of the projects that you're most excited about? And then we can jump into that a little bit. Right, I think one that perhaps on the surface does not sound very exciting is that we standardized our onboarding across the board. And we did the same thing with our recruiting process. It sounds very operational. But it just changed how we operate on a group level, we have a lot of locations across the globe. And we had a very fragmented approach when it came to some of our very basic processes, how we onboard people, how we welcome them to our organization, the types of trainings that we provide them with, how we actually hire them. So very different approaches based on the different locations and just what was done for many years in some of those locations. So we changed that up a little bit. We created a global team out of the P&O team and put them together. And with the various perspectives and kind of standards of doing things, came up with a process that I think is pretty robust that we can implement across the board.
04:34
And it's been a journey. We are still kind of finalizing a couple of things here and there. But overall, we're really pleased with the process. We've received really good feedback from Colleagues who joined us last year, we had quite a big number of new joiners. So I think this is representative of the experience they had. And then also in terms of our recruiting process, just really standardizing, ensuring that we are meeting minimum quality standards across all of our regions, whilst also respecting some of the local realities and the fact that, you know, you can't just replicate a process in the U.S., in a country like France, but perhaps, you know, local communities. cultures, customs and all of that is somewhat different. But where we could, we did. Yeah, I love that. That is a big mistake that I see many companies make, right? It's not a copy and paste. You have to have that global strategy, but with local nuance.
05:29
Absolutely. You can't just replicate. You really need to respect the local nuance, as you said. yeah how did you approach this because obviously the way in which we recruit especially with the i mean we're already went to the world ai we just got into the interview uh things have changed so much but did that give you the team a great opportunity to rip up that rip rip things up completely start from scratch um talk us through a little bit about the the process and the why and and how you fought through that
06:00
Right. So I think we looked at best practices across the organization and we have pretty good processes in North America simply because part of the largest teams sit there and the team there is quite mature and established. So they helped us with a lot of the best practices of how things are done. And then we also looked at some of our other locations within India and APAC to see what they were doing and the team I can't really take credit for those came together here and shared and discussed and came up with what they thought could be sort of a minimum threshold of a process that we could apply. We looked at AI to some extent, but this is actually something that as a group level, we will be looking at how to deploy AI a lot more in our recruiting process. When it comes to what we did in the organization, it was very basic things such as
06:53
agreeing on the number of interviews, cognitive tests, you know, assessments, which hay grade, just really setting certain rules that we would apply across the board. And that in itself already resulted in having a lot of conversations, lots of exchange and it felt like we were really looking at what's doable, workable, and at the same time, giving us just that minimum quality that we wanted in our recruiting standard. And so setting the groundwork for what's to come this year, which is going to be looking at AI and how we can focus on more innovation, really, and speed in our recruiting process. Yeah. Well, you're doing it the right way around, right? Because a lot of people start with the AI first. It's like, no, we have to start with what is the problem we're trying to solve for, and then work back and see perhaps what solutions are out there.
07:47
Otherwise, you can just get lost in the sea of... There's so many opportunities and solutions and so many vendors that are coming to you with their offerings and so really trying to understand sometimes what is the very unglamorous problem that you're trying to solve here and then just get to it and then the fancy solutions can come later on. Yeah, I love that because it's tempting to chase the new shiny object into this sort of fear of missing out. But one of the things I talk about here at HR Leaders, which is, I mean, I heard it at a conference when I was like 16 years old. I'm not even exaggerating.
08:24
I've never been to school. So I started work when I was 16.
08:27
And I remember hearing a speaker talk about innovation, but always focusing on, are we doing the basics to a high standard consistently before we look at anything else?
08:42
And honestly, that one thing has served me so well over the years of just making sure I asked myself, before I look at any AI solutions or innovations, guys, are we doing the basics? Are we doing it to a high standard? And are they consistent? And that has been a huge benefit for us as a business. I'm with you there 100%. And also prioritizing on what you can actually get done, because it's tempting when you step into a new role to tackle 20 different things, but really just to look at what are my quick wins? What are my low hanging fruit and what really needs to get solved? Because you can come up with beautifully articulated initiatives and highbrow kind of strategies, but really you need to understand what the business needs and some of the most pressing problems that you need to solve. I think that's the tension that we always feel, right?
09:37
You're kind of on a tug rope of delivering on the day to day while still having one step in the future of where we need to be going and balancing. It's almost like a paradox.
09:54
Of balancing both. And that's tough.
09:58
In my case, I have an incredible co-founder. We kind of separate those in a way where he's kind of delivering on the day to day. And unfortunately, a lot of times my crazy ideas and I'm coming up with and I'm always kind of looking at, hey, how what are the ways that maybe HR leaders can be disrupted? And what are the sums and things that we can be doing to future-proof and improve the experience for our employees, for our customers, and being obsessive over that constantly and not waiting for change to happen to me.
10:34
If that makes sense. And that means, by the way, making a lot of failures, sorry, failing a lot, but also creating sandboxes for the team to play in and create in psychological safety that they can fail forward and have that culture where we can, that culture of curiosity, I suppose, to be able to do that. How did you manage the communication of this? Because you can't solve for everything. And I think, you know, being transparent about that and saying, hey, this is what we are going to do and this is what we can do. I know you all want all of these things. So I'm just wondering in your experience, how did you approach that?
11:17
Right. So one of the things that I learned at E.ON was clarity and communication was really important in this organization as well because it's so international and it's been through quite a bit of change. So communicating upfront what you just said, what we will do and what we won't do to some extent was really important. We used our town halls. We have a fantastic internal communications team and what we call the Purple Hub, our intranet where we communicate news. And that is really well used and is something that our teams, because they are spread across the globe, use to be updated on what's going on in the organization. So we communicate it, sometimes maybe over-communicate it, but I don't think you can. There's no such thing. There's no such thing. Okay, let me caveat. There is such a thing if you're communicating something that's not relevant to the individual.
12:14
So I think that's the key thing, right? Like I think now we've got, that drove me crazy years back. I think we've got better where we were really good at this with our customers.
12:24
You wouldn't send a customer product updates and communications on the product they haven't bought, for example. But yet with our employees, we just send them updates about everything.
12:34
And we wonder why they're not answering surveys or communicating and there's this lack of uncertainty and clarity there. Does that make sense, by the way? I don't know if that even makes sense.
12:48
No, it does make sense. I feel like you need to be tailoring it. But at the beginning, what I've noticed a little bit is that what you think is perhaps straightforward and people understand might not be. So you sometimes just need to spell it out. so that you are avoiding misunderstandings, especially when you are operating in a very fast moving, very dynamic environment, many locations, even different sub segments within the business. You really need to be crystal clear as to what you're doing, what you're delivering. And and then I think, as you said earlier, I think face to face communication is quite important. Meeting people. Yeah. where they are and locally if possible. Literally meeting them.
13:31
Actually meeting them, not just via Teams or Zoom or whatever it might be. And I felt that made quite a difference because at the very beginning communication, it's also about trust building. You can have the right messaging out there, but if you really want to understand what's going on, it's a dialogue. So people need to talk to you as well to explain to you what it is that they're doing, where they might need P&O's help with, and really what you should be focusing on. So initially, I spent quite some time just traveling and listening and trying to understand the culture. And that was something that became quite evident to me, actually, it was a bit of a learning curve is how culture is actually something that is really tangible in an organization. Previous to Swisslock Healthcare, I had been with the company for 13 years. So the culture for me was something that just existed. And I understood quite literally, because I had been part of building it.
14:25
But coming to an organization where you don't know the culture, and it's not apparent to you right away, speaking to people, understanding how they take decisions or not, how they tackle problems. All of that really was quite important to me to understand how does this organization function? And you need to kind of speak that language and understand the culture in order to get anything moving. Yeah, it's so interesting you said that. Just before the new year, one of the guests I had had just started a theater role in an FMCG organization, a huge frontline population. And when I asked what was the number one thing that made this a success or that was the most impactful, that was her response, is that, Chris, I spent almost the entire first year
15:20
traveling to every site all over the world which doesn't sound glamorous and she said it wasn't at all times being honest it was pretty exhausting like if i'm being honest but being on the ground having those conversations that taught her more than anything than she even to the point of like the information she received from the executive team
15:44
Because it's the people on the ground, right, that are living and breathing and are in front of your customers every day, delivering your product. And them seeing you travel to them in person, it means a lot and it builds a lot of trust.
16:00
And I think we used to do that a lot. And I think now we've gone digital. I think we're doing that less and less and less. And cost cutting and all of that. But I still think that there is value, at least meeting the teams once to establish that relationship and the communication line, because that already helps. And then you don't need to meet them every three months, but you already have met once, at least personally. So I felt like that was really important. And as you said, to your point, people really value that you're taking the time to go to some rather remote places. Sometimes it takes you quite a quite a while to get there, but it really yields the value of establishing that relationship and then hopefully the trust that you need. Yeah, people feel heard when you're sitting in a room saying, hey, how can I help you? Almost sometimes people even take them back. They're like, is there a catch here? Am I in trouble? What's happening? But it's because it's becoming quite rare.
16:58
I do want to go back to your earlier comments about the standardization.
17:03
What was the biggest challenge that you faced in terms of standardizing some of these processes and some of the cross-functional departments and activities?
17:15
I think part of it initially was why are we doing this? So we have been doing this for many years and it works. Why are we even changing a winning horse was what I received as feedback from some regions. And then really educating the people because it's not just a P&O process. If you look at onboarding, recruiting or any process, really, it's a process that involves other people, other teams. And so educating them and making them getting their buy in really of like, this is what we're doing now. It might involve you to come to the office to welcome an employee when they start as part of their onboarding process or filling out a form that we need you to fill out just to be able to get things done. So those are things where we need input from the line. And so it was not just about convincing our P&O teams and my team, this is what we're doing, but also educating our business that we're actually adding some value here and changing things around.
18:11
And some of our locations had operated relatively independently for quite some time. So for them to now be part of a larger global process, I think is something that
18:24
meant that they needed to see the value in it. And so you really kind of have to sell what you're doing and why that's actually going to be of benefit. But if I'm honest, I didn't receive a lot of resistance in the process, at least not in a way that was obvious to me. I felt like people understood that we were trying to make their lives easier and really adding value for new employees for the hiring process. So because it was, let's say, not something it was something that most of our line managers do on a daily basis or not on a daily but on a regular basis welcoming new employees hiring new employees they really saw more value in it so it was not a fancy initiative that people might not have understood why we're doing it rather something that was so grounded that they saw value yeah if you had to choose one what would you say is the one thing that you did that made the most impact to bring them on the journey
19:18
I think, as I said previously, I felt like having those conversations, having met with people, having spoken to them, explaining what we were planning on doing and then getting their buy-in was really important.
19:31
And also getting feedback from our P&O partners. So they went back to the business and spoke to them and we kind of leveraged their relationships in order to get everyone's buy-in. Yeah. How did you then choose, based on all that feedback, what to prioritize?
19:49
It was part of the conversations that we had with our leadership team, partly also with my boss, our CEO. And quite frankly, it was pretty obvious to me that some of the basics needed to be fixed and standardized, including recruitment, including onboarding. So that was so obvious that it didn't feel like there was a competition between too many of the other topics. And then in addition to that, we also launched our first engagement survey with Gallup last year. So that was a big project that we tackled as well as employer branding. And those were two additional projects. So with that, with those four, we had our hands full and really having a relatively lean team and P&O, we weren't able to take on much more. So it was kind of, how should I say, just by the fact that we had those four projects pretty quickly established as things that we would be focusing on, not having much time and capacity left for others.
20:49
Yeah. You mentioned your boss, your CEO. What would you say is like the number one thing for people listening that will perhaps be sitting in your seat one day builds the most credibility fastest as a new HR leader coming into a brand new organization?
21:08
Good question. I think not trying to impress anyone, but really trying to listen and to understand the business and taking your time. So I feel like a mistake that many new leaders in organizations, P&O or other functions
21:26
make is that they come in and they want to change things quickly to show their value to the organization. And to show that this is what I've done in my three months in my first three months in my first six months, etc. And I wouldn't say that that was not on my mind. But to me, it was important for him to understand that what I was trying to achieve was actually going to have real value for the organization, for this organization, and not something that might have worked in the previous organization I worked for. And for that, I needed some time to meet people, to speak to people, to travel, to understand the culture. And I luckily was given that time by him to understand what's going on and then start executing. So that actually worked quite well. And at the same time, I think he felt that I took the right approach and not trying to fix everything in the first three months and then basically done and dusted.
22:24
It sounds like you might have learned that from previous experience.
22:28
Yes, I will admit to that. I made that mistake in the past and I wasn't going to do it again. Yeah, that's like the natural instinct though, right? Like I've been hired, I need to impress, I need to come in. Whereas actually no, you're the new person coming in. So the job now is actually to learn from all of that collective knowledge and experience that already exists.
22:56
in the business and be an orchestrator and bring that all together, right? And then make an informed decision. And to your point earlier, you don't need people's buy-in because they've been on the journey with you. You're making the decisions based on
23:13
conversations not based on hey i did this really successfully in my last company so let's do this here and i and i and i as i said i've done over a thousand episodes of this and i've seen that go terribly wrong in organizations and then you spend the next year trying to get buy-in and and you wonder why it's never the transformation the technology which is a challenge is the people
23:36
It's the people. Absolutely. And yes, and I feel like that is a mistake that many new leaders commit at least once in their life and you might learn from it. But it's also, as you said, very tempting. You want to go in and you want to show your value to the organization and you might think that you have a quick fix. But again, I think that's a trap because often you have a fix that might not be applicable to the organization that you operate in. Yeah, what I've learned as well is even if I know it's the right decision, I still don't do it. I still come to my team because I feel like I'm robbing them of the opportunity and the growth.
24:14
That's a good point too. If that makes sense.
24:18
I used to think that I was helping and my coach Chester really helped me. He's like, no, Chris, you're robbing them of the opportunity of learning because even if they fail, it's going to grow them. And also it opens up a lot of trust and they come to me with new ideas. And even when they fail, they'll come and seek guidance and feedback. Whereas if I'm like, oh, no, actually, I know how to do that. Let's do this.
24:43
Right. Whereas just simply reframing of what do you think we should do? And even if I completely disagree, which sounds to everyone probably listening counterintuitive, I still let them go and do it.
24:56
Because that's the learning moment and the growth where you build the trust.
25:00
And you don't need them to inspire them, motivate them. They're excited that I trust them and have the faith. And even when they do fail, we celebrate failures. And of course, we need to learn from them and not make them again. But the whole point is creating the innovation culture in the business as well. And I think for so many years, I did that so badly.
25:27
I thought I had to step in as a leader and try and solve all the problems.
25:31
And I realized... We think that, right? We feel like that's our job when it actually is not. No. It takes real maturity and experience to come to a point where you know that's not your job. The job is to listen and to...
25:44
sometimes maybe stop things from going terribly wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's part of the job. But it's not saying having the answers all the time and definitely not executing by yourself. So interesting. And to that point, actually, something that was a very nice byproduct of our global projects, because we assigned them and essentially it was voluntary for the teams to join whatever that project, at least one, but one that they really felt, passionate about, they wanted to join. So they were free to choose because I wanted them to be committed and to be interested in the topic. Some people chose the engagement survey, some chose the onboarding, some chose recruitment, some chose employer branding, some chose multiple projects. But what happened as well was that the teams came together from different regions, APAC, EMEA and North America.
26:39
And as a team, because they had been a global team, but relatively fragmented, They came together and they executed successfully on these projects with a lot of autonomy because I left them with a lot of autonomy to basically drive the process. That's why you had them. And it was a lot of confidence in themselves that they were actually able to do it and do it well. and bring things to a closure. And there was a lot of pride related to that. So that was maybe not what I had necessarily intended as the end result of those projects. We really wanted to solve problems and we did, but it was a very nice byproduct that the team, that it created that confidence that this team is global and can solve some of these problems together. Yeah, I absolutely love that. You're also creating sort of this, which we've lost a lot with remote, this stickiness and this glue that brings people together and the diversity of experiences, of direct diversity of thoughts that you bring together in that room creates something special.
27:49
That's so important. That moment when you know you have a great idea and then you execute it and people actually see what you've done. It becomes a visual success. It's great. So that was really nice to watch. And the bond that creates. Also, yeah. With that team, right? And then I'm sure the innovation that comes from that and then reaching out to each other and connecting even across continents, it's very important to be able to do that. Very important, yeah. It doesn't come without its challenges because, of course, we operate in different time zones. It meant that our APAC team had to stay up late. Our North America team had to get up very early.
28:33
We're somewhat shielded in Europe, luckily, so long time zone wise. But yeah, so I wouldn't say that I didn't come without its challenges. And I'm sure here and there people, you know, got fatigued and felt like, you know, there was a lot asked of them because there's also your day to day job, right? This is on top of everything. And as, you know, a lean team, it meant that people had to take on more than they had done previously. But I got really good feedback from the team feeling that it had been a challenging year. but also really worrying one and that's what you want to hear yeah one of the things i was interested in is obviously you're operating in such a highly competitive global market but also that requires balancing the need to become leaner and faster right but at the same time still investing in your people your leadership and the long-term capability we've all seen you know what it means to a leader when i started
29:27
to where we are now.
29:29
We weren't talking about resilience or servant leadership or psychological safety. There's so much of what it means to be a leader. You've got distributed teams now.
29:45
I'm managing teams in office. How do I make sure there's equity there? So I'm interested to understand, what are the areas that you're prioritizing that you and the team have identified of the key skills that the leaders are going to have in the future? And what's your approach to that? Yeah, that's a very interesting and topical question because actually this year, We're also coming together as a KUKA group, which is what healthcare operates within the KUKA group. There we've identified a number of synergies and ways of operating more efficiently. As a group in P&O across the different segments that make part of the KUKA group, we're going to be coming together and we're going to be operating in a shared services model, which ultimately will mean that some of these operational processes,
30:40
that you can standardize even further outside of your specific segment across the different segments are going to be are going to be operating within shared services. And then when it comes to business relevant processes, services, etc. So here we're looking at P&O partners, those who are really close to the business, they're going to remain in the segment and provide this type of service And again, this requires some change management, obviously, but it makes a lot of sense because you are using capabilities, you're using people who are already there, who know how certain things work, looking at payroll, looking at contracting, looking at a lot of the employee administration.
31:28
And you can scale that across the board. So it's going to be more efficient ultimately, and we're using people more effectively as a team. So that's going to happen this year.
31:41
We are starting out in Europe, and it will mean that we're going to be putting a lot more emphasis as well on the P&O partnering role. So the people who work with the business and can then provide a lot of the real business partnering, a lot of the let's say more strategic work that goes with it, rather than being upheld with a lot of the administrative tasks. So at the moment, we have a bit of a problem that some people who would and should be focusing on a lot of the strategy on a lot of the business partnering can't because they're tied up with admin work ultimately. So going forward, hopefully in the next six to nine months, we'll see a shift there in becoming a team that can operate more efficiently. Yeah, I love that. Again, goes back to like what you said before about, hey, we've got to focus on setting some of these standards and laying some foundations and consolidating to free up people from doing some of the administrative tasks to focus on more value-led work, right?
32:45
Absolutely, yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, but from a skills point of view, like I mentioned, what has been your approach, right? Like the half-life of skills we've seen is getting shorter and the world is changing very quickly. What are your thoughts in terms of like how you're looking at upskilling and reskilling the workforce to prepare them for, I wouldn't say the future of work because I feel like it's kind of over, can't keep saying that now, we're here.
33:15
Future workers now. And it's changing too fast for us to keep saying that. So I'd love to hear your views on how you're approaching that. As a group, for us, AI obviously is very important. And we have also focused in terms of building a team that will be tackling AI across the board, across all of the segments and utilizing it. not just for Swisslock Healthcare, but also for the other businesses. So that remains a very strong focus point for us. And other than that, we operate in a sector that through automation obviously makes work in hospitals more efficient, more safe and easier to maintain. So through our work, We are trying to create solutions in automation that ultimately free up time of, for instance, a pharmacist in a hospital.
34:11
In our own teams, I think the focus is going to be on incorporating AI more on a, let's say, daily basis within all of the different teams that we have.
34:24
And then I think one of the other focus areas is going to be in product management and innovation, because obviously to stay competitive, we need to be at the forefront of innovation of product management to ensure that our solutions are going to be applicable to our different target markets. but also state of the art in terms of innovation. So there we are also upskilling, reskilling to make sure that in product management we are where we should be. Yeah. What's your approach in that? Is it traditional training? Are you looking external? I'm just interested to understand what your approach is on that you know from the traditional hey we've got all these content libraries we freed into an lms versus some more tater stuff as you go for obviously very uh many many technical uh skills skills as well i'm just interested to understand your views on that so i think here we rely a lot on in-house we have our own in-house academy that supports all of these trainings because as you can imagine we operate in
35:27
a bit of a niche sector when it comes to health care automation. This is not large scale. A lot of the solutions that we come up with, you know, are our own. So we need to make sure that people are trained on solutions. So this is why we rely on our in-house academy based out of Italy. But that serves the global team and they're doing a fantastic job in supporting this. Yeah. Sorry I was harping on about that because that's exactly why I was asking. Because of what you do, you're not going to solve that with a LinkedIn learning course. Yeah. No.
36:04
That's why I was interested. And then how you scale that, I'm sure there'll be some interesting solutions around AI where you can create more personalized pathways with that content to be able to bring that to life as well.
36:20
You mentioned obviously KUKA.
36:23
How are you looking at now incorporating the shared values and bridging that and bringing that together? Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely.
36:38
Actually, we are in the midst of our culture journey. We're actually coming to an end of it. This has been one of our focus points last year, and it was about embedding Swisslock Healthcare, our values into the KUKA family values. And so this has been a transition that we've been on throughout Q4 and now in Q1 as well. And we did this through messaging, etc. For us, it was important that people understand that we are not changing our identity, but rather that we are stepping into an era where we're ultimately going to be part of a larger, more diverse family. And what helped us in the process is that a lot of the KUKA values seem quite familiar. So they were not far off from our own, but the language was somewhat different. And so also through branding activities, I think we found
37:33
a very good way of incorporating the Swisslock Healthcare brand, which, as you can see, in my background, we use a lot of purple. And so from a perspective, we've actually merged this with orange, which is the main KUKA brand color. I'm here. It's my color. Right, exactly. So we were merging your sofa and my poster in the background a bit to actually showcase that it's not an identity overtake or a value overtake. I love that. groups coming together, and we did that also for the other segments. We did that for the other segments, and I think we've done a good job. We're still in the process because, of course, it's not something that you can do in a quarter only, but we're still in the process of essentially making people more familiar with what the new values are, how they are going to be embedded in our everyday work.
38:28
they're going to become part of how we set targets in our performance management system. I think through that, they'll actually become livable values that people will feel are just part of our organization.
38:41
I was just thinking while you were saying that, and this may be a bit of a random question, but what would you say you've learned? Everything you're describing, you've been there a year.
38:52
It sounds like a five-year... A year and a half months, yeah. Everyone listening is probably like, this is like a five-year worth of... transformation and change that you've just described to me um and i'm just wondering this is you personally i'm talking about right now what would you say is the the how has this impacted you most personally maybe what have you learned about yourself over the last year i think um
39:22
that it's a team effort is definitely something I learned. I couldn't have pulled this off alone. So having a team, empowering them and making them part of the mission is so important. What I learned about myself is that I enjoy the work of creation and putting new things in place.
39:46
And that even if I don't have all the answers, I don't necessarily have to. But if I'm supported by a good team, et cetera, just let it flow. So just see where we're going. And that's probably become part of the journey as well. Not necessarily knowing because when I onboarded in February, I certainly didn't think and didn't know where I was going to be in January of the subsequent year.
40:11
But that sometimes you just have to let it flow, go with it and do your best and see where it takes you. Yeah, I love your point that you mentioned that that's why you have all these amazing people around you.
40:25
That comes back to our point earlier about us not having all the answers, right? Yes. I was interviewing Lego's chief people officer, Lauren Schuster, and I asked him a similar question. And his background was sales and operations, and he had never worked in HR, and he went straight into the CPA role.
40:45
wow so no experience transition right and then so I was asking like hey how are you finding it and and you're super calm and chill and I was like he was like Chris this is why I surround myself with an incredible team and if I don't and if I don't know I'll ask a question and that level of vulnerability yeah
41:07
becomes a superpower, which again, as a leader, I used to think was a weakness as well. And any of the HR team I've ever interacted with Lego have such a great relationship with Lauren because they're like, he hired me for my diversity of thought, my expertise, and he lets me
41:28
you know, thrive and move forward. Right. And yeah, of course, he's here to steer. And like we mentioned before and take a take a step back at the overall strategy. But we have to, you know, rely on the teams around us and be vulnerable and sometimes and also give ourselves grace along along the way. Very important.
41:50
So we're going to make mistakes as well. But it is true. And to your point, I think if I think about the best line managers that I've worked for, including my current one, are the people who don't necessarily tell you what to do, but rather expect you to come up with the solutions and give you that autonomy and don't have all the answers because that's not their job either. So we don't actually expect that ourselves, but sometimes as leaders, We feel that we have to do that. And I think that's part of the transition and kind of becoming at ease with being a bit more vulnerable, as you said. I think it comes like we both just said, by making mistakes along the journey and learning the hard way.
42:33
If you're lucky enough to have some great leaders along the way, that's fantastic. Otherwise, in my case, I kind of just learned.
42:40
And along the way. But listen, honestly, it's been an absolute pleasure. The time has just flown by. And that always happens when you're having fun. And congratulations so far for you and the team. And I say so far because it's a journey. It is. There's no destination. It's a continuous journey that we're on. And it sounds like you've set up for an incredible year ahead in 2026. Yes.
43:06
I'm excited to just getting started. Yeah, we'll have to do part two. I'm going to check in with you a year from now. Absolutely. I'm up for it. But until then, have an incredible year and I wish you all the best until next week. Thank you very much, Chris.
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Sarah Stary, Vice President Global Head of People and Organisation & Internal Communications at Swisslog Healthcare.