Unilever’s efforts to ‘home-grow’ female leaders to more accurately reflect its largely female customer base are paying off, thanks to a global mentoring programme.
As Coaching at Work went to press, Unilever workers in the UK planned to carry on striking against changes to their pension scheme, while group CEO Paul Polman was lambasted for being paid a salary 285 times that of the average worker.
However, while Polman’s strategies have been criticised in some quarters, his approach to diversity seems to be hitting the spot. In the two years since Unilever launched its global mentoring programme to achieve greater ‘gender balance’, more than 100 females have enrolled as mentees and 21 per cent have been promoted to a more senior role.
Polman himself is one of the mentors, said Katherine Stone, manager of the mentoring programme and global talent manager at the 160,000-strong consumer goods giant.
“From a strategic point of view, Unilever realised its workforce didn’t represent its customer base. Paul Polman saw this needed to change so he created a company strategy with diversity high [on the agenda] to create a pipeline [of female talent],”Stone continued.
“We’ve done some great work on mentoring, and we’re really starting to see the fruits of our labour over the past two and a half years. It’s gaining momentum…Senior level buy-in is really easy at Unilever. I have never had one mentor turn me down, which I think is an amazing feat”, said Stone, who wants to push the percentage of senior female promotions up to 50 per cent.
Diversity is one of 12 key aspects in the company’s new HR strategy. “It’s not a fad at all,” she said.
Stone is starting to work with other countries to encourage ‘on-the-ground’ mentoring, capturing best practices to share among the HR community to help those setting up new mentoring programmes.
Currently, North America, India, UK & Ireland, France and Brazil have mentoring programmes in place.
Both mentees and mentors are given training by third-party provider, Insala.
- Watch out for a case study in a forthcoming issue of Coaching at Work