At Sanofi, everyone gets parental leave: all parents of all genders, irrespective of which country they’re in. “People feel like it’s part of our culture,” Sanofi-Aventis Germany’s CFO Marcus Lueger tells me in this week’s podcast. “We’re recognised, and it pays off,” he says. “I don’t have to offer anybody any kind of retention bonus or above-average pay increase so that they stay. They know what our values are, and that pays back.”

 In an unexpectedly open and warm-hearted discussion, Marcus explains why he shares MyCollective’s convictions around diversity, and explains some of the ways in which Sanofi support both genders in their parenting/career goals:

👉 14 weeks minimum paid parental leave for everyone globally;

👉 giving parental leavers the option to stay in touch and keep receiving news that’s relevant to their team / position / re-entry;

👉 flexible work models, including tandems and hybrid 50-50 office and working from home solutions.

It was really inspiring for us to see what can be done within big companies – and how much can shift as a result. “One thing that definitely changes, is when you recruit someone to a position where in the past people said, ‘She’s 30 she’s probably going to get pregnant, I’m gonna take the guy!'“ says Marcus. „Well, guess what – the guy is also going to go on 14 week parental leave, so that takes one key argument away!”

As we always say – we’ll know that we’ve arrived when men and women of childbearing age are treated the same way, so it’s fantastic to see that in this company, that’s already happening!

Speaker: Marcus Lueger – CFO GSA & Managing Director Finance @Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland

Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: Marcus Lueger   

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #leadership #parenthood  #changemakers #getinspiredpodcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit

For all of us who are on Linkedin and other social media, the idea of personal branding feels – let’s be honest – a little bit narcissistic. 

But – as Dr. Irène Kilubi puts it – it’s also an incredible opportunity. An industrial engineer who in another life worked for BMW, Irène now helps individuals and companies with community building and corporate influencer strategies, putting her focus on two main topics: joint generations and brandfluencing. She’s a published author, has founded a start-up, has won numerous awards and is a sought-after public speaker, so we were very lucky to have her on our podcast for this week’s episode. 

She explains why developing your own brand on social media is so important: 

⭐️ For you: being clear about what you stand for and what your topics are allows you to actively drive your career into the area where you want it to go, connecting to people who share your interests and who could influence the direction of your career; 

⭐️ For your company: if you advocate for positive change, that can help your company position itself too – and they may well pick up on it to promote diversity and community themselves; 

⭐️ For everyone: even though there is an impact gap between online influence and society large, there is a trickle-down effect even outside the Linkedin bubble. Your advocacy could change the world for the better! 

Always hands-on, she also shared some important do’s and don’ts for anyone who wants to get started right away: 

DO 

👉 be mindful about choosing your topic and what you stand for; maybe link it to your personal family story or career path; 

👉 think about the target group – is it inside or outside of your company? Who do you want to reach and why? 

👉 be clear about your mission and your Why. 

DON’T: 

👉 overshare from your private life (be personal, but private) 

👉 be too sales-y. Be yourself! 

👉 post, post, post. It should be a conversation – take time to see what other people are doing too, comment on their posts and respond to people who reach out to you. 

Speaker: Dr. Irène Kilubi – Founder @Joint Generation / Corporate Influencer, Marketing & Strategy 

Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder @MyCollective

Photo: Thomas Dashuber

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #leadership #femaleleaders #generationgap #personalbranding #brandfluencer #parenthood  #changemakers #getinspiredpodcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit

Parenting skills are leadership skills – this has long been a mantra of ours at MyCollective.

So it was fantastic to meet someone as like-minded as Anette Lippert when she spoke to me in preparation for her new book, “Leading Mothers.” It’s a brilliant read which reminds us why it’s so important to not just recognise the management skillset that we learn as we parent our children – but also verbalise it in a business context.

„The importance for me was to see how you can transfer the things that you’ve learned at home into the environment of business,“ she explains in our latest podcast. “If you want to find out that someone can do crisis management because it’s necessary for the job, you ask them for examples. Now why not use an example from motherhood? You have to put it into business language, but you know that language from your business experience.“

There are plenty of examples of how to do this; Anette describes how breaking up an argument between toddlers in a sandpit trained her to resolve conflicts in meetings – how her family calendar taught her to plan projects better – and how talking to her child improved her communication at work, because “your child is an ever-changing target group, with different skillsets and different interests, so you learn to listen, to adapt and to appreciate diversity at work and in your teams.”

One way to verbalise those skills is to put them on your CV. “When I was on parental leave, I put that in as Senior Leadership Role at Home, and then listed the skills I learned underneath,” she says.

Time to brush up our CVs, I think!

Anettes book is out now!

Speaker: Annette Lippert – Author and Speaker
Host: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier – Founder MyCollective

Photo: Annette Lippert

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #leadership #femaleleaders #parenthood #changemakers #getinspiredpodcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit

We’ve been running Real World Role Models sessions at MyCollective for over two years now, and it’s one of my favourite formats – modelled on our Get Inspired podcast series, but featuring speakers who may still be less well known, but are closer to our participants in terms of where their lives are at the moment.

Our podcast guests tend to be board members, professors, book authors – experts who speak eloquently on our core topics, most of whom had children themselves 10, 15, sometimes 20 years ago. But the world was different then; we’ve seen a real shift happen in the past few years, with COVID and the quota and the lack of skilled labour all changing perceptions both of what’s possible and what’s necessary. That has resulted in a power shift in the labour market which means that if you’re coming back from parental leave now, you’re coming back to a different situation than previous generations.

That’s why Real World Role Models is so important to me. Usually we don’t publish these sessions, but the speakers at our most recent session – Dagmar Schaefer, Maria Ostrowski and Nele Pollmann – very graciously allowed us to record the first part our conversation, so that we can share some of their wisdom. Their advice broadly fell into three categories –
👉 for people about to go on parental leave: prepare your next career step before you go. For example, you could find someone to replace your current role permanently, with a view to taking a higher position when you come back (armed with all those parental skills which are of course also leadership skills!) Instead of creating more work for your manager, create a solution – and then make it happen.
👉 for people in the process of returning from parental leave: set up the space and time that you need to be able to breastfeed / parent in your workplace, so that it becomes manageable and not a constant source of stress.
👉 for people back at work properly: you’re in the efficiency zone! You will notice that you are more effective at work than you’ve ever been, but the hack here is to make time to network and to keep that connection to your group and peers. Working parents tend to be very efficient at home too – but here it’s important to delegate, and to share the entire responsibility package with co-caregivers, not just individual tasks.

#realworldrolemodels #impulsesessions #getinspired #mycollective #parentalleave #elternzeit #workingparents

Is equal care an issue that only women care about? (I really wish it wasn’t, but why didn’t a single man show up to this discussion?)

If I work part-time, should my partner be participating in care work too? (I say, hell yeah!) 

Are tandems for both genders actually the solution that ticks all the boxes? (I think they might just be…)

These are the kind of questions that we discussed with some superstars in the German diversity scene –Johanna Fink, founder @teilzeitalente, Johanna Mühlbeyer, founder @equalate, @Christina Wildenrother, social media lead @superheldin and @Nina Gillmann, founder @twise – who all advocate for equality not just in their own lives but professionally too. We also had a really fantastic, interactive group of women who joined the conversation and contributed a lot of additional ideas and insight.

We decided to record it and publish it as a podcast, so that you can hear it too – it’s well worth a listen!

And in honour of Equal Care Day – the invisible day (29th February) for the invisible work – let’s keep this conversation going here too.

Tell us how you manage the division of care work in your life (or don’t, as the case may be ) and what needs to happen to make it easier for all of us!

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #carework #invisiblelabour #jobsharing #leadership #parenthood #diversity #equality #changemakers #getinspiredpodcast #ImpulseSessions #parentalleave #elternzeit