While working as a practicing lawyer, Nathalie Grenache landed on a career in HR “completely by accident” after a teammate requested her legal assistance with an expat employee’s immigration status. Grenache now serves as the Senior VP of People and Culture at Sanofi, a Paris-based global pharmaceutical company. She is based in Boston and is responsible for providing strategic HR leadership to Sanofi’s North American operations and Global Specialty Care. In this episode of People and Strategy, Grenache joins host Mo Fathelbab to discuss topics including what HR leaders in the U.S. can learn from the rest of the world about diversity and inclusion, the importance of viewing talent acquisition as a function that stretches beyond HR, her thoughts on the future of succession planning, and much more.
While working as a practicing lawyer, Nathalie Grenache landed on a career in HR “completely by accident” after a teammate requested her legal assistance with an expat employee’s immigration status. Grenache now serves as the Senior VP of People and Culture at Sanofi, a Paris-based global pharmaceutical company. She is based in Boston and is responsible for providing strategic HR leadership to Sanofi’s North American operations and Global Specialty Care.
In this episode of People and Strategy, Grenache joins host Mo Fathelbab to discuss topics including what HR leaders in the U.S. can learn from the rest of the world about diversity and inclusion, the importance of viewing talent acquisition as a function that stretches beyond HR, her thoughts on the future of succession planning, and much more.
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Mo Fathelbab:
Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, President of International Facilitators Organization. People and Strategy is a podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives and thought leaders in the field of human resources. People and Strategy is the podcast delivering in-depth conversations with HR executives and people leaders to advance the field of human resources by providing engagement and thought leadership to senior executives.
In today's episode, I'm pleased to be joined by Nathalie Grenache, Senior VP of People and Culture at Sanofi, the French multinational and healthcare company based in Paris. Sanofi has 15,000 employees in the US and 90,000 worldwide, providing research and development across seven major therapeutic areas including cardiovascular, central nervous system, diabetes, internal medicine, oncology, thrombosis and vaccines.
In her role, Nathalie's responsible for providing strategic HR leadership to Sanofi's Specialty Care and North America organizations. She partners with the executive team to really challenge HR and push it forward as much as possible.
Prior to joining Sanofi in 2017, Natalie acquired more than 20 years of human resources experience working in a variety of companies such as Air Liquide, Rogers Communication, Pratt & Whitney, and Bombardier. She has served as a practicing lawyer and is fully bilingual in French and English, having studied and worked in Canada, France, the United Arab Emirates and the US.
Nathalie, welcome to People and Strategy podcast.
Nathalie Grenache:
Thank you. Welcome.
Mo Fathelbab:
Great to have you with us today. And what an impressive career. I want to start right there and just hear from you how you got started on this journey, what attracted you to HR, and how you ended up in this wonderful position that you have today?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yes. Well, honestly, I ended up in HR completely by accident. I was practicing as a lawyer and my intention was to go back to do my MBA, but in the interim I was approached by someone who said, "Hey, we need someone to help us on few things, and would you come on board before you're going back to school?" Which I did. And it was at CAE Electronics at the time. So it was a really brief in my career and the director of HR at the time find out that I was a lawyer and then she asked me to take care of the expat and the visa immigration and stuff and she said, "Oh, we have this guy that we need to bring in 48 hours. Can you help?" And I helped and ended up with taking care of all the expat afterwards. So that was really by accident. And then she moved to Pratt and she asked me to follow her. So that's how it started really.
Mo Fathelbab:
And what do you prefer, being a lawyer or being in HR?
Nathalie Grenache:
Being in HR, definitely. I'm a business leader. I define myself as a business leader with an expertise in HR. And I think this law background and the fact that I practice as a lawyer really brought this business sense and I always see with the angles of that, but definitely fascinating by the culture, by the people, talent. So that's really where I belong.
Mo Fathelbab:
Well, that is really just fascinating to me because I have a lot of friends who call themselves recovering lawyers, so I understand.
So you've worked in many countries. What can HR leaders in the US learn from the rest of the world?
Nathalie Grenache:
You learn a lot. I think working in different countries, first of all brings a lot of humility because you learn that first of all, the majority of the culture need to learn about others, seek to understand how people see things, how they think, like how they view things. It really brings a richness in terms of looking at inclusion. And I think when we talk about D&I today, it's really important, this piece about inclusion and seeking to understand. I think it's really the thing that we need to, and especially right now, D&I in North America, we all know that it's really something that we need to look at. And I think this inclusion piece and seeking to understand if you've been a leader abroad, really bring that perspective and really bring a lot of richness.
Mo Fathelbab:
It must be defined differently in different countries as well.
Nathalie Grenache:
Yes, completely. When you talk at D&I as a global leader, you don't talk D&I the same way depending on the country. And North America is very different with different angles to it. When you talk globally, you can talk more about gender on general matters. In France, it's something different. In South America, it's different. So you have to understand and it's really important and meet the people where they are and what the different issue and challenges they have. So that's true from a D&I, but that's true from a people and culture perspective as well.
Mo Fathelbab:
Makes sense to me. Absolutely. Let's talk for a minute about talent. So the pharma industry is obviously very competitive and I've heard you say that you believe talent should not just be an HR thing and that you're trying to implement that mindset in your company. Can you say more about that?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yeah. When I started, I said I'm a business leader and I'm part of the leadership team, and I fully believe, and I shared this with my colleagues, we're all responsible for talent. And I can tell you, they all jump in into the talent. So when I am around the table, you cannot see that I'm really the HR expert around the table. We're all talking about talent.
And I think it's important because more and more we cannot, I'm not a believer in you just do a succession planning bottom up and do big PowerPoint. This is not the way talent wants to be talked about. They want to understand what's their own path, where they bring values. And so you need to tackle it from different angles, but you need to be practical.
One thing we did at Sanofi, we created those gigs. Gigs are where people can actually experience, they stay in their current job, but let's say I have a project in D&I and someone in marketing would be interested and bring some input in that. So they would actually come, apply to the gig, and spend two hours per week for six months working on the project with the people and culture team. And it really brings the people to, that's one example, but bring the people to understand the organization, understand what's there out there, and having also leader embracing and knowing some talent. So it's really finding more pragmatic and being more intentional about talent, but we all have a role to play.
Mo Fathelbab:
All right. I want to go back to something you said. You don't believe in succession planning. I'm very curious because I haven't heard that much. I see you giggling and I'm sure we're going to learn some brilliance from you on that front. Say some more please.
Nathalie Grenache:
Actually, yes. Well, don't get me wrong. I think for key value driving roles, for important roles, critical roles, you need the succession planning, especially for EXCOM and stuff. But thinking that you can have succession planning for the whole organization, all the roles, I think it's a waste of time. I tell my team, "I prefer you spend time with people, you understand your talent, you understand where they're going." Because how many times I had people bring a succession planning for a role and say, "Oh, these people are ready now to replace that leader." When I asked the question, "Oh, I'm sorry, they're not ready." And then go through the list and nobody's ready to take the role. And then, because we didn't do our job and putting our energy in developing people instead of doing PowerPoint.
So I'll say, I don't believe in successful planning for all the roles. Definitely the critical roles we need to continue to build and that, but I think I prefer my business partners and the leaders knowing the talent and developing those talent.
Mo Fathelbab:
I like it. Thank you.
So are there any especially creative strategies that Sanofi is using these days to attract and retain top talent?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yes. I think many things. One is that we really engage with our leaders. So when they go to conference and stuff, they really talk about Sanofi. I think one thing that we've done, our CEO has done very well is also be out there establishing the strategy. So when you talk to people in pharma, they know, they get it, which is very attractive because we have the clear strategy where we're going from a pipeline perspective and our leaders also have all the same story. So it's very engaging for, I've seen a difference since our CEO has been here, really people coming and say, "Oh, we know your strategy."
And people wants to know that we have a clear vision, we have a clear strategy. We definitely, we just launched a new branding just to make sure we're out there and people know what's Sanofi, what's our culture. It's not just about benefit, but it's about the culture, the leadership, the purpose that we have as a company.
So we've been very good at trying to, being out there. But not just people and culture, but all the leaders, talking about our purpose, our strategy, our culture so we can attract people within the organization.
Mo Fathelbab:
With 115,000 employees worldwide if my math is correct, how do you impact the culture across the globe?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yeah, it's a very good question. And culture eats strategy for lunch, as we say.
Mo Fathelbab:
Or breakfast.
Nathalie Grenache:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's really, again, I think it's something that we've, being practical, it's in everything that we do as well, in the people you promote. People will look at the people you promote, the role model as a leader, the behaviors that we exemplify.
I think we've been also, again, very clear about what was expected from our leaders, the talent, what we expect from the talent, but also being very pragmatic and making sure we were actually walking the talk, which actually is very important.
Are we there? Probably not. We're not completely there, but it's ongoing work, but it's all working with the leaders, with the organization and having the story and reinforcing the story, but also making the actions ... translate this into tangible actions so people can see it.
Mo Fathelbab:
Yeah. Well, that makes sense.
I want to go back to inclusion and diversity. Here in the US, there's a tug of war about this issue the past few years. And being a global company, I'm imagining there may be a lesson for us to learn in the US from your global perspective. What might that be?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if there's a lesson to learn, but I think what I would say is that, for example, in France or in some countries, they really focus on emerging talent, really developing the pipeline, very engaging in that. And I think it's something that struck me, maybe it's not everywhere, but at Sanofi when I came to the US that we had a small program around CLDP, but we didn't really being intentional about building the pipeline of talent and looking at diversity, but diversity from not just ethnicity, but background, like different, having multicultural teams and all that stuff. And even bringing emerging talent, people with more experience, really blending. And I think that's something that we probably need to do more to make sure that when those roles that comes into for senior leaders, we have the talent that is actually ready to take those roles.
Mo Fathelbab:
Another topic that's been maybe a little challenging, especially post-Covid, is the notion of are people going back to work or are they working remotely? How is Sanofi really balancing that in terms of ensuring productivity and giving people the flexibility that they've become so accustomed to?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yeah, and as you say, it's still a topic that we discuss a lot. I think we were, again, very clear from the get go. Even the pandemic was not over, we decided as a senior leadership team and EXCOM to have a global policy worldwide where we were asking people to come back two, three days per week. Not an average, but really two, three days per week.
And the reason why of that, it's because Sanofi, as you know, is transforming. We're really focused on trying to build our pipeline, really working as one team. And so it was important for us to say, "You cannot do that through Zoom. You cannot have ... bump into people, create the network and all those conversation and brainstorm as a team." It's not as easy on Zoom. Even though we were very good, you have some limitation. And it was really in a transformation culture, if you want to create this culture and everything, it's very important.
So we were very clear from the beginning and we say we actually engage with the leaders. We even coach our leaders to say, "You need to bring the people for the right reasons," and the right reasons, they needs to understand the why. And why we're doing this it's not just to be, limit their flexibility or anything, but it's because we believe that we can better serve our patients. We believe we can better serve our employees. We believe we can build this culture. We believe that we can be successful if we bring people together.
And we still have that flexibility. It's not full flexibility like Covid, but two, three days per week, it still brings flexibility with people to manage. So that was really something.
Are we there yet? We're close to the pre-pandemic in terms of attendance. It's still a topic that we're working with the leaders, but I think what's important is the why and explain why we're doing it. It's not just because we don't trust you. It's because we truly believe that the collaboration and co-location brings something else.
Mo Fathelbab:
Makes sense to me. And are you insisting on certain days of the week so people actually can be together or not?
Nathalie Grenache:
No. We really rely on the, and that's why when we say we worked with the leaders, we said to the leaders, "You're the ones knowing your team on what you achieve, what your objectives. And with your team, you need to decide when this co-location will work better. How do you make it work for your employees?" And so that's really for each leaders to decide. And sometimes if you have to work with other teams, how do you make it work? So really the why and the purpose and make it because it makes sense, not because we just want people to be at the office.
Mo Fathelbab:
Yeah, yeah. Thank you.
So finally, we can't wrap up without talking about the hot topic of the year, AI. So how is AI changing your work as an HR leader, Nathalie?
Nathalie Grenache:
Yeah. I think we need to definitely as a people and culture team, use more AI. I think it's still something in terms of data and prediction it's something that we need to be better. But I think for me, the most important topic is how, and it's something that we've not ... we just parting, but how AI will impact the workforce. How do we have the discussion with the leaders about AI and the impact it will have on the workforce and the capabilities of the future?
We look at AI saying, "Okay, negative," but it could be very positive because imagine AI can take the work where you have less value, but have the people do the more value work. But we need to understand what it is, and we need to work with the leader to kind of predict what's the future workforce, what's the capability, what will make us successful, and embrace it instead of being afraid of it. And I think that's something for me that's really important.
Mo Fathelbab:
I think embrace it rather than be afraid of it is a great place to wrap up for this episode of People and Strategy. A big thanks to Nathalie Grenache for her insights and thought leadership.
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